Introducing Structural Zero, HRDAG’s New Monthly Newsletter

I want to invite you to check out HRDAG’s new newsletter, Structural Zero. It’s written by me and my colleagues Megan Price, Bailey Passmore, Tarak Shah, and Maria Gargiulo. Each month, one of us will write about a mathematical or scientific concept we use in our work and how it can be applied to understanding the world. We’ll offer some of the real world examples we’ve come across, including the times when we or our partners worked to collect and process data in very dangerous situations. We’ll talk about some of the key insights we’ve uncovered through our work, and the cultural context for understanding what those insights mean.

You don’t have to be a statistician to get a lot out of our newsletter. We hope to make the newsletter particularly helpful for people who don’t have a background in math or statistics but are curious about how data shapes what we know about the world. (Though if you happen to be a data scientist, I think you’ll also delight in this newsletter.)

The goal of the newsletter isn’t just to teach you about statistical concepts, but to explore some of the deeper issues we grapple with in our work, like:

How do any of us really know anything about what happened in the past?

How can we act as responsible stewards for collective memory?

What does it mean to offer uncertainty in a world that loves to speak in absolutes?

How can machine learning offer insights that weren’t possible before, and where might it enhance bias instead of uncovering truth?

We’ll also talk specifically about the vital lessons learned from people who lived in countries where democracies failed and authoritarianism took root. While we hope none of our readers will ever need these lessons, we know we are living in tumultuous times. Things can change quickly and it’s good to be prepared.

Subscribe today.

Here are our first few newsletter editions:

Structural Zero 01: Dictatorships Create a Lot of Data — exploring how authoritarian regimes generate massive quantities of data when violating human rights.

Structural Zero 02: Scatter and Keep Working — returning to core principles to help us navigate times that are especially dangerous for those working in the field of human rights.

Structural Zero 03: Without Encryption, My Work Wouldn’t Be Possible — centering encryption as vital to our work in using data to understand human rights violations.

Structural Zero 04: Pulling Back the Curtain on LLMs and Policing Data — a primer on artificial intelligence plus an explanation of how we used LLMs  to parse and explore a massive database about police misconduct in California.

PB

Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Director of Research

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