E-Nudging Justice: The Role of Digital Choice Architecture in Online Courts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ayelet Sela: “Justice systems around the world are launching online courts and tribunals in order to improve access to justice, especially for self-represented litigants (SRLs). Online courts are designed to handhold SRLs throughout the process and empower them to make procedural and substantive decisions. To that end, they present SRLs with streamlined and simplified procedures and employ a host of user interface design and user experience strategies (UI/UX). Focusing on these features, the article analyzes online courts as digital choice environments that shape SRLs’ decisions, inputs and actions, and considers their implications on access to justice, due process and the impartiality of courts. Accordingly, the article begins to close the knowledge gap regarding choice architecture in online legal proceedings. 

Using examples from current online courts, the article considers how mechanisms such as choice overload, display, colorfulness, visual complexity, and personalization influence SRLs’ choices and actions. The analysis builds on research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics that shows that subtle changes in the context in which decisions are made steer (nudge) people to choose a particular option or course of action. It is also informed by recent studies that capture the effect of digital choice architecture on users’ choices and behaviors in online settings. The discussion clarifies that seemingly naïve UI/UX features can strongly influence users of online courts, in a manner that may be at odds with their institutional commitment to impartiality and due process. Moreover, the article challenges the view that online court interfaces (and those of other online legal services, for that matter) should be designed to maximize navigability, intuitiveness and user-friendliness. It argues that these design attributes involve the risk of nudging SRLs to make uninformed, non-deliberate, and biased decisions, possibly infringing their autonomy and self-determination. Accordingly, the article suggests that choice architecture in online courts should aim to encourage reflective participation and informed decision-making. Specifically, its goal should be to improve SRLs’ ability to identify and consider options, and advance their own — inherently diverse — interests. In order to mitigate the abovementioned risks, the article proposes an initial evaluation framework, measures, and methodologies to support evidence-based and ethical choice architecture in online courts….(More)”.

The Psychology of Prediction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Morgan Housel: “During the Vietnam War Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tracked every combat statistic he could, creating a mountain of analytics and predictions to guide the war’s strategy.

Edward Lansdale, head of special operations at the Pentagon, once looked at McNamara’s statistics and told him something was missing.

“What?” McNamara asked.

“The feelings of the Vietnamese people,” Landsdale said.

That’s not the kind of thing a statistician pays attention to. But, boy, did it matter.

I believe in prediction. I think you have to in order to get out of bed in the morning.

But prediction is hard. Either you know that or you’re in denial about it.

A lot of the reason it’s hard is because the visible stuff that happens in the world is a small fraction of the hidden stuff that goes on inside people’s heads. The former is easy to overanalyze; the latter is easy to ignore.

This report describes 12 common flaws, errors, and misadventures that occur in people’s heads when predictions are made….(More)”.

From Hippocrates to Artificial Intelligence: Moving Towards a Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carlos María Galmarini at Open Mind: “Modern medicine is based upon the work of Hippocrates and his disciples and is compiled in more than 70 books comprising the Hippocratic body of work. In its essence, these writings declare that any illness originates with natural causes. Therefore, medicine must be based on detailed observation, reason, and experience in order to establish a diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. The Hippocratic tradition stresses the importance of the symptoms and the clinical exam. As a result, medicine abandoned superstition and the magic performed by priest-doctors, and it was transformed into a real, experience-based science….

A complementary combination of both intelligences (human and artificial) could help overcome the other’s shortcomings and limitations. As we incorporate intelligent technologies into medical processes, a new, more powerful form of collaboration will emerge. Analogous to the past when the automation of human tasks completely changed the known world and ignited an evolution in the offering of products and services, the combination of human and artificial intelligence will create a new type of collective intelligence capable of building more efficient organizations, and in the healthcare industry, it will be able to solve problems that until now have been unfathomable to the human mind alone.

Finally, it is worth remembering that fact based sciences are divided into natural and human disciplines. Medicine occupies a special place, straddling both. It can be difficult to establish the similarities between a doctor who works, for example, with rules defined by specific clinical trials and a traditional family practitioner. The former would be more related to a natural science, and the latter with a more human science – “the art of medicine.”

The combination of human and artificial intelligence in a new type of collective intelligence will enable doctors themselves to be a combination of the two. In other words, the art of medicine – human science – based on the analysis of big data – natural science. A new collective intelligence working on behalf of a wiser medicine….(More)”.

