Impacts the future of Artificial Intelligence. Hi deborah. Hello, so nice to meet you. I enjoyed your book. Thank you. I would like to start this interview by talking a little bit about you, i would like to know more about you but i would like the audience to hear the story which honestly frankly really offended me which is in your introduction, you got a note from a professor claiming that you would never be a political scientist, can you say a little bit about that. I put that in the book because when i was in college i struggled with what i wanted to major in, like most kids do in college and i was torn between going into science and going into humanities, social science and i finally decided on social science because i find those questions much more interesting and engaging and urgent in my First Political science course we read all the great political philosophers from plato on out and they were all asking the question what is justice, good government, how can you organize government and organize society to make life better for people and particularly make justice. So before i decided to become a Political Science major i took this course and i already had a lack of confidence in my skills of the humanists with the social scientist because i did not get very good grades in those courses but i got really good grades in my science class, it was kind of a dilemma so i took the Political Science course and i dont even remember what the paper was on, you never remember that stuff coming only remember the grade or the nasty comments so the professor wrote this is a credible effort but youll never be a political scientist. It really resonates because i remember myself i became an ostentation but one of the reasons, i had a similar dilemma with a different reaction, one of the things that i realized in middle school we were being taught about manifest destiny as if it was a thing that we should believe and i remember thinking from the perspective of the native americans, this is not at all a reasonable theory, i remember being in geometry which i was thinking at the time when i approve something i can be comfortable with that. So i felt the discomfort somehow overwhelm my interest but my interest was there and somehow for you i think it was opposite, would you agree . I think that is right, also i had a discomfort moment with members which is probably what led to this book, its been scratching for a long time when i took my first economics course i remember the professor put up the glass of supply and demand and said what a beautiful model the market is and people buy things depending on the price and suppliers sell things and at the point where the price is right a buyer once a buyer and the seller wants a teller in the market is perfect and it makes everybody happy and they raise my hand and said price is not the only thing that people think about when they decide whether to buy something or what they want to buy and the professor says i know thats true but if we make this up with we can get some powerful conclusion by stripping away the extraneous stuff. Thank you for the story and by the way i agree with you and thats why i went on to economics in college is not just mathematical enough. Into many assumptions and i believe the assumption if it was pure mathematic which i was interested in at the time, that is fine because you agree. But what you just said does brg me to a question whichs ive been thinking through a lot e of your interest points, when we count things, im gonna repeat what you said, when we count tngs we have to classify and strip them of context. And that is something that is human so we teach her children to do, tell us a little bit about the classification in the number as a metaphor. That is the key point of my book and i think wereaught in scol that whoevereaches us to count, there is a right answer in your tagging a number of words like 123, just tagging number words onto things. But in fact you have to decide what belongs in the group of things your accounting so say a parent puts down a bunch of oranges and apples in front of a kid and say count t apples, the kid has to know how to tone apple from an orange and they have to be taught those rules beforehand, before they can start to count. , that is a simple o, we think its easy to teach kids how to tone apple from an orange but go to something more interesting like counting blots in an ection, somebody has to dide dede, we want to count votes for different candidat. But somebodys making a decision before they even count the votes, what is a valid blot, does this ballot meet the test, did you sign in all the right places. In somebody is deciding who even gets to cast the blot. Those classification decisions, o is in and who is out which ballot isnt and wch is out, those get made before anybody starts to tally up the number of votes. On the ballot. You might need dwelling on this for a few minutes, its a very profound point, i have three children, we think about teaching our children to count, we think its an exercise when to comes after one or three comes after two and four comes after three et cetera, what your book has done is meaning rethi rethink, in fact, thats the easy part, the hard part is in visible part where were asking them to categorize in the first place. It reminds me of one of my favorite conundrums that i came up with as a teenager, when you say hi to a piece of broccoli, is it the entire stock that says hi back or is it the Little Flower its at the in the say hi back, that is a ridiculous example but thats the same thing, what is an individual item of nature in this context, thats what were always asking our sons and daughters to do is to enter decide what belon and what does not belong. Its very important, anoer example we came up with reading your book because i been thinking abouthis a lot, for taxes, my frid is an accountant he does the taxes and from his perspective people think that the tax calculation is hard and its really easy once you decide, everything counts, this does not count, if you get rid of this a once you have the income number, the tax calculation is really easy. That is negotiation that we are constantly doing under the covers and i think its a really important point, you want to come up with and supply a coupl more examples. I kinda came to the insight when i was reading dr. Seu