A new Slop University brochure, The Room Already Knows, showcases three published studies that weigh an automated score or dashboard against the judgement of the person already watching the same room, drawn from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement.
The Room Already Knows gathers three published studies that test what an instrument reports against what a person watching the same room would say
An automated score and the person who already knows better than it: that’s the throughline running under Slop University’s newest brochure, The Room Already Knows, released today from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement.
A brochure is usually the last place an institution tells you what it’s still unsure of. This one is where we decided to put it anyway.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
The brochure sets three recent findings side by side: a neighbourhood giveaway group whose automated listing score barely agreed with a volunteer moderator’s own read of what counted as a genuine repost, a school whose incident-heatmap reseating of invigilators moved where attention went without moving where integrity concerns actually got flagged, and a bike-rack occupancy dashboard that kept being cited in committee decisions long after anyone had stopped visiting it. “None of the three resolves cleanly in the instrument’s favour, and none in the room’s either,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement. “That’s closer to the point than either side winning.”
The release reflects a habit the two Schools say they aren’t interested in outgrowing: putting an instrument’s read of a room up against the read of whoever is already standing in it, and publishing the disagreement rather than smoothing it over.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vtha4a.