As Human Beings, We are Flawed but We Learn

“But human decision making, while often flawed, has one chief virtue. It can evolve. As human beings learn and adapt, we change, and so do our processes.”

[Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’neil]

We are flawed and vulnerable. We sometimes are blinded by prejudice. We are often apt to be emotional and fails to make the right decision. Yes, we are human beings. However, we have learned from our mistakes. We accepted the Copernican system. We changed our mind after Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. When we realized that there is something wrong, we can change all at once.

Automated systems, by contrast, CANNOT change their model immediately. The only thing they can do is an improvement of the model to add more parameters and correlations (like the eccentric and the epicycle in the Ptolemaic system). This makes the model more complex and complicated (not the right direction!). This shows the main role of human beings in the age of Big Data. Only we, human beings, stop and change the data-driven model immediately when it goes wrong.