How You Ask the Question: NFL Edition

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Well folks, it’s another Sunday in October and another day for me to rue how cursed my fantasy football team is this year. Both my QBs are hurt, I’ve had two players with season ending injuries, and I am getting to that level of irritated where I barely want to watch anymore.

On the plus side, I’ve just discovered that the NFL/National Anthem protests are providing me with a few new interesting statistical anecdotes.

First up, we have this interesting brand survey that shows the NFL is now one of the most divisive brands in the US. Here “divisive” really means “politically discordant”…..basically the two parties have very different current favorability ratings for them. To give you a flavor, they were more divisive than the Huffington Post, but less divisive than Fox News.

This ranking system is kind of interesting, but the article points out how unstable it is for certain brands. Getting in the headlines may give you a temporary hit, but they are starting to gather evidence that the long term impact of those hits is less than it used to be. For example, after bad press this past spring, United Airlines is now not viewed any differently by consumers than it was before the incident. It would be interesting to add some sort of weighting factor to “divisive” brands to account for temporary divisiveness vs long term.

Next up was this article, that reviewed public perception of the NFL protests based on how the polling question was asked. As is often seen with contentious issues, there is a 10 point swing when we change the wording. In this case, including the reason for the protest in the question garners more support for the cause vs a question that just mentions the protest. To note: the discrepancy came from those who support the protests, the % who opposed stayed steady regardless. This backs up my general theory that most people are only half paying attention most of the time anyway.

They also have some interesting poll numbers that show that most people support broad issues (like being against police brutality) more than they support specific actions (like kneeling during the anthem to protest police brutality), which is another way certain polls can skew the results.

It’s still amazing to me how small differences in wording can change the results of polling, and how under-reported this effect often is, and it is still stunning to me that all of my obsession with stats and details never seems to translate in to a good fantasy football team. Sigh.

Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook

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I’m swamped with thesis writing this weekend, but I saw this on Twitter this week and thought it was worth a repost:

It’s from a series from WNYC, and it was actually originally posted over 4 years ago. They have a whole series of these, which I have not looked through, but it would be interesting to click on them every time something bad happens and see how the advice holds up.

Lego Superheroes and Combinatorics

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My son (age 5) has developed the most fascinating (for both of us) new hobby of creating his own Lego superheroes by rearranging the ones that he has. He’s spent hours on this recently, meticulously dismantling them and looking for exactly the right piece to create the character he wants. Behold, a few recent versions:

He refused to tell me their names and got shy when I asked, but from what I can put together it’s (from right to left): Joker in disguise, Queen Tut/Barbara Gordon, Robin ripping his pants off, Happy Bug Man, Caveman Scarecrow and Spidergirl.

Never one to let a good analogy go, I attempted to explain to him that he’s figuring out how many combinations there are for any group of Legos. For example, if we wanted to know how many unique creations we could make out of the pieces in the picture above, we could make over 70,000 unique characters. He informed me “yes, but they wouldn’t be cool guys.” The kid’s got an aesthetic.

So I tried it a different way, and used it to explain to him the difference between a permutation and a combination. If I told him he could only take 2 out of these 6 creations in the car, he has 15 different groups of two he could select. That’s a combination.

If, however, he has a friend over and I tell them they can take two creations in the car and they each get one, they now have 30 possibilities….the original 15 possibilities x 2 ways of splitting them. That’s a permutation….the order matters in addition to the picks, so the number is always higher.

Of course, they will actually just want the same one, and then we will move on to a lesson in sharing. Also, he’s 5, and he kinda just wandered off part way through permutations and then asked if he could be a baby turtle. That’s when I figured I’d move this lesson to the blog, where I was slightly less likely to get turtle related commentary as a response.

Anyway, the history of using Lego’s to illustrate mathematical concepts is actually pretty robust, and can get really interesting. For more on permutations and combinations, try here.  For why stepping on a Lego hurts so much, try this:

Buoy Statistics

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Okay, this is going to be another one of those posts where I make up a term for something I’m seeing that annoys me. You’ve been warned.

When I was a little kid, I remember one of the first times I ever saw a buoy in the ocean. I don’t remember how old I was, but I was probably 5 or so, and I thought the buoy was actually somebody’s ball that had floated away. As the day went on, I remember being amazed that it managed to stay so close to the same spot without moving…it was far from shore (at least to a 5 year old) but somehow it never disappeared entirely. I think my Dad must have noticed me looking at it because he teased me about it for a bit, but he finally told me it was actually anchored with a chain I couldn’t see. Life lessons.

I think about that feeling sometimes when I see statistics quoted in articles with little context. It’s always something like “75% of women do x, which is more than men”, and then everyone makes comments about how great/terrible women are for awhile. 5 paragraphs down you find out that 72% of men also do x, meaning all of the previous statements were true, but are a little less meaningful in context. What initially looked like a rather interesting free floating statistic was actually tied to something bigger. It may not stop being interesting or useful, but it certainly changes the presentation a bit. In other words:

Buoy statistic: A statistic that is presented on its own as free-floating, while the context and anchoring data is hidden from initial sight.

