ChatGPT reminds us why good questions matter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Anil Ananthaswamy: “Over 100 million people used ChatGPT in January alone, according to one estimate, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. By producing resumes, essays, jokes and even poetry in response to prompts, the software brings into focus not just language models’ arresting power, but the importance of framing our questions correctly.

To that end, a few years ago I initiated the 100 Questions Initiative, which seeks to catalyse a cultural shift in the way we leverage data and develop scientific insights. The project aims not only to generate new questions, but also reimagine the process of asking them…

As a species and a society, we tend to look for answers. Answers appear to provide a sense of clarity and certainty, and can help guide our actions and policy decisions. Yet any answer represents a provisional end-stage of a process that begins with questions – and often can generate more questions. Einstein drew attention to the critical importance of how questions are framed, which can often determine (or at least play a significant role in determining) the answers we ultimately reach. Frame a question differently and one might reach a different answer. Yet as a society we undervalue the act of questioning – who formulates questions, how they do so, the impact they have on what we investigate, and on the decisions we make. Nor do we pay sufficient attention to whether the answers are in fact addressing the questions initially posed…(More)”.

Americans Don’t Understand What Companies Can Do With Their Personal Data — and That’s a Problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by the Annenberg School for Communications: “Have you ever had the experience of browsing for an item online, only to then see ads for it everywhere? Or watching a TV program, and suddenly your phone shows you an ad related to the topic? Marketers clearly know a lot about us, but the extent of what they know, how they know it, and what they’re legally allowed to know can feel awfully murky. 

In a new report, “Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data,” researchers asked a nationally representative group of more than 2,000 Americans to answer a set of questions about digital marketing policies and how companies can and should use their personal data. Their aim was to determine if current “informed consent” practices are working online. 

They found that the great majority of Americans don’t understand the fundamentals of internet marketing practices and policies, and that many feel incapable of consenting to how companies use their data. As a result, the researchers say, Americans can’t truly give informed consent to digital data collection.

The survey revealed that 56% of American adults don’t understand the term “privacy policy,” often believing it means that a company won’t share their data with third parties without permission. In actual fact, many of these policies state that a company can share or sell any data it gathers about site visitors with other websites or companies.

Perhaps because so many Americans feel that internet privacy feels impossible to comprehend — with “opting-out” or “opting-in,” biometrics, and VPNs — they don’t trust what is being done with their digital data. Eighty percent of Americans believe that what companies know about them can cause them harm.

“People don’t feel that they have the ability to protect their data online — even if they want to,” says lead researcher Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania….(More)”

Letting the public decide is key to Big Tech regulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Rana Foroohar: “Complexity is often used to obfuscate. Industries like finance, pharmaceuticals and particularly technology are rife with examples. Just as programmers can encrypt code or strip out metadata to protect the workings of their intellectual property, so insiders — from technologists to economists to lawyers — can defend their business models by using industry jargon and Byzantine explanations of simple concepts in order to obscure things they may not want the public to understand.

That’s why it’s so important that in its second major antitrust case filed against Google, the US Department of Justice last month asked not only that the company break up its advertising business, but that a jury of the people decide whether it must do so. This is extremely unusual for antitrust cases, which are usually decided by a judge.

It is a risky move, since it means that the DoJ’s antitrust division head, Jonathan Kanter, will have to deconstruct the online advertising auction business for lay people. But it’s also quite smart. The federal judges who hear such complex antitrust cases tend to be older, conservative types who are historically more likely to align themselves with large corporations.

As one legal scholar pointed out to me, such judges are reluctant to be seen as people who don’t understand complexity, even when it’s in a realm far outside their own. This may make them more likely to agree with the arguments put forward by expert witnesses — the Nobel laureates who construct auction models, for example — than average people who are willing to admit they simply don’t get it…

There are, of course, risks to policy by populism. Look at Britain’s departure from the EU after the 2016 referendum, which has left the country poorer. But that’s how democracy works. Allowing important decisions over key issues like corporate power and the rules of surveillance capitalism to be made by technocrats behind closed doors also carries dangers. The justice department is quite right that ordinary people should be able to hear the arguments…(More)”.

Conspiracy Theory: On Certain Misconceptions About the Uses of Behavioral Science in Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cass R. Sunstein: “In some circles, there is a misconception that within government, the only or principal uses of behavioral science consist of efforts to nudge individual behavior (sometimes described, pejoratively and unfairly, as “tweaks”). Nothing could be further from the truth. Behavioral science has been used, and is being used, to help inform large-scale reforms, including mandates and bans directed at companies (as, for example, in the cases of fuel-economy mandates and energy efficiency mandates). Behavioral science has been used, and is being used, to help inform taxes and subsidies (as, for example, in the cases of cigarette taxes, taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, and subsides for electric cars). Behavioral science has been used, and is being used, to help inform nudges imposed on companies (with such goals as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving occupational safety, and protecting personal privacy). Some important interventions are indeed aimed at individuals (as with fuel economy labels, nutrition labels, and calorie labels, and automatic enrollment in savings plans); sometimes such interventions have significant positive effects, and there is no evidence that they make more aggressive reforms less likely. It is preposterous to suggest that choice-preserving interventions, such as nudges, “crowd out” more aggressive approaches…(More)”.

