  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.
