Insightful interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to the principled governance of complex technologies, like those produced by modern computing research and development. Technical research on the interaction between computation and society often focuses on how researchers model social and physical systems. These models underlie how computer scientists specify problems and propose algorithmic solutions. However, the social effects of computing can depend just as much on obscure and opaque technical caveats, choices, and qualifiers. Such artifacts are products of the particular algorithmic techniques and theory applied to solve a problem once modeled, and their nature can imperil thorough sociotechnical scrutiny of the often discretionary decisions made to manage them. We describe three classes of objects used to encode these choices and qualifiers: heuristic models, assumptions, and parameters. We raise six reasons these objects may be hazardous to comprehensive analysis of computing and argue they deserve deliberate consideration as researchers explain scientific work.

翻译：富有洞察力的跨学科合作对于复杂技术（如现代计算研发所催生的技术）的规范化治理至关重要。关于计算与社会交互的技术研究通常聚焦于研究者如何对社会与物理系统进行建模。这些模型构成了计算机科学家定义问题并提出算法解决方案的基础。然而，计算的社会效应可能同样取决于晦涩难懂且不透明的技术细节、选择与限定条件。此类人工产物源于为解决已建模问题而应用的特定算法技术与理论，其本质可能危及对为管理它们所做的通常具有自由裁量权的决策进行彻底的社会技术审视。我们描述了用于编码这些选择与限定条件的三类对象：启发式模型、假设和参数。我们提出了这些对象可能对计算的全面分析构成风险的六点原因，并主张在研究者阐述科学工作时，应给予它们审慎的考量。