Descriptive and prescriptive software

Abstract

Every few months or so since graduate school, I encounter new circumstances that remind me of the relation between the descriptive and prescriptive approaches humans use to understand and navigate the world in which we live. My most recent reminder occurred while reading about bias in software and efforts by researchers to reduce the negative impacts of this bias on society by (re) designing algorithms to address such biases as gender, racial, age, etc. Typically, "software bias" arises from using a descriptive model of human behavior within a prescriptive program.