Against longtermism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Phil Torres: “The point is that longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today. But to understand the nature of the beast, we need to first dissect it, examining its anatomical features and physiological functions….

Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75 per cent for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a small blip – the equivalent of a 90-year-old man having stubbed his toe when he was two.

Bostrom’s argument is that ‘a non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilisation is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback.’ It might be ‘a giant massacre for man’, he adds, but so long as humanity bounces back to fulfil its potential, it will ultimately register as little more than ‘a small misstep for mankind’. Elsewhere, he writes that the worst natural disasters and devastating atrocities in history become almost imperceptible trivialities when seen from this grand perspective. Referring to the two world wars, AIDS and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, he declares that ‘tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things … even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life.’

This way of seeing the world, of assessing the badness of AIDS and the Holocaust, implies that future disasters of the same (non-existential) scope and intensity should also be categorised as ‘mere ripples’. If they don’t pose a direct existential risk, then we ought not to worry much about them, however tragic they might be to individuals. As Bostrom wrote in 2003, ‘priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.’ He reiterated this several years later in arguing that we mustn’t ‘fritter … away’ our finite resources on ‘feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy’ such as alleviating global poverty and reducing animal suffering, since neither threatens our longterm potential, and our longterm potential is what really matters…(More)”.

We need to talk about techie tunnel vision

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Gillian Tett :”Last year, the powerful US data company Palantir filed documents for an initial public offering. Included was a remarkable letter to investors from Alex Karp, the CEO, that is worth remembering now.

“Our society has effectively outsourced the building of software that makes our world possible to a small group of engineers in an isolated corner of the country,” he wrote. “The question is whether we also want to outsource the adjudication of some of the most consequential moral and philosophical questions of our time.”

Karp added, “The engineering elite in Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires.” To put it more bluntly, techies might be brilliant and clever at what they do, but that doesn’t make them qualified to organise our lives. It was a striking statement from someone who is himself an ultra techie and whose company’s extensive military and intelligence links have sparked controversy…

The good news is that people in his position are finally prepared to talk about it. The even better news is that there are experiments under way to combat techie tunnel vision. In Silicon Valley, for instance, Big Tech companies are hiring social scientists. Other innovation hubs show promising signs too. In Canberra, Genevieve Bell, a former vice-president at Intel, has launched a blended social and computer science AI institute. These initiatives aim to blend AI with what I call “anthropological intelligence” — a second type of “AI” that provides a sense of social context.

The bad news is that such initiatives remain modest, and there is still extreme information asymmetry between the engineers and everyone else. What is needed is an army of cultural translators who will fight our tendency to mentally outsource the issues to engineering elites. Maybe tech innovators such as Karp and Schmidt could use some of their vast wealth to fund this….(More)”.

Falling in love with the problem, not the solution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Kyle Novak: “Fall in love with the problem, not your solution.”  It’s a maxim that I first heard spoken a few years ago by USAID’s former Chief Innovation Officer Ann Mei Chang. I’ve found myself frequently reflecting on those words as I’ve been thinking about the challenges of implementing public policy. I spent the past year on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. working as a legislative fellow, funded through a grant to bring scientists to improve evidence-based policymaking within the federal government. I spent much of the year trying to better understand how legislation and oversight work together in context of policy and politics. To learn what makes good public policy, I wanted to understand how to better implement it. Needless to say, I took a course in Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), a framework to manage risk in complex policy challenges by embracing experimentation and “learning through doing.”

Congress primarily uses legislation and budget to control and implement policy initiatives through the federal agencies. Legislation is drafted and introduced by lawmakers with input from constituents, interest groups, and agencies; the Congressional budget is explicitly planned out each year based on input from the agencies; and accountability is built into the process through oversight mechanisms. Congress largely provides the planning and lock-in of “plan and control” management based on majority political party control and congruence with policy priorities of the Administration.  But, it is difficult to successfully implement a plan-and-control approach when political, social, or economic situations are changing.

