Responsible modelling and the ethics of mathematics for decision support
Mathematical models are used to inform decisions across many sectors including climate change, finance, and epidemics.
But models are not perfect representations of the real world – they are partial, uncertain and often biased.
What, then, does responsible modelling look like? And how can we apply this ethical framework to new AI modelling methods?
“things that we care about actually exist not inside the model and so we have to escape from model land”
Erica Thompson is Associate Professor of Modelling for Decision Making at UCL’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP), and the author of ‘Escape From Model Land‘ (2022).
The essence of the rationale is well explained and related to the short blog I wrote referring to Pia Lauritzen, the knowledge “MODELS EMBODY EXPERT JUDGEMENTS“, and “It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.”
Enjoy 🙂
P.S.:
Erica Thompson also published about the hawkmoth effect – related to the butterly efect.
The Butterfly Effect is well-known as the sensitivity to initial conditions displayed by some dynamical systems, meaning that a small perturbation to initial conditions can result in a large change to the state of the system after some length of time (dynamical instability).
The Hawkmoth Effect, by analogy, is the sensitivity to structural model formulation, meaning that a small perturbation to the system itself can result in a large change to the state of the system after some length of time (structural instability).
Surtil : 