DAWN: I’m always curious about how data scientists measure the consistency or sensitivity of results from datasets

DAWN: I’m always curious about how data scientists measure the consistency or sensitivity of results from datasets. You have a notion of confidence intervals that communicates in a shorthand way “this is the size of grain of salt you have to take.” Ethnography doesn’t look at the world probabilistically, so we can never say, “9 of 10 times this will be the case.” But there are patterns, and those patterns can be relied upon for some purposes but not others. Even though we have messy complicated debates about how culture “scales” (which isn’t the same thing as reliability of results, but it’s related), we still don’t have clear ways to communicate to clients “this is the size of the grain of salt you need to take.” — https://www.epicpeople.org/data-science-and-ethnography/