Take the problem of data privacy and protection. A person’s identity is becoming largely digital. Every day each of us produces almost a gigabyte of information—our location is shared by our mobile phones, our preferences and interpersonal connections are tagged on social media, our purchases analyzed, and our actions recorded on increasingly ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Monetization of this information, often bought and sold through data brokers, enables an invasive and oppressive system that affects all aspects of our lives.  Algorithms mine our data to make decisions about our employment, healthcare, education, credit, and policing. Machine learning and digital redlining skirts protections that prohibit discrimination on basis of race, gender, and religion. Targeted and automated disinformation campaigns suppress fundamental rights of speech and expression. And digital technologies magnify existing inequities. While misuse of personal data has the potential to do incredible harm, responsible use of that data has the power to do incredible good. The challenge of data privacy and protection is one that impacts all of us, our civil liberties, and the foundations of a democratic society.

The success of members of Congress are often measured in the solutions they propose, not the problems that they identify….(More)”

How to Budget for Equity and Drive Lasting Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Andrew Kleine and Josh Inaba: “After George Floyd’s tragic death last year sparked calls to “defund the police,” government leaders across the country looked at all their operations under a new lens of equity. Most importantly, state and local leaders examined ways to invest in equitable services. While it is often said that government budgets are value statements, the past year has revealed that many budgets need to be revisited so that they better demonstrate the values of the people they serve.

To address misalignments between government spending and community values, leaders should focus on budgeting for equity, which has four fundamental facets: prioritizing equity, using data and evidence, budgeting for outcomes and engaging the community in new ways…

Data and evidence are important components of any efforts to address racial equity because they allow governments to pinpoint disparities, establish goals to remedy them and find solutions that work. This means that government leaders should be using data to evaluate not just “How well did we do it?” and “Is anyone better off?” but also consider the question “Is everyone better off?”

Asking “Is everyone better off”? is what led Boston officials to take a deep dive into its sidewalk repair data. Analysts found that because repairs were driven by 311 complaints instead of an objective assessment of need, the sidewalks in poorer, minority neighborhoods were in worse shape than those in wealthier parts of the city. Boston now uses a sidewalk condition index and other need-based factors to prioritize its sidewalk capital program.

Similarly, evidence can help governments address more long-standing inequities such as kindergarten readiness. In Maryland, for example, 60% of white students were ready for kindergarten in 2019 compared with 42% of Black students and 26% of Hispanic students, a readiness gap that has widened in recent years. Although Maryland has acted to expand early childhood education, the root cause of the disparity starts before childbirth, when the health and preparedness of mothers can make or break early childhood outcomes.

Evidence-based upstream interventions, such as Nurse-Family Partnership programs, help improve early childhood educational outcomes by supporting low-income, first-time mothers from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday. Initiatives like these can help to address long-standing inequities, and governments can use clearinghouses, such as Results for America’s Economic Mobility Catalog, to identify evidence-based strategies to address a wide variety of these equity-related gaps…(More)”.

Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age: A Briefing For Potential Research Collaborators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age (TPSDA) is an international collaboration of scholars and practitioners focused on increasing the number of public servants who have the fundamental skills they need to succeed in the digital era. …TPSDA’s primary approach to making social impact is to help educators teach critical new skills to current and future public servants. We do this by developing and sharing open access teaching materials, and by actively teaching and networking with educators who want to deliver better digital era skills to their students, whether in universities or in governments.

Thus far we have published two key sets of materials, which are available free of charge on our website:

  • A set of Digital Era Competencies, describing the minimum capabilities all public services leaders now need to have.
  • A full syllabus developed for use by MPP and MPA lecturers, professors and program directors. This syllabus has already been translated into German, and is now being translated into Spanish, by members of our community….