I see buoy statistics most often when it comes to group differences. Gender, racial groups, political groups….any time you see a number with what one group does without the number for the other half, I’d get suspicious.

For example, a few years ago, a story broke that the (frequently trolling) Public Policy Polling Group had found that 30% of Republican voters supported bombing the fictional city of Agrabah from the movie Aladdin. This got some people crowing about how dumb Republicans were, but a closer read showed that 36% of Democrats opposed it. Overall, an almost identical number of each party (43% vs 45%) had an opinion about a fictional city. Now this was a poll question designed to get people to say dumb things, and the associated headlines were pure buoy statistics.

Another example was around a Github study from a few years ago that showed that women had a lower acceptance rate of their pull requests if their user name made it clear they were female (71.8% to 62.5%). Some articles ended up reporting that they got far fewer requests accepted than men, but it turns out that men actually got about 64% of their requests accepted. While it was true the drop off was bigger from gender-neutral names (men went from about 68% to about 64%), 62.5% vs 64% is not actually “far fewer”.  (Note: numbers are approximate because, annoyingly, exact numbers were not released)

I’m sure there are other examples, but basically any time you get impressed by a statistic, only to feel a bit of a let down when you hear the context, you’ve hit a buoy statistic. Now, just like with buoys, these statistics are not without any use. One of the keys to this definition is that they are real statistics, just not always as free-floating as you first perceive them. Frequently they are actually the mark of something legitimately interesting, but you have to know how to take them. Context does not erase usefulness, but it can make it harder to jump to conclusions.

Data Sets and Closet Cleaning

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I mentioned a few posts ago that I’m finally (finally!) working on my final capstone project for my degree. It’s going well so far, but it struck me this weekend exactly how much my process of wading through data resembles my process of cleaning out my closets:

  • Step 1: Take everything out and throw it all in a pile. For this project, my pile is 21,000 response sets from the American Time Use Survey.  For my closet, well, it’s a little bit of everything, possibly including a request to participate in the American Time Use Survey (sorry BLS!). Once everything’s in a pile, frolic around a bit feel good about myself for taking such a large and productive step.
  • Step 2: Stare at the pile I just created. Poke around at it a bit. Wonder suddenly if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, or if perhaps I should have taken things more slowly. Swear quietly while maintaining outward calm.
  • Step 3: Start spreading things out to see what I’ve got. Decide to start with getting rid of what I KNOW I don’t need and can throw out.  Hope fervently the reduced pile size will quell my growing sense of panic.
  • Step 4: Start sorting things in to a few broad categories . Figure out if there are any core assumptions I need to validate like “can we assume a normal distribution of the data” or “realistically will I ever be able to pull off carrying a bright pink sparkle purse with a tassel”?  I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
  • Step 5: I don’t actually know how to describe this step (for my closet or my data) but this is the part where I start sort of communing with the data. I basically plop myself in the middle of it, and examine whatever catches my interest. I set up analysis schemes, then decide I don’t like them and rearrange things again. Much work and rework occurs, but I’m going where my gut takes me. I probably have one or more glasses of wine to maintain proper zen. If my energy begins to flag, I explore remote corners of Stack Exchange or, uh, Pinterest I guess, for inspiration. Nothing in this part makes sense to anyone else, but that’s okay.  Data, like art, sometimes takes a little time.
  • Step 6: This step has changed over the years, for both my house cleaning and my work habits. This used to be where I looked up from my data cleaning/bopping around and realized I was now running short on time and everything was still a mess. Fortunately I have now learned to set a reminder on my phone that alerts me when I need to wrap up the play/go with my gut part and start freaking writing things down/putting things away. Gotta be stern with myself or I’ll never get there. 
  • Step 7: Write a bad first draft. Part of why I used to delay so much on #6 is I was worried that I had to write a good first draft. Now I purposely write a bad one. Since there’s not a lot intimidating about doing shoddy work, it gets me moving faster and makes sure I have SOMETHING down on paper when I’m out of time. Not fun, but I get through it. 
  • Step 8: Revise and perfect details as time allows. Does that graph need a new label/color scheme? Should I order my shoes by color? Once the dust has settled, I work on these details until I am either out of time, or totally sick of everything. When “careful tweaking” moves in to “reckless rearrangement” I take it as a sign I need to call it quits.

The end.

Human Bias vs Machine Bias

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One of the most common running themes on this blog is discussions of human bias, a topic I clearly believe deserves quite a bit of attention. In recent years though, I have started thinking a lot more about machine bias, and how it is slowly influencing more of our lives. In thinking about machine bias though, I’ve noticed recently that many people (myself included) actually tend to anthropomorphize machine bias and attempt to evaluate it as though it was bias coming from a human with a particularly wide-spread influence. Since anthropomorphism is actually a cognitive bias itself, I thought I’d take a few minutes today to talk about things we should keep in mind when talking about  computers/big data algorithms/search engine results. Quite a few of my points here will be based off of the recent kerfluffle around Facebook offering to target your ads to “Jew haters”, the book Weapons of Math Destruction, and the big data portion of the Calling BS class. Ready? Here we go!

