Hi everyone, I am Sharifa Sultana, from Cornell University.
Today I will present our paper, Chasing Luck: Data-driven Prediction, Faith, Hunch,
and Cultural Norms in Rural Betting Practices. This work was done with Mobaydul Haque Mozumder
from KUET and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed from University of Toronto.
HCI research predominantly uses scientific rationality to explain users’ behaviors,
decisions, and interactions with statistical model-based and data-driven systems.
However, the set of values influential in many users’ life
and rationales in data-driven systems often do not cohere.
This mismatch often makes AI more unpredictable and inaccessible to the users,
especially those with limited understanding of statistics, probability, and computation.
In this paper, we explain how data-driven prediction, faith,
hunch, and cultural norms harmonized together in rural betting practices in Bangladesh.
In this work, we investigated:
How did the rural Jessorian communities define betting and set its relationship with prediction?
How did the bettors’ interact with the platforms and fellow bettors? Which of the
factors influenced their betting decisions? How did they negotiate with multiple
rationalities, their judgment, and their perceived justification?
We conducted a ten-month long ethnographic study in 7 villages in rural Bangladesh.
In these two phases of the work, we engaged with more than 150 people from 27 families,
watched cricket matches with them, and followed their betting practices.
Our work was supported by a local NGO, namely Rural Reconstruction Foundation.
We found several rules and protocols of rural betting practices. For example,
Bettors formed groups only within their trusted networks.
Many bettors depended on experts and made collective betting decisions.
Experts aimed at maintaining harmony among the bettors and
ensuring maximum collective benefit, and a minimum loss for individuals.
We also listed some factors influential in rural betting, for example,
Bettors bet for earning easy money and sustaining their personal economic relations.
The bettors respected the mosques and prayed on time to succeed in betting.
Many of them also had stigma and superstitions. For example, one of the participants believed
in misfortune brought by specific people and explained how to avoid them,
“Robi and Raju (pseudonyms) are ‘Kufa’ guys—they always lose. So, we will also lose if they hold
the same bet as ours. So, we don’t show them our bets.” (P15, 20yrs, Male, Motor-Mechanic)
We also found that some bettors bet because they wanted to gain reputation
as a risk-taker which could help them engaging in other economic activities.
We found that bettors local calculations and
predictions often used details with emotional and sentimental values.
For example, one of the participants explained to
us that how they values the retirement of an international player in their betting,
“Malinga is retiring today. It means that Sri Lanka will try to win the match with their life.
There is no way to win a bet against them today", (P3, 31yrs, Male, Shopkeeper)
There are several moral and social justice aspects in rural betting.
We found that many of the social and religious norms were tangential to bettors’ moral values
For example, they often expected to lose bets during Ramadan
So, they often sought blessing from other holy spirits so that God spare their sinful bets.
For example, a male bettor mentioned that one of his betting accounts was not bringing him
much luck since the SIM card was not blessed by “Fakir Garib Shah Mazar" (tomb of a locally
renowned holy Islamic person) and he planned to give the SIM card a tour to the Mazar.
We also found that many bettors justified they immoral practices, even though they were
sensitive to their socio-economic customs. For instance, four of the female bettors
used home-grown vegetables in betting and used the money for their family.
One of them explained how she thought it was unfair that her plant stopped growing
melons after she used its melon for betting, “The first harvest from the plant should be
donated to the mosque by convention, but I used it for betting as I did not have money that day.
And now it has stopped growing melons.", (P29, 32yrs, Female, Housewife)
Our work has several takeaways. We will start with design implications:
We found that betting decisions are often influenced by local moral values. Thus,
platforms that would allow the bettors to receive experts’ advice could help them make
a balance between economic benefit and other social values in betting.
HCI should develop situated understanding of the privacy, and design technologies using the
local cultural resources in a way that would let the bettors know more about the local laws and
warn them when they are close to violate any. Second, Rationality, Justification, and HCI:
There are fundamental differences between the western notion of rationality and rural
traditional rationality of Bangladesh. In many cases, the western society is
individualist and secular and data-driven models there seldom involve cultural values.
However, many Global South communities are collective and influenced by traditional values.
HCI and human-AI design should investigate local communities, look out for local materials and
forms of ‘other’ rationalities of local people, and integrate them in culturally embedded-AI.
And finally, Postcolonial Computing and Human-AI Interaction:
We found that there are fundamental differences between the western ideas
of probability and luck and that of Bangladesh.
Western data-driven systems count on past to predict the future, while many people
in the Global South believe that their future is controlled by a supernatural power (religious or
para-religious beliefs) and hence focus more on pleasing the God and supernatural entities.
This mismatch calls for integrating local ethics in AI system, instead of a global, secular,
ubiquitous ethics for recommendation and designing more technologies for faith-based communities.
Thank you and I will invite question here.