Smart Cities in Application: Healthcare, Policy, and Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Stan McClellan: “This book explores categories of applications and driving factors surrounding the Smart City phenomenon. The contributing authors provide perspective on the Smart Cities, covering numerous applications and classes of applications. The book uses a top-down exploration of the driving factors in Smart Cities, by including focal areas including “Smart Healthcare,” “Public Safety & Policy Issues,” and “Science, Technology, & Innovation.”  Contributors have direct and substantive experience with important aspects of Smart Cities and discuss issues with technologies & standards, roadblocks to implementation, innovations that create new opportunities, and other factors relevant to emerging Smart City infrastructures….(More)”.

The Power of Global Performance Indicators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue of International Organization by
Judith G. Kelley and Beth A. Simmons: “In recent decades, IGOs, NGOs, private firms and even states have begun to regularly package and distribute information on the relative performance of states. From the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index to the Financial Action Task Force blacklist, global performance indicators (GPIs) are increasingly deployed to influence governance globally. We argue that GPIs derive influence from their ability to frame issues, extend the authority of the creator, and — most importantly — to invoke recurrent comparison that stimulates governments’ concerns for their own and their country’s reputation. Their public and ongoing ratings and rankings of states are particularly adept at capturing attention not only at elite policy levels but also among other domestic and transnational actors. GPIs thus raise new questions for research on politics and governance globally. What are the social and political effects of this form of information on discourse, policies and behavior? What types of actors can effectively wield GPIs and on what types of issues? In this symposium introduction, we define GPIs, describe their rise, and theorize and discuss these questions in light of the findings of the symposium contributions…(More)”.

Stop Surveillance Humanitarianism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Latonero at The New York Times: “A standoff between the United Nations World Food Program and Houthi rebels in control of the capital region is threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Yemen.

Alarmed by reports that food is being diverted to support the rebels, the aid program is demanding that Houthi officials allow them to deploy biometric technologies like iris scans and digital fingerprints to monitor suspected fraud during food distribution.

The Houthis have reportedly blocked food delivery, painting the biometric effort as an intelligence operation, and have demanded access to the personal data on beneficiaries of the aid. The impasse led the aid organization to the decision last month to suspend food aid to parts of the starving population — once thought of as a last resort — unless the Houthis allow biometrics.

With program officials saying their staff is prevented from doing its essential jobs, turning to a technological solution is tempting. But biometrics deployed in crises can lead to a form of surveillance humanitarianism that can exacerbate risks to privacy and security.

By surveillance humanitarianism, I mean the enormous data collection systems deployed by aid organizations that inadvertently increase the vulnerability of people in urgent need….(More)”.

Betting on biometrics to boost child vaccination rates

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Parker at The New Humanitarian: “Thousands of children between the ages of one and five are due to be fingerprinted in Bangladesh and Tanzania in the largest biometric scheme of its kind ever attempted, the Geneva-based vaccine agency, Gavi, announced recently.

Although the scheme includes data protection safeguards – and its sponsors are cautious not to promise immediate benefits – it is emerging during a widening debate on data protection, technology ethics, and the risks and benefits of biometric ID in development and humanitarian aid.

Gavi, a global vaccine provider, is teaming up with Japanese and British partners in the venture. It is the first time such a trial has been done on this scale, according to Gavi spokesperson James Fulker.

Being able to track a child’s attendance at vaccination centres, and replace “very unreliable” paper-based records, can help target the 20 million children who are estimated to miss key vaccinations, most in poor or remote communities, Fulker said.

Up to 20,000 children will have their fingerprints taken and linked to their records in existing health projects. That collection effort will be managed by Simprints, a UK-based not-for-profit enterprise specialising in biometric technology in international development, according to Christine Kim, the company’s head of strategic partnerships….

Ethics and legal safeguards

Kim said Simprints would apply data protection standards equivalent to the EU’s General Directive on Privacy Regulation (GDPR), even if national legislation did not demand it. Families could opt out without any penalties, and informed consent would apply to any data gathering. She added that the fieldwork would be approved by national governments, and oversight would also come from institutional review boards at universities in the two countries.

Fulker said Gavi had also commissioned a third-party review to verify Simprints’ data protection and security methods.

For critics of biometrics use in humanitarian settings, however, any such plan raises red flags….

