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The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach, and it's an approach that, in a situation like this, no

The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach, and it's an approach that, in a situation like this, not only can't help but can't even help but be actively harmful. I have some relevant experience here. Back almost a decade ago, while I was working as a staff engineer for a local medical school's genomics institute, I was briefly involved with some tooling work for a project that aimed to characterize the spread and prevalence of various STDs among Baltimore's at-risk youth. Contact tracing was of course a major part of that, but where today's (or 2012's!) tech industry would just shrug and stick New Project.xcodeproj in front of an unsecured Mongo store, the doctors and public health professionals running this project built free clinics. Yes, there was an app involved - a tablet app for doctors to use, in documenting what their patients told them about whom they'd been with, when, and so forth. But, unlike some, they knew better than to assume that any app could by itself do the job for them, rather than they themselves needing to go out and serve the community they wanted the chance to learn more about. You know. Contact tracing. As opposed to, slapping together a pile of React Native and throwing it on an app store in hopes of grabbing some VC bucks and making a get-rich-quick exit - or even Apple and Google getting together and actually engineering something that's technically very sound and still totally useless because it can only ever be purely quantitative in a single dimension, physical proximity, and - as I learned when I was asked to help out with building data models for it - contact tracing is not and never can be a one-dimensional problem. That's the point Doctorow is making here. And for all that I'm not a big fan of the guy, in this case he's nailed it dead square in the bullseye.

roenxi 6y ago
> The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach... More subtly, his point is that tech is choosing to do what is easy, not what is necessary. Tech has had some great successes doing this in the past (see also Worse is Better). It isn't a very good approach though when the relationships are mandatory and the data sensitive.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Sure. Looking at it in the most generous fashion possible, it's an example of what happens when the low-hanging fruit lasts so long that people forget what ladders are for. Looking at it with the experience of two decades spent in and around this industry, it's the latest in a long and depressing series of reasons why unicorn factory farming needs to die.
usrusr 6y ago
> The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach Maybe that's the point he intended to make, what he actually wow is really just a collection of anecdotes about troubles with location based tracking. That's like realizing that it hurts if you hit yourself with a hammer and thus vowing to never again use a screw. The closest thing be has to an argument against the decentralized proximity approach is a hand-wavy mention of the idea that there might be a possibility of false positives in a traffic jam. The thing is that the conflict between manual tracing vs electronic exposure notification is a complete fantasy because the resources required to do one have zero overlap with the resources to do the other. Sure, automated exposure notification is wildly imprecise. But so is viral spread, it's a game of probabilities with or without the uncertainties of Bluetooth beacons. But beacon tracing scales where manual tracing doesn't. In a high incidence situation manual tracing will quickly run out of call center agents and in a low incidence situation social distancing and manual location logging (e.g. documentation of restaurant table allocation) will quickly erode to the point where a very, very large fraction of contacts cannot be manually reconstructed. And even in the moderate incidence band where manual tracing works best it has blind spots where beacon logging can fill in, not only anonymous exposures like public transit but also the entire field of "awkward" contacts that Doctorow spent an entire paragraph on. "And then there's this survival sex worker I occasionally meet, here's his number" surely isn't a line that comes up often in a manual tracing conversation. But yeah, it must be fun to drum up negativity about exposure notification apps, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy when nobody is using them.
- throwanem 6y ago
  You seem to know a lot about the problems of contact tracing! From what demonstrably successful work, or at least training or experience in the field, do you derive your perspective? And it's not just a simple question of opportunity cost - or, rather, it is, but you're wrong about in which direction. The same people who are building useless junk that nobody uses absolutely could be building tools, like the one I worked on years back, that actually empower clinicians and public health workers to produce datasets susceptible to useful analysis. Doctorow's argument, with which I agree, is that they aren't doing that because it's difficult, exacting, unglamorous work, exactly the sort toward which our industry absolutely sucks at incentivizing anyone. So that's not what happens, and instead we get a bunch of pointless data about physical adjacency that's totally devoid of the kind of context it needs for any meaningful analysis to be possible - but which can be misused to any number of harmful ends.

roenxi 6y ago

> The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach... More subtly, his point is that tech is choosing to do what is easy, not what is necessary. Tech has had some great successes doing this in the past (see also Worse is Better). It isn't a very good approach though when the relationships are mandatory and the data sensitive.

throwanem 6y ago
Sure. Looking at it in the most generous fashion possible, it's an example of what happens when the low-hanging fruit lasts so long that people forget what ladders are for. Looking at it with the experience of two decades spent in and around this industry, it's the latest in a long and depressing series of reasons why unicorn factory farming needs to die.

usrusr 6y ago

> The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach Maybe that's the point he intended to make, what he actually wow is really just a collection of anecdotes about troubles with location based tracking. That's like realizing that it hurts if you hit yourself with a hammer and thus vowing to never again use a screw. The closest thing be has to an argument against the decentralized proximity approach is a hand-wavy mention of the idea that there might be a possibility of false positives in a traffic jam. The thing is that the conflict between manual tracing vs electronic exposure notification is a complete fantasy because the resources required to do one have zero overlap with the resources to do the other. Sure, automated exposure notification is wildly imprecise. But so is viral spread, it's a game of probabilities with or without the uncertainties of Bluetooth beacons. But beacon tracing scales where manual tracing doesn't. In a high incidence situation manual tracing will quickly run out of call center agents and in a low incidence situation social distancing and manual location logging (e.g. documentation of restaurant table allocation) will quickly erode to the point where a very, very large fraction of contacts cannot be manually reconstructed. And even in the moderate incidence band where manual tracing works best it has blind spots where beacon logging can fill in, not only anonymous exposures like public transit but also the entire field of "awkward" contacts that Doctorow spent an entire paragraph on. "And then there's this survival sex worker I occasionally meet, here's his number" surely isn't a line that comes up often in a manual tracing conversation. But yeah, it must be fun to drum up negativity about exposure notification apps, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy when nobody is using them.

throwanem 6y ago
You seem to know a lot about the problems of contact tracing! From what demonstrably successful work, or at least training or experience in the field, do you derive your perspective? And it's not just a simple question of opportunity cost - or, rather, it is, but you're wrong about in which direction. The same people who are building useless junk that nobody uses absolutely could be building tools, like the one I worked on years back, that actually empower clinicians and public health workers to produce datasets susceptible to useful analysis. Doctorow's argument, with which I agree, is that they aren't doing that because it's difficult, exacting, unglamorous work, exactly the sort toward which our industry absolutely sucks at incentivizing anyone. So that's not what happens, and instead we get a bunch of pointless data about physical adjacency that's totally devoid of the kind of context it needs for any meaningful analysis to be possible - but which can be misused to any number of harmful ends.