The content of TPSDA’s competencies and syllabus is largely based on a set of hypotheses about the skills and knowledge that public servants need for the digital age. These hypotheses emerge from a sort of modern craft tradition: they reflect accepted best practice in leading digital era workplaces, and have been largely validated in the private sector….(More)”.

Frontiers of inclusive innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UN-ESCAP: “Science, technology and innovation (STI) can increase the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of efforts to meet the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The successful adoption of existing innovations has enabled many economies to sustain economic growth. Innovation can expand access to education and health-care services. Technologies, such as those supporting renewable energy, are also providing options for more environmentally sustainable development paths.

Nevertheless, STI have exacerbated inequalities and created new types of social divides and environmental hazards, establishing new and harder to cross frontiers between those that benefit and those that are excluded. In the context of increasing inequalities and a major pandemic, Governments need to look more seriously at harnessing STI for the Sustainable Development Goals and to leave no one behind. This may require shifting the focus from chasing frontier technologies to expanding the frontiers of innovation. Many promising technologies have already arrived. Economic growth does not have to be the only bottom line of innovation activities. Innovative business models are offering pathways that benefit society and the environment as well as the bottom line.

To maximize STI for inclusive and sustainable development, Governments need to intentionally expand the frontiers of innovation. STI policies must seek not just to explore emerging technologies, but, most importantly, to ensure that more citizens, enterprises and countries can benefit from such technologies and innovations.CH1

This report on Frontiers of Inclusive Innovation: Formulating technology and innovation policies that leave no one behind highlights the opportunities and challenges that policymakers and development partners have to expand the frontiers of inclusive innovation. When inclusion is the next frontier of technology, STI policies are designed differently.

They are designed with broader objectives than just economic growth, with social development and sustainable economies in mind; and they are inclusive in terms of aspiring to enable everyone to benefit from – and participate in – innovative activities.

Governments can add an inclusive lens to STI policies by considering the following questions:

   1. Do the overall aims of innovation policy involve more than economic growth? 

   2. Whose needs are being met?

   3. Who participates in innovation?

   4. Who sets priorities, and how are the outcomes of innovation managed?…(More)”

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Meghan O’Gieblyn: “For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes’s division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking.

Meghan O’Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering….(More)”.

Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rajesh Veeraraghavan: “How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. In Patching Development, Rajesh Veeraraghavan presents an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines NREGA’s implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. He finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. “Patching development” is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions and technology is intricate, fluid and highly situated. A highly original account with global significance, this book casts new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs….(More)”.

International Network on Digital Self Determination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Data is changing how we live and engage with and within our societies and our economies. As our digital footprints grow, how do we re-imagine ourselves in the digital world? How will we be able to determine the data-driven decisions that impact us?

Digital self-determination offers a unique way of understanding where we (can) live in the digital space – how we manage our social media environments, our interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies, how we access and operate our personal data, and the ways in which we can have a say about mass data sharing.

Through this network, we aim to study and design ways to engage in trustworthy data spaces and ensure human centric approaches. We recognize an urgent need to ensure people’s digital self-determination so that ‘humans in the loop’ is not just a catch-phrase but a lived experience both at the individual and societal level….(More)”.

Developing indicators to support the implementation of education policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Across OECD countries, the increasing demand for evidence-based policy making has further led governments to design policies jointly with clear measurable objectives, and to define relevant indicators to monitor their achievement. This paper discusses the importance of such indicators in supporting the implementation of education policies.

Building on the OECD education policy implementation framework, the paper reviews the role of indicators along each of the dimensions of the framework, namely smart policy design, inclusive stakeholder engagement, and conducive environment. It draws some lessons to improve the contribution of indicators to the implementation of education policies, while taking into account some of their perennial challenges pertaining to the unintended effects of accountability. This paper aims to provide insights to policy makers and various education stakeholders, to initiate a discussion on the use and misuse of indicators in education, and to guide future actions towards a better contribution of indicators to education policy implementation…..(More)”.