We’re Talking About the Wrong Error: Why Variance Matters More than Bias in AI – Jan 19, 2026

Session Description

The Data Sciences Speaker Series is a collaborative marquee series, whose focus is data science and its intersection with other fields.

Speaker: Laura Nelson, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia

Prof. Nelson argues for shifting the focus among computational social scientists and data scientists from bias to variance. She will show how low-variance LLMs can be incredibly powerful for certain uses, such as some forms of text classification and annotation, and also why they pose challenges for other uses, especially social simulation and comparative analysis.

This talk is in collaboration with the University of Toronto Scarborough.