Data protection analysts have long been arguing that gathering digital ID and biometric data carries particular risks for vulnerable groups who face conflict or oppression: their data could be shared or leaked to hostile parties who could use it to target them.

In a recent commentary on biometrics and aid, Linda Raftree told The New Humanitarian that “the greatest burden and risk lies with the most vulnerable, whereas the benefits accrue to [aid] agencies.”

And during a panel discussion on “Digital Do No Harm” held last year in Berlin, humanitarian professionals and data experts discussed a range of threats and unintended consequences of new technologies, noting that they are as yet hard to predict….(More)”.

Blockchain and Public Record Keeping: Of Temples, Prisons, and the (Re)Configuration of Power

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Victoria L. Lemieux: “This paper discusses blockchain technology as a public record keeping system, linking record keeping to power of authority, veneration (temples), and control (prisons) that configure and reconfigure social, economic, and political relations. It discusses blockchain technology as being constructed as a mechanism to counter institutions and social actors that currently hold power, but whom are nowadays often viewed with mistrust. It explores claims for blockchain as a record keeping force of resistance to those powers using an archival theoretic analytic lens. The paper evaluates claims that blockchain technology can support the creation and preservation of trustworthy records able to serve as alternative sources of evidence of rights, entitlements and actions with the potential to unseat the institutional power of the nation-state….(More)”.

In the Mood for Democracy? Democratic Support as Thermostatic Opinion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christopher Claassen: “Public support has long been thought crucial for the survival of democracy. Existing research has argued that democracy moreover appears to create its own demand: the presence of a democratic system coupled with the passage of time produces a public who supports democracy. Using new panel measures of democratic mood varying over 135 countries and up to 30 years, this paper finds little evidence for such a positive feedback effect of democracy on support. Instead, it demonstrates a thermostatic effect: increases in democracy depress democratic mood, while decreases cheer it. Moreover, it is increases in the liberal, counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, not the majoritarian, electoral aspects that provoke this backlash from citizens. These novel results challenge existing research on support for democracy, but also reconcile this research with the literature on macro-opinion….(More)”.

Truth and Consequences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sophia Rosenfeld at The Hedgehog Review: “Conventional wisdom has it that for democracy to work, it is essential that we—the citizens—agree in some minimal way about what reality looks like. We are not, of course, all required to think the same way about big questions, or believe the same things, or hold the same values; in fact, it is expected that we won’t. But somehow or other, we need to have acquired some very basic, shared understanding about what causes what, what’s broadly desirable, what’s dangerous, and how to characterize what’s already happened.

Some social scientists call this “public knowledge.” Some, more cynically, call it “serviceable truth” to emphasize its contingent, socially constructed quality. Either way, it is the foundation on which democratic politics—in which no one person or institution has sole authority to determine what’s what and all claims are ultimately revisable—is supposed to rest. It is also imagined to be one of the most exalted products of the democratic process. And to a certain degree, this peculiar, messy version of truth has held its own in modern liberal democracies, including the United States, for most of their history.

Lately, though, even this low-level kind of consensus has come to seem elusive. The issue is not just professional spinners talking about “alternative facts” or the current US president bending the truth and spreading conspiracy theories at every turn, from mass rallies to Twitter rants. The deeper problem stems from the growing sense we all have that, today, even hard evidence of the kind that used to settle arguments about factual questions won’t persuade people whose political commitments have already led them to the opposite conclusion. Rather, citizens now belong to “epistemic tribes”: One person’s truth is another’s hoax or lie. Just look at how differently those of different political leanings interpret the evidence of global warming or the conclusions of the Mueller Report on Russian involvement in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Moreover, many of those same people are also now convinced that the boundaries between truth and untruth are, in the end, as subjective as everything else. It is all a matter of perception and spin; nothing is immune, and it doesn’t really matter.

Headed for a Cliff

So what’s happened? Why has assent on even basic factual claims (beyond logically demonstrable ones, like 2 + 2 = 4) become so hard to achieve? Or, to put it slightly differently, why are we—meaning people of varied political persuasions—having so much trouble lately arriving at any broadly shared sense of the world beyond ourselves, and, even more, any consensus on which institutions, methods, or people to trust to get us there? And why, ultimately, do so many of us seem simply to have given up on the possibility of finding some truths in common?

These are questions that seem especially loaded precisely because of the traditionally close conceptual and historical relationship between truth and democracy as social values….(More)”.