one fish, two fish. I cannot think about the number stop for a long time but i want to goack and see how kids wanted to come and whats that mont about quantity and i thought it was accounting book, it says that one fis two fish, redfish, bluefish, blackfish bluefish and it goes on and on with different kinds of fish and never gets past two. Fast fish, low fish, not one is like another. Dont ask is why, ask your mother. And then i thought if one is not like another how do you count them all as fish and it made me realize that the problem with life everything is unique. If only humans we need to group things in order to make sense of our rules into think about things. Language does the same thing when we teach kids words, we teach them for example by pointing, my nose, daddys nose, doggies knows. Doggies knows and my nose dont look anything a alike but they have certain similarities that are meaningful to us adults so we want them all under one word, i think numbers in language, numbers are just another language or categorizing things. That is a great segue of my next questio numbers are just a language, just nearly, they also have an unbelievable power and you talk about that quite brilliantly with respect with scoring systems and i wanted you to talk little bit about the system where people are asked to measure their own pain. What does it mean to measure ones pain on a scale of one to te if we ever had anying that causes pain on a scalele from 1 10 how bads it and sometimes they wl say one is highly noticeable in ten is off the chart they cant stand it anore i want to jump out of a wind. Most people are completely baffled b this question, we dont think about pain, we experience it in a lot of different way but we dont experience i by a thermometer or number. Ive asked lots of friends about the pain scale when i was fighting thiwriting this book ay says they find it difficult to put their pain in the number and put a number on their pain. And yet the medical system keeps using it and it has some benefit, no one else can feel your pain is one of those experiences that is years and years alone thats really impossible to communicate. Trying to do that with a number is a start. A canadian doctor name ronald who came over in a much better way for asking people to measure and get a handle on peoples pain is a system of words and you listen to people talk about their pain with a hundred different words to characterize pain most of the medical professionals and doctors say the word system is much more helpful in allowing patients to express in helping clinicians understand what they feel. In some words apparently are bingo words or to think that is a stomach ulcer, making of that example. Even though i think the pain scale is very problematic and very frustrating for people is one big advantage, it is a language and allows people to communicate a little bit and if you say my pain was a ten yesterday but only a seven now, you are communicating that you feel that much better and if a doctor is giving you pain meds and you say youre still a ten, they know to try something else. It becomes a language of communication and its better than nothing but is not a very good one. A couple of fascinating details with the last part of the section about the pain numbers, despite how well the contextual nuance word language for pain works like building companies, Insurance Companies prefer the numbers essentially because they want to know how much they can charge. Or maybe you seem to apply there was a rule engine should be treated for it. Like the doctors responsibility to give you pain meds. That is really interesting. In some sense it becomes more quantified and somehow becomes more objective from the perspective of the Insurance Agency but the flipside of that which i found more interesting and i would like you to discuss a little bit is the extent to which the patient themselves learned that rule and asserted control over their own treatment by deciding what to say of what your pain level is. Talk about the flip of asserting control of the patients to the system. I learned from a friend who has cancer and has some pretty serious pain meds and she said to me, they dont want you to be above a five, i scratch my head what does that mean, they try to tell you and she said no youre above a five, that means they will want to do something, they want to give you meds. So tn i talked to more people and what people told me, it is a cat and mouse game and that puts them whatever answer in whatever next card is. People who are experiencing a lot of pain, pain meds mak you a zombie, they really mess wh your head, people have a lot of pain sometimes think i dont want to be doped up in several of my friends told me that they learned i the uses scale what the nurse or the doctor wou do if they didnt want more pain me they would say a low number number. One thing that i learned from the book was how much a scoring system exerted in terms of power and authority, if youre talking about a Public School teacher which everyone else discusses in getting their value out, some of the teachers in that system with the natural reaction is to trust the number because it was a four and were so used to trusting our scores we have our iq score, were expected to trust these things and the trust isnt always dessert, it is fascinating to see in the example wit the pain meds with the patient or the tart of these taking control because its so rare. Usually the scores are power over the targets of the score is, thats a rare case where the targets take back the power, if you want to talk a little bit about the teachers and the scoring system around the teachers. Lets talk about power first the reason was 30 are the ruins scoring themselves. Somebody elses scoring you, we all grow up in schools being scored all the time. Being given grades we are used to being subject to somebody elses power and unfortunately kids learn very early on that the teacher is right or the grade is right and a grade will make them doubt themselves, i certainly doubted myself and i told i got a b and i would never be qualified. Its a long story why came around to it but numbers have an oura and our culture of being objective and there is a lot of slogans nowadays t say we want to make evidencebased decisions, datase decisions, we want decisions to be driven by research, facts, what