In design as in politics: who decides?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joan Subirats at Open Democracy: “Can we keep on organizing decision-making processes as we used to do in the age of the Enlightenment or in a scenario where information only flows from top to bottom? Designers and creators have been questioning this for a long time now, seeking to go beyond the user paradigm which has determined innovation processes in recent decades. Today, their concern is how to put people at the center of new experiences…..

Today, in the world of design, emphasis is being placed on the fact that all those who will want or will be able to use a product or service should be incorporated into the creative process itself. On the other hand, science has shown that we cannot imagine designing a building or constructing an infrastructure without taking into account the materials we use, the impact on the surroundings, and the effects on the environment and on the functioning of the city where the new building is located or the new service is to come into operation. The building, the infrastructure “participates” in a complex environment than cannot be ignored. The design of any object or activity is not immune to all that is around it and to the materials used to build or imagine it – nor is its destruction or disappearance. The design of “things” cannot be only a framework in which participants are to be assumed as data, the design itself has to be “participated”.

In this sense, designers cannot avoid being participants, just as politicians cannot avoid being citizens. In the same way as you cannot complain about a traffic jam where you find yourself stuck as if the whole problem was due to others, for the simple reason that you are part of this traffic and this jam. We need design and policy-making systems that do not have designers sitting in a bubble, seemingly immune to what goes on outside. We need political decision-making systems that invite-incite-engage people, rather than processes that ask people to participate in what others have thought needs to be done. And, surely, to do this, we need a little more humility when it comes to doing politics – and this implies changing power structures and the distribution of responsibilities. In the face of ever more complex problems, with more structural implications and more heterogeneous interests, we need a reconfiguration and an expansion of collective decision-making mechanisms…. (More) (Español).”

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Aeron Davis: “...argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy.

With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Covering areas of international public concern, these polemical, accessible texts include reflections on the fate of schools and education, the takeover of public institutions by private interests, and the corruption of news and information in the financial sector. They cover the compromised Greek media during recent EU negotiations, the role played by media and political elites in the Irish property bubble, the compromising of government policy by corporate interests in the United States and Korea, and the squeeze on public service media in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.

Individually and collectively, these pieces spell out the importance of maintaining public, shared knowledge in all its forms, and offer a rallying cry for doing so, asserting the need for strong public, financial, and regulatory support….(More)”

How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Oren Etzioni in the New York Times: “…we should regulate the tangible impact of A.I. systems (for example, the safety of autonomous vehicles) rather than trying to define and rein in the amorphous and rapidly developing field of A.I.

I propose three rules for artificial intelligence systems that are inspired by, yet develop further, the “three laws of robotics” that the writer Isaac Asimov introduced in 1942: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the previous law; and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the previous two laws.

These three laws are elegant but ambiguous: What, exactly, constitutes harm when it comes to A.I.? I suggest a more concrete basis for avoiding A.I. harm, based on three rules of my own.

First, an A.I. system must be subject to the full gamut of laws that apply to its human operator. This rule would cover private, corporate and government systems. We don’t want A.I. to engage in cyberbullying, stock manipulation or terrorist threats; we don’t want the F.B.I. to release A.I. systems that entrap people into committing crimes. We don’t want autonomous vehicles that drive through red lights, or worse, A.I. weapons that violate international treaties.

Our common law should be amended so that we can’t claim that our A.I. system did something that we couldn’t understand or anticipate. Simply put, “My A.I. did it” should not excuse illegal behavior.

My second rule is that an A.I. system must clearly disclose that it is not human. As we have seen in the case of bots — computer programs that can engage in increasingly sophisticated dialogue with real people — society needs assurances that A.I. systems are clearly labeled as such. In 2016, a bot known as Jill Watson, which served as a teaching assistant for an online course at Georgia Tech, fooled students into thinking it was human. A more serious example is the widespread use of pro-Trump political bots on social media in the days leading up to the 2016 elections, according to researchers at Oxford….

My third rule is that an A.I. system cannot retain or disclose confidential information without explicit approval from the source of that information…(More)”

The Role of Evidence in Politics: Motivated Reasoning and Persuasion among Politicians

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Baekgaard et al in British Journal of Political Science: “Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided….(More)“.

