Ethics and Data Science

Chapter 2. Of Oaths and Checklists

“Oaths? We don’t need no stinkin’ oaths.” (With apologies to Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)

Over the past year, there has been a great discussion of data ethics, motivated in part by discomfort over “fake news,” targeted advertising, algorithmic bias, and the effect that data products have on individuals and on society. Concern about data ethics is hardly new; the ACM, IEEE, and the American Statistical Association all have ethical codes that address data. But the intensity with which we’ve discussed ethics shows that something significant is happening: data science is coming of age and realizing its responsibilities. A better world won’t come about simply because we use data; data has its dark underside.

The recent discussion frequently veers into a discussion of data oaths, looking back to the ancient Hippocratic Oath for doctors. Much as we appreciate the work and the thought that goes into oaths, we are skeptical about their value. Oaths have several problems:

• They’re one-shots. You take the oath once (if at all), and that’s it. There’s no reason to keep it in the front of your consciousness. You don’t recite it each morning. Or evaluate regularly whether you’re living up to the ideals.

• Oaths are a set of very general and broad principles. Discussions of the Hippocratic Oath begin with the phrase “First, do no harm,” words that don’t actually appear in the oath. But what does “do no harm” mean? For centuries doctors ...