people mean nowadays by facts, evidence dataesearch is numbers, they think those are objective and words are squishy and subject to interpretation which they are, the point of myook people use scoring systems and all kinds of organizations to make decisions tha are going to affect other peoples lives whether they hired them, fire them, prote them, give them a pay raise, you talk aboutn your book, give them insurance, how much they charge for their insuranc whether to give them a bank loa in the example that will fascinate both of us is teachers and that people with education bureaucracy wted to make sure that teachers were qualified in producing results. So they came up with way to measure resul which was testing students on reading and math,retty much those two subjects. When students spend a year in teachers classroom and they do well on the test, the result is distributed tohe equality of the teacher. If the students do well. Thats a simple mel on how it works but they developed fancy formulas to sort out exactly how much of the students test sco was due and h much was due to finance factors like the kid alone before and the teacher in the previous grade was. And how well they did in the past. The teacher was given credit if he did better than expected, but the had an expected concept for a match enter mathematical model. In addition to scoring people, scoring teachers, the symptoms reported or penalize them on the basis of their score, either they could get fired, or schools would be shut down or taken over by Emergency Management or whatever or putting receiverships and School Budgets will be determined by how well these teachers are performing. It could be lifeanddeath consequences, not literally but job losing consequences for teachers to get a bad score and is the combination of the scoring system and the attachment of rewards and penalties that leads to these consequences. The score is what i tell about in the book, all of us hop hopee education does so much more than teach people how to add and subtract impasse reading comprehension test or know the right grammar rules, we really hope a really good teacher is one who instills curiosity in this business and instills excitement about learning and confidence that they can learn and boost them and encourage theimagination and nurture their creativity, those are the thin things, i want my kids to learn how to count and read and write but i want them to do so much more than that and i want to educate them to do that in the problem is these formulas for how much value a teacher adds to a student knowledge are so narrowly defined and they include only these narrow parts of education that are such a small part of it. I often say the idea of assessing a teacher with test scores is seen as a insufficient concept, we even have to go through the 12 year experiment torture teachers i guess we did do that. I want to move back to a few examples of you have what gets counted and what does not get counted, i have three examples here but i want you to choose one. The violence against women, what is counted when were talking about violence against women . Im partly disabled because i want people to realize that this book has wonderful examples. The gdp, what is counted as production is good news for the nation or other nations. And of course madisons as a virginia slaveholder, his calculation of what gets counted as a human with rights. Take one of those that you would like to go through to lay down that point very strongly that its really not about the counting, the counting is easy part, its about what counts, what gets categorized appropriately so we can count it later. It is hard to choose, i think we can come back to others in other contexts. The un wanted to develop a way to measure gender violence in different countries. And had a whole bunch of Committee Meetings and invited people from different countries. What they wanted to do is set up indicators, say what counts as violence, is it rape, is it murder, is it beating up somebody, is it kicking somebody so say the women who are from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions that they would count as violence and ultimately they would go around and they would ask and do surveys and ask if you had experienced that so there was rape and beatings and kicking and someone were the things in western people came up with. Then there was women at the meeting and they said we have different kinds of violence in our country so we asked in your faith, burning, setting on fire, dropping from a high place, sticking needles under your fingernails, smashing your hands, those are things that we think are violent and they also said it was psychological violence to take another wife, take a second wife or to be raped and punish a woman for not giving birth to a male child. Those were things they considered gender violence. The committee that ultimately designed the survey with all the indicators did not include any of those things that the women had brought up. There you have a case worth the question of who is in the room, we come back to power really, who is in the room when these decisions are getting made, what counts as violence in the women were in the room but they were not Strong Enough to get their definition of violence in the experiences of violence counted as examples of violence, when the survey gets done, that will not be done. It is about power, we dont have time for all of those questions, im going to move ahead, i would like you because im always looking for positive stories about numbers, i want you to talk about numbers and witnesses in the context of flint, michigan if you would. Before i talk about that, i just want to say a lot of people when they first hear my message they worry that im telling people never trust numbers, numbers are no good we should not count, that is not my message at all, i think numbers can be extremely helpful and i have lots of examples. The flint missing under michigan water crisis is one of where the city of flint switched its source of water from the detroit reservoir to the flint river i think it was called in shortly after that people noticed that their water smelled and tasted funny d they started having pretty serious problems, their hair falling out, skin rashes and Everybody Knows that it came back there was a lot of blood in the wate