{"id":19608,"date":"2015-11-13T09:56:40","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T15:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/?p=19608"},"modified":"2025-02-01T10:26:27","modified_gmt":"2025-02-01T16:26:27","slug":"you-do-not-want-to-be-an-edge-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/13\/you-do-not-want-to-be-an-edge-case\/","title":{"rendered":"You do not want to be an edge case"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hilary Mason made\u00a0an important observation\u00a0on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hmason\/status\/659412072720044032\">Twitter<\/a> a few days ago:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You do not want to be an edge case in this future we are building.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Systems run by algorithms can be\u00a0more efficient on average, but make life harder on the\u00a0edge cases, people who are exceptions to the system\u00a0developers&#8217; expectations.<\/p>\n<p>Algorithms, whether encoded in software or in rigid bureaucratic processes, can unwittingly discriminate against minorities. The problem isn&#8217;t <em>recognized<\/em> minorities, such as racial minorities or the disabled, but\u00a0<em>unrecognized<\/em> minorities, people who were overlooked.<\/p>\n<p>For example, two twins were recently prevented from getting their driver&#8217;s licenses because DMV software couldn&#8217;t tell their photos apart. Surely the people who wrote the software harbored no malice toward twins. They just didn&#8217;t anticipate that two driver&#8217;s license applicants could have indistinguishable photos.<\/p>\n<p>I imagine most people reading this have had difficulty with software (or bureaucratic procedures) that didn&#8217;t anticipate something about them; everyone is an edge case in some context. Maybe you don&#8217;t have a middle name, but a form insists you cannot leave the middle name field blank. Maybe there are more letters in your name or more children in your family than a programmer anticipated. Maybe you choose not to use some technology that &#8220;everybody&#8221; uses. Maybe you happen to have a social security number that hashes to a value that causes a program to crash.<\/p>\n<p>When software routinely fails, there\u00a0obviously has to have a human override. But as software improves for most people, there&#8217;s less apparent need\u00a0to make provision for\u00a0the exceptional cases. So things could get\u00a0harder for edge cases as they get\u00a0better for more people.<\/p>\n<h2>Related posts<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"link\"><a href=\"\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/10\/a-statistical-problem-with-nothing-to-hide\/\">A statistical problem with \u201cnothing to hide\u201d<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"link\"><a href=\"\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/19\/the-buck-stops-with-the-programmer\/\">The buck stops with the programmer<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hilary Mason made\u00a0an important observation\u00a0on Twitter a few days ago: You do not want to be an edge case in this future we are building. Systems run by algorithms can be\u00a0more efficient on average, but make life harder on the\u00a0edge cases, people who are exceptions to the system\u00a0developers&#8217; expectations. Algorithms, whether encoded in software or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johndcook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}