Democracy Index 2022

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Economist Intelligence Report: “The average global index score stagnated in 2022. Despite expectations of a rebound after the lifting of pandemic-related restrictions, the score was almost unchanged, at 5.29 (on a 0-10 scale), compared with 5.28 in 2021. The positive effect of the restoration of individual freedoms was cancelled out by negative developments globally. The scores of more than half of the countries measured by the index either stagnated or declined. Western Europe was a positive outlier, being the only region whose score returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Alongside an explanation of the changes in the global rankings and an in-depth regional review, the latest edition of EIU’s Democracy Index report explores why democracy failed in Russia, how this led to the current war and why democracy in Ukraine is tied to its fight for sovereignty…(More)”.

Citizens’ assemblies: are they the future of democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Eva Talmadge: “…Citizens’ assemblies, a phenomenon that is gaining in popularity around the globe, date back to ancient Athens, where legislative panels, courts and councils were chosen via random selection. In a practice known as sortition, Greek citizens over the age of 30 were enlisted to debate governmental matters from city finances to military strategy. More recently, citizens’ assemblies have convened to hammer out solutions to such issues as homelessness in Los Angeles, the allocation of a $5bn budget in Melbourne, Australia, and the longstanding ban on abortion in Ireland.

In 2017, after meeting over the course of five weekends for deliberation, an Irish citizens’ assembly came up with a recommendation to legalize the procedure. Sixty-six per cent of Irish voters later approved the referendum, ending more than four decades of fruitless political debate.

Modern citizens’ assemblies are typically convened by legislative bodies, which work alongside non-profit groups to reach out to large numbers of citizens at random – sending letters like the one Bajwa received in the mail – then sorting the respondents who express interest according to social and economic factors. The result is a group of people who are randomly selected and reflect the demographics of the population as a whole.

Sortition, a word that might evoke the next chapter in the Hunger Games franchise, offers a revived spin on democracy. Instead of leaving the decision-making up to elected officials, citizens’ assemblies can offer a special interests-free alternative to politics as we know it.

The system is not unlike jury duty. With facilitators in place to provide background information on the issue at hand and encourage everyone’s participation, the group meets over the course of several days to learn about a problem, hear from a range of stakeholders and experts, and come up with recommendations for new legislation…(More)”

Because Data Can’t Speak for Itself

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“A Practical Guide to Telling Persuasive Policy Stories” by David Chrisinger and Lauren Brodsky: “People with important evidence-based ideas often struggle to translate data into stories their readers can relate to and understand. And if leaders can’t communicate well to their audience, they will not be able to make important changes in the world.

Why do some evidence-based ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Because Data Can’t Speak for Itself, accomplished educators and writers David Chrisinger and Lauren Brodsky tackle these questions head-on. They reveal the parts and functions of effective data-driven stories and explain myriad ways to turn your data dump into a narrative that can inform, persuade, and inspire action.

Chrisinger and Brodsky show that convincing data-driven stories draw their power from the same three traits, which they call people, purpose, and persistence. Writers need to find the real people behind the numbers and share their stories. At the same time, they need to remember their own purpose and be honest about what data says—and, just as importantly, what it does not.

Compelling and concise, this fast-paced tour of success stories—and several failures—includes examples on topics such as COVID-19, public diplomacy, and criminal justice…(More)”

Big Data and Public Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rebecca Moody and Victor Bekkers: “This book provides a comprehensive overview of how the course, content and outcome of policy making is affected by big data. It scrutinises the notion that big and open data makes policymaking a more rational process, in which policy makers are able to predict, assess and evaluate societal problems. It also examines how policy makers deal with big data, the problems and limitations they face, and how big data shapes policymaking on the ground. The book considers big data from various perspectives, not just the political, but also the technological, legal, institutional and ethical dimensions. The potential of big data use in the public sector is also assessed, as well as the risks and dangers this might pose. Through several extended case studies, it demonstrates the dynamics of big data and public policy. Offering a holistic approach to the study of big data, this book will appeal to students and scholars of public policy, public administration and data science, as well as those interested in governance and politics…(More)”.

Measuring Partial Democracies: Rules and their Implementation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Debarati Basu,  Shabana Mitra &  Archana Purohit: “This paper proposes a new index that focuses on capturing the extent of democracy in a country using not only the existence of rules but also the extent of their implementation. The measure, based on the axiomatically robust framework of (Alkire and Foster, J Public Econ 95:476–487, 2011), is able to moderate the existence of democratic rules by their actual implementation. By doing this we have a meaningful way of capturing the notion of a partial democracy within a continuum between non-democratic and democratic, separating out situations when the rules exist but are not implemented well. We construct our index using V-Dem data from 1900 to 2010 for over 100 countries to measure the process of democratization across the world. Our results show that we can track the progress in democratization, even when the regime remains either a democracy or an autarchy. This is the notion of partial democracy that our implementation-based index measures through a wide-based index that is consistent, replicable, extendable, easy to interpret, and more nuanced in its ability to capture the essence of democracy…(More)”.

Prophets at a Tangent: How Art Shapes Social Imagination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “This Element asks if the arts can help us imagine a better future society and economy, without deep social gulfs or ecological harm. It argues that at their best, the arts open up new ways of seeing and thinking. They can warn and prompt and connect us to a bigger sense of what we could be. But artists have lost their role as gods and prophets, partly as an effect of digital technologies and the ubiquity of artistic production, and partly as an effect of shifting values. Few recent books, films, artworks or exhibitions have helped us imagine how our world could solve its problems or how it might be better a generation or more from now. This Element argues that artists work best not as prophets of a new society but rather as ‘prophets at a tangent’….(More)”.