In addition to this blog, I’m guest blogging over at Ribbonfarm; Venkat just published my first post, Algorithmic Governance and the Ghost in the Machine. Hopefully the community over there can further stir the juices.
The piece explores a distinction that I’ve been mulling over for a while about the legibility — basically, opacity or transparency from the outside — of data science vs. economics algorithms.
Data science-y algorithms are often pretty opaque (think Google search) where economics-y algorithms are usually pretty transparent (think of the kidney-matching algorithms pioneered by Roth et al.).