Bridging Governments’ Borders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robyn Scott & Lisa Witter at SSIR: “…Our research found that “disconnection” falls into five, negatively reinforcing categories in the public sector; a closer look at these categories may help policy makers see the challenge before them more clearly:

1. Disconnected Governments

There is a truism in politics and government that all policy is local and context-dependent. Whether this was ever an accurate statement is questionable; it is certainly no longer. While all policy must ultimately be customized for local conditions, it absurd to assume there is little or nothing to learn from other countries. Three trends, in fact, indicate that solutions will become increasingly fungible between countries…..

2. Disconnected Issues

What climate change policy can endure without a job-creation strategy? What sensible criminal justice reform does not consider education? Yet even within countries, departments and their employees often remain as foreign to each other as do nations….

3. Disconnected Public Servants

The isolation of governments, and of government departments, is caused by and reinforces the isolation of people working in government, who have few incentives—and plenty of disincentives—to share what they are working on…..

4. Disconnected Citizens

…There are areas of increasingly visible progress in bridging the disconnections of government, citizen engagement being one. We’re still in the early stages, but private sector fashions such as human-centered design and design thinking have become government buzzwords. And platforms enabling new types of citizen engagement—from participatory budgeting to apps that people use to report potholes—are increasingly popping up around the world…..

5. Disconnected Ideas

According to the World Bank’s own data, one third of its reports are never read, even once. Foundations and academia pour tens of millions of dollars into policy research with few targeted channels to reach policymakers; they also tend to produce and deliver information in formats that policymakers don’t find useful. People in government, like everyone else, are frequently on their mobile phones, and short of time….(More)”

 

Is it too late to build a better world?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Keith Burnett at Campaign for Social Science: “The greatest challenge we face is to use our intellects to guide our actions in making the world a better place for us and our fellow human beings.

This is no easy task and its history is littered with false dawns and doctrines. You would have to be blind to the lessons of the past to fail to appreciate the awful impact that delusional ideas have had on mankind. Some of the worst are those meant to save us.

There are some who take this as a warning against intervention at all, who say it can never be done and shouldn’t even be attempted. That the forces of nature blow winds in society that we can never tame. That we are bound to suffer like a small ship in a stormy sea.

They might be right, but it would be the utmost dereliction of academia to give up on this quest. And in any case, I don’t believe it is true. These forces may be there, but there is much we can do, a lot of it deeply practical to make the journey more comfortable and so we even end up in the right port.

Of course, there are those who believe we academics simply don’t care. That scholarship is happiest at a distance from messy, contradictory humanity and prefers in its detached world of conferences and publications. That we are content to analyse rather than heal.

Well I can tell you that my social sciences colleagues at Sheffield are not content in an ivory tower and they never have been. They feel the challenges of our world as keenly as any. And they know if we ever needed understanding, and a vision of what society could be, we need it now.

I am confident they are not alone and, as a scientist all my life, it has become apparent to me that, to translate insights into change, we must frequently overcome barriers of perception and culture, of politics and prejudice. Our great challenges are not only technical but matters of education and economics. Our barriers those of opportunity, power and purpose.

If we want solutions to reach those who desperately need them, we must understand how to take the word and make it flesh. Ideas alone are not enough, they come to life through people. They need money, armies of changed opinion.

If we don’t do this work, the risk is truly terrible – that the armies and the power, the public opinion and votes, will be led by ignorance and profit. As the ancient Greeks knew, a demos could only function when citizens could grasp the consequences of their choices.

Perhaps we had forgotten; thought ‘it can’t happen here’? If so, this year has been a stark reminder of why we dare not be complacent. For who would deny the great political lessons we are almost choking on as we see Brexit evolve from fringe populist movement to a force that is shaking us to pieces? Who will have failed to understand, in the frustrations of Trump, the value of a constitution designed to protect citizens against the ravages of a tyrant?

Why do the social sciences matter? Just look around us. Who would deny the need for new ways to organise our industry and our economy as real incomes fade? Who would deny that we need a society which is able to sensibly regulate against the depredations of the unscrupulous landlord?

Who would deny the need to understand how to better educate and train our youth?

We are engaged in a battle for society, and the fronts are many and difficult. Can we hope to build a society that will look after the stranger in its midst? Is social justice a chimera?

Is there anything to be done?

To this we answer, yes. But we must do more than study, we must find the gears which will ensure what we discover can be absorbed by a society than needs to act with understanding…(More)”

The Politics of Evidence: From evidence-based policy to the good governance of evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

(Open Access) Book by Justin Parkhurst: “There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ‘improved’ use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective.

Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’ can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias – the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue bias in how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns.

Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas.

Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes ‘good evidence for policy’, as well as the ‘good use of evidence’ within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the ‘good governance of evidence’ – a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served…(More)”

Responding to problems: actions are rewarded, regardless of the outcome

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Asmus Leth Olsen at Public Management Review: “When faced with a problem, policymakers have a choice of action or inaction. Psychological research shows varying results on how individuals evaluate (in)actions conditional on the subsequent outcome. I replicate, generalize, and extend this research into a public management setting with two independent experiments embedded in a nationally representative sample of Danish citizens (n = 2,007).

Both experiments show that actions are evaluated more positively than inactions – regardless of the outcome. This finding runs contrary to the inaction (or omission) bias but is consistent with evidence on a “norm of action”, in response to poor performance in political–administrative settings….(More)”

Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard: “Cyber troops are government, military or political party teams committed to manipulating public opinion over social media. In this working paper, we report on specific organizations created, often with public money, to help define and manage what is in the best interest of the public. We compare such organizations across 28 countries, and inventory them according to the kinds of messages, valences and communication strategies used. We catalogue their organizationalforms and evaluate their capacities in terms of budgets and staffing. This working paper summarizes the findings of the first comprehensive inventory of the major organizations behind social media manipulation. We find that cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon. Many different countries employ significant numbers of people and resources to manage and manipulate public opinion online, sometimes targeting domestic audiences and sometimes targeting foreign publics.

  •  The earliest reports of organized social media manipulation emerged in 2010, and by 2017 there are details on such organizations in 28 countries.
  • Looking across the 28 countries, every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations, while only a few of them target foreign publics. In contrast, almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics, while political‐party‐supported campaigns target domestic voters. 
  • Authoritarian regimes are not the only or even the best at organized social media manipulation. The earliest reports of government involvement in nudging public opinion involve democracies, and new innovations in political communication technologies often come from political parties and arise during high‐profile elections.
  • Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns….(More)”

Democracy Promotion: An Objective of U.S. Foreign Assistance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report by Congressional Research Service: “Promoting democratic institutions, processes, and values has long been a U.S. foreign policy objective, though the priority given to this objective has been inconsistent. World events, competing priorities, and political change within the United States all shape the attention and resources provided to democracy promotion efforts and influence whether such efforts focus on supporting fair elections abroad, strengthening civil society, promoting rule of law and human rights, or other aspects of democracy promotion.

Proponents of democracy promotion often assert that such efforts are essential to global development and U.S. security because stable democracies tend to have better economic growth and stronger protection of human rights, and are less likely to go to war with one another. Critics contend that U.S. relations with foreign countries should focus exclusively on U.S. interests and stability in the world order. U.S. interest in global stability, regardless of the democratic nature of national political systems, could discourage U.S. support for democratic transitions—the implementation of which is uncertain and may lead to more, rather than less, instability.

Funding for democracy promotion assistance is deeply integrated into U.S. foreign policy institutions. More than $2 billion annually has been allocated from foreign assistance funds over the past decade for democracy promotion activities managed by the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other entities. Programs promoting good governance (characterized by participation, transparency, accountability, effectiveness, and equity), rule of law, and promotion of human rights have typically received the largest share of this funding in contrast to lower funding to promote electoral processes and political competition. In recent years, increasing restrictions imposed by some foreign governments on civil society organizations have resulted in an increased emphasis in democracy promotion assistance for strengthening civil society.

Despite bipartisan support for the general concept of democracy promotion, policy debates in the 115th Congress continue to question the consistency, effectiveness, and appropriateness of such foreign assistance. With the Trump Administration indicating that democracy and human rights might not be a top foreign policy priority, advocates in Congress may be challenged to find common ground with the Administration on this issue.

As part of its budget and oversight responsibilities, the 115th Congress may consider the impact of the Trump Administration’s requested FY2018 foreign assistance spending cuts on U.S. democracy promotion assistance, review the effectiveness of democracy promotion activities, evaluate the various channels available for democracy promotion, and consider where democracy promotion ranks among a wide range of foreign policy and budget priorities….(More)”.