4 ms·

Well written and engaging, but I think there is a lot more room to really explore what the sociological, techno-economic, power dynamic etc ramifications are of

by szvsw 2y ago

Well written and engaging, but I think there is a lot more room to really explore what the sociological, techno-economic, power dynamic etc ramifications are of specific data structures. This doesn’t go too far beyond the surface level notion of data, and there are plenty of discussions of the historical significance of taxonomizing and “objectifying” and archiving and surveilling the world into data from Foucault to Gitelman to Hui to Galloway and more. With a title like the one given, it would be nice to see the authors try to tease out what the political implications of a linked list, a heap, a stack a directed acyclic graph or a cyclic one, a tree, a FIFO queue, a hash table, a point cloud, a data lake, actually are… it can be difficult to really wrestle with these on an interdisciplinary and simultaneously technical & sociological/organizational level, but seems worth doing.

barathr 2y ago
I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and CLRS.
abtinf 2y ago
Word salad.
- szvsw 2y ago
  Sorry! More succinctly: the authors explore politics of data, as opposed to politics of data structures. I’m curious what the latter would really look like.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    Any recommendations from other writers on "politics of data"?
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  It really is, it seems more like satire of a comment than a comment.
Zababa 2y ago
Yeah, the author does not seem to know what a data structure is, or assume the reader does not know and won't mind.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Feels that if anything, the author is describing computational abstractions, not data structures per se. They mention the term in the text, but then continue to say "data structure" while talking about everything except data structures. For example: "a local cafe is no longer a community hangout but a data structure containing a menu, a list of reservation options, and a hundred 5-star ratings" This description is focusing on the "not data structure" parts like what is there, what it means, and what can be done with it; the data structure part would be, how it's arranged and what the impact of that is. It's still clear what the author means, and they are using the relevant terminology, just the irony is in details being named opposite to what they should be.
  - barathr 2y ago
    It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are involved in holding the data and the difference that might make. There are data structures underneath in the excerpt you pulled out and they're so common in code that we don't even notice it. (Even something as simple as this: certain data structures are better for finding recent / first items and others are better for finding "top" / largest items. That has implications that ripple upward and can skew what users are shown.) It would be nice to consider the differences in how different data structures store data and their broader implications.
    - Zababa 2y ago
      Sorry, my comment was harsher than it needed to be. I've struggled with belonging where most people seem to fit in, but on the other hand I've benefited greatly, I think, from the processes that make me a taxable citizen rather than a member of a community.
_glass 2y ago
In my PhD thesis I am doing this, but at an organizational level, how algorithms are managed and organized, i.e., via task lists, inside of the system, e.g., the debugger, or virtual meetings. There was a clear discovery of the movement away from the code, but also that we should really think about how the algorithm sees things, and how it is taking on a subjectivity on its own, as an actor. This approach is postmodern, by describing hyper-reality, so taking in things that management theory would approach as only superficial, and putting this into the foreground. Your idea is actually brilliant, to go one step further and check the individual implementation details. I think there is some work about algorithms, but mostly for the AI case.

by szvsw 2y ago

barathr 2y ago

I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and CLRS.

abtinf 2y ago

Word salad.

szvsw 2y ago
Sorry! More succinctly: the authors explore politics of data, as opposed to politics of data structures. I’m curious what the latter would really look like.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Any recommendations from other writers on "politics of data"?
CyberDildonics 2y ago
It really is, it seems more like satire of a comment than a comment.

Zababa 2y ago

Yeah, the author does not seem to know what a data structure is, or assume the reader does not know and won't mind.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Feels that if anything, the author is describing computational abstractions, not data structures per se. They mention the term in the text, but then continue to say "data structure" while talking about everything except data structures. For example: "a local cafe is no longer a community hangout but a data structure containing a menu, a list of reservation options, and a hundred 5-star ratings" This description is focusing on the "not data structure" parts like what is there, what it means, and what can be done with it; the data structure part would be, how it's arranged and what the impact of that is. It's still clear what the author means, and they are using the relevant terminology, just the irony is in details being named opposite to what they should be.
- barathr 2y ago
  It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are involved in holding the data and the difference that might make. There are data structures underneath in the excerpt you pulled out and they're so common in code that we don't even notice it. (Even something as simple as this: certain data structures are better for finding recent / first items and others are better for finding "top" / largest items. That has implications that ripple upward and can skew what users are shown.) It would be nice to consider the differences in how different data structures store data and their broader implications.
  - Zababa 2y ago
    Sorry, my comment was harsher than it needed to be. I've struggled with belonging where most people seem to fit in, but on the other hand I've benefited greatly, I think, from the processes that make me a taxable citizen rather than a member of a community.

_glass 2y ago

In my PhD thesis I am doing this, but at an organizational level, how algorithms are managed and organized, i.e., via task lists, inside of the system, e.g., the debugger, or virtual meetings. There was a clear discovery of the movement away from the code, but also that we should really think about how the algorithm sees things, and how it is taking on a subjectivity on its own, as an actor. This approach is postmodern, by describing hyper-reality, so taking in things that management theory would approach as only superficial, and putting this into the foreground. Your idea is actually brilliant, to go one step further and check the individual implementation details. I think there is some work about algorithms, but mostly for the AI case.