Seeing Like A

How certain data-driven schemes to improve the human condition have failed
(while achieving a high R^2).

Brian Abelson
@brianabelson | brianabelson@gmail.com

Senior Data Scientist, Enigma

Research Fellow, Tow Center

slides: abelson.nyc/seeing-like-a-stata

Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation.

- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State