  1. Algorithm bias knows no “natural” limit. There’s an old joke where someone, normally a prankster uncle, tells a child that they’ll stop pouring their drink when they “say when”. When the child subsequently says “stop” or “enough” or someone other non-when word, the prankster keeps pouring and the glass overflows. Now, a normal prankster will pour a couple of extra tablespoons of milk on the table. An incredibly dedicated prankster might pour the rest of the container. An algorithm in this same scenario would not only finish the container but go run out to the store and buy more so they could continue pouring until you realized you were supposed to say when. Nearly every programming 101 class starts at some point with a professor saying “the nice part is, computer’s do what you tell them. The downside is, computers do what you tell them”. Thus, despite the fact that no sane person, even a fairly anti-Semitic one, would request an advertising group called “Jew haters”, a computer will return a result like this if it hits the right criteria.
  2. Thoroughness does not indicate maliciousness. Back in the 90s, there was a sitcom on called “Spin City” about a fictional group of people in the mayor’s office in New York City. At one point the lone African American in the office discovered that you could use their word processing software to find certain words and replace them with others, so in an attempt to make the office more PC, he sets them up to replace the word “black” with “African-American”. This of course promptly leads to the mayor’s office inviting some constituents to an “African-American tie dinner”, and canned laughter ensues. While the situation is fictional, this stuff happens all the time. When people talk about the widespread nature of an algorithm bias, there’s always a sense that some human had to put extra effort in to making the algorithm do absurd things, but it’s almost always the opposite. You have to think of all the absurd things the algorithm could do ahead of time in order to stop them. Facebook almost certainly got in to this mess by asking its marketing algorithm to find often-repeated words in people’s profiles and aggregate those for its ads. In doing so, it forgot that the algorithm would not filter for “clearly being an asshole” and exclude that from the results.
  3. While algorithms are automatic, fixing them is often manual. Much like your kid blurting out embarrassing things in public, finding out your algorithm has done something embarrassing almost certainly requires you to intervene. However, this can be like a game of whack-a-mole, as you still don’t know when these issues are going to pop up. Even if you exclude every ad group that goes after Jewish people, the chances that some other group has a similar problem is high. It’s now on Facebook to figure out who those other groups are and wipe the offending categories from the database one by one. The chances they’ll miss some iteration of this is high, and then it will hit the news again in a year. With a human, this would be a sign they didn’t really “learn their lesson” the first time, but with an algorithm it’s more a sign that no one foresaw the other ways it might screw up.
  4. It is not overly beneficial to companies to fix these things, EXCEPT to avoid embarrassment. Once they’re up and running, algorithms tend to be quite cheap to maintain, until someone starts complaining about them. As long as their algorithms are making money and no one is saying anything negative, most companies will assume everything is okay. Additionally, since most of these algorithms are proprietary, people outside the company almost never get insight in to their weaknesses until they see a bad result so obvious they realize what happened. In her book Weapons of Math Destruction , Cathy O’Neill tells an interesting story about one teachers attempt (and repeated failure) to get an explanation for why an algorithm called her deficient despite excellent reviews, and why so much faith was put in it that she was fired. She never got an answer, and ultimately got rehired by a (ironically better funded, more prestigious) district. One of O’Neills major take-aways is that people will put near unlimited trust in algorithms, while not realizing that the algorithms decision making process could be flawed. It would be nearly impossible for a human to wield that much power while leaving so little trace, as every individual act of discrimination or unfairness would leave a trail. With a machine, it’s just the same process applied over and over.
  5. Some groups have more power than others to get changes made, because some people who get discriminated against won’t be part of traditional groups. This one seems obvious, but hear me out here. Yes, if your computer program ends up tagging photos of black people as “gorillas”, you can expect the outcry to be swift. But with many algorithms, we don’t know if there are new groups we’ve never thought of that are being discriminated against. I wrote a piece a while ago about a company that set their default address for unknown websites to the middle of the country, and inadvertently caused a living nightmare for the elderly woman who happened to own the house closest to that location. This woman had no idea why angry people kept showing up at her door, and had no idea what questions to ask to find out why they got there. We’re used to traditional biases that cover broad groups, but what if a computer algorithm decided to exclude men who were exactly age 30? When would someone figure that out? We have no equivalent in human bias for more oddly specific groups, and probably won’t notice them. Additionally, groups with less computer savvy will be discriminated against, solely due to the “lack of resources to trouble-shoot the algorithm” issues. The poor. Older people. Those convicted of crimes.The list goes on.

Overall, things aren’t entirely hopeless. There are efforts underway to come up with software that can systematically test “black box” algorithms on a larger scale to help identify biased algorithms before they can cause problems. However, until something reliable can be found, people should be aware that the biases we’re looking for are not the ones you would normally see if humans were running the show. One of the reasons AI freaks me out so much is because we really do all default to anthropomorphizing the machines and only look out for the downsides that fit our pre-conceived notions of how humans screw up. While this comes naturally to most of us, I would argue it’s on of the more dangerous forms of underestimating a situation we have going today. So uh, happy Sunday!