Zeynep Tufekci: evaluation

Transcript context

…Question from the iPad: how does your background in programming affect your work as a sociologist and public intellectual? Oh, it’s a great question. The thing is, it’s not just the technological side. For example, I did a lot of trying to understand. I was going to write a book about that before the pandemic. I’m super fascinated by machine learning, and I think there’s a lot of misunderstandings around it. One of the reasons that I think I can do some of what I do is that I can read the papers. I’m not a machine learning researcher. I’m not going to develop advanced science or anything like that, but I understand what’s going on in a way that someone who’s just looking at the sociology of impacts might not because of my background. I had the same thing happen with the pandemic. I actually used to teach sociology of pandemics because I thought it was really fascinating sociologically, but I was always interested in the science side too. I didn’t start knowing nothing. I started knowing — yes, as a layperson, but a professor, an educated layperson, and somebody who taught some of the stuff. I had some level of reading, and whenever possible, I just deepen it. I read textbooks. I read primary papers in a lot of fields that I’m trying to do sociological analysis in. I think that’s something we don’t do enough of in the academy because we’re so siloed. We treat it like dabbling. It’s not dabbling if you do it right. Yes, you can do it in a bad way, but it’s not dabbling to get some level of understanding of a field. You need to be careful. You need to be humble about what you’re doing and then apply your own field, sociology, to that base. If you don’t have any of the other, you can get things wrong quite easily. If you’re overconfident, yes, it can get into that heavily criticized dabbling where you’re just completely out of your depth. But I think there’s great value to be added. It’s not really interdisciplinary. You’re rooted in one discipline, but you’re going and learning stuff, and you’re interacting with the field directly as much as you can. I think that’s how it’s been broadly beneficial. Zeynep, a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you very much. [applause]…

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