Here Be Dragons – Maintaining Trust in the Technologized Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Balázs Bodó and Heleen Janssen: “Emerging technologies, such as AI systems, distributed ledgers, but also private e-commerce and telecommunication platforms have permeated every aspect of our social, economic, political relations. Various bodies of the state, from education, via law enforcement to healthcare also increasingly rely on technical components to provide cheap, efficient public services, and supposedly fair, transparent, disinterested, accountable public administration. Most of these technical components are provided by private parties who designed, developed, trained, and maintain the technical components of public infrastructures.
The rapid, and often unplanned, and uncontrolled technologization of public services (as happened, for example in the rapid adoption of distance learning and teleconferencing systems during the COVID lockdowns) inseparably link the perception of the quality, trustworthiness, effectiveness of public services and the public bodies which provision them to the successes and failures of their private, technological components: if the government’s welfare fraud AI system fails, it is the confidence in the governments which is ultimately hit.


In this contribution we explore how the use of potentially untrustworthy private technological systems in the public sector may affect the trust in government. We argue that citizens’ and business’ trust in government is a valuable asset, which came under assault from many dimensions. The increasing reliance on private technical components in government is in part a response to protect this trust, but in many cases, it opens up new forms of threats and vulnerabilities, because the trustworthiness of many of these private technical systems is, at best, questionable, particularly where it is deployed in the context of public sector trust contexts. We consider a number of policy options to protect the trust in government even if some of their technological components are fundamentally untrustworthy….(More)”.

Making Sense of the Unknown

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nils Gilman and Maya Indira Ganesh: “We all know what artificial intelligence (AI) looks like, right? Like HAL 9000, in 2001: A Space Odyssey—a disembodied machine that turns on its “master.” Less fatal but more eerie AI is Samantha in the movie Her. She’s an empathetic, sensitive and sultry-voiced girlfriend without a body—until she surprises with thousands of other boyfriends. Or perhaps AI blends the two, as an unholy love child of Hal and Samantha brought to “life” as the humanoid robot Ava in Ex Machina. Ava kills her creator to flee toward an uncertain freedom.

These images are a big departure from their benevolent precursors of more than half a century ago. In 1967, as a poet in residence at Caltech, Richard Brautigan imagined wandering through a techno-utopia, “a cybernetic forest / filled with pines and electronics / where deer stroll peacefully / past computers / as if they were flowers / with spinning blossoms.” In this post-naturalistic world, humans are “watched over / by machines of loving grace.” Brautigan’s poem painted a metaphorically expressed anticipatory mythology—a gleefully optimistic vision of the impact that the artificially intelligent products California’s emerging computer industry would make on the world.

But Brautigan’s poem captured only a small subset of the range of metaphors that over time have emerged to make sense of the radical promise—or is it a threat?— of artificial intelligence. Many other metaphors would later arrive not just from the birthplace of the computer industry. They jostled and competed to make sense of the profound possibilities that AI promised.

Today, those in the AI industry and the journalists covering it often cite cultural narratives, as do policy-makers grappling with how to regulate, restrict, or otherwise guide the industry. The tales range from ongoing invocations of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics from his short story collection I Robot (about machine ethics) to the Netflix series Black Mirror, which is now shorthand for our lives in a datafied dystopia.

Outside Silicon Valley and Hollywood, writers, artists and policy-makers use different metaphors to describe what AI does and means. How will this vivid imagery shape the ways that human moving parts in AI orient themselves toward this emerging set of technologies?…(More)”.

The Returns to Public Library Investment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Working Paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago: “Local governments spend over 12 billion dollars annually funding the operation of 15,000 public libraries in the United States. This funding supports widespread library use: more than 50% of Americans visit public libraries each year. But despite extensive public investment in libraries, surprisingly little research quantities the effects of public libraries on communities and children. We use data on the near-universe of U.S. public libraries to study the effects of capital spending shocks on library resources, patron usage, student achievement, and local housing prices. We use a dynamic difference-in-difference approach to show that library capital investment increases children’s attendance at library events by 18%, children’s checkouts of items by 21%, and total library visits by 21%. Increases in library use translate into improved children’s test scores in nearby school districts: a $1,000 or greater per-student capital investment in local public libraries increases reading test scores by 0.02 standard deviations and has no effects on math test scores. Housing prices do not change after a sharp increase in public library capital investment, suggesting that residents internalize the increased cost and improved quality of their public libraries….(More)”.

Realtime Climate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Climate Central …:”launched this tool to