There are several takeaways here, of which the first is principally, though not purely, methodological. Computer scientists are reaching out to the social sciences as they begin to think more broadly about what goes into the models they build. Likewise, social scientists are reaching out to the machine-learning community and are finding they now have a powerful new microscope at their disposal. As the Stanford authors write, “In standard quantitative social science, machine learning is used as a tool to analyze data. Our work shows how the artifacts of machine learning (word embeddings here) can themselves be interesting objects of sociological analysis. We believe this paradigm shift can lead to many fruitful studies.”

Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, loc. 90498