if a sociologist wanted to study the social impact of transit infrastructure, that would be perfectly reasonable, and we wouldn't expect them to know much going

if a sociologist wanted to study the social impact of transit infrastructure, that would be perfectly reasonable, and we wouldn't expect them to know much going in about signaling systems, switches, or different types of rolling stock. likely a railway engineer wouldn't be all that successful trying to do the sociologist's job. i think machine learning systems are different, and any researcher in a new field of "Machine Behavior" would have to know much more about how they work than in the railroad example. but there's no reason to suppose that work done by people trained outside of CS departments will be nonsense. and as the authors say, there are real blind spots where CS researchers might just ask the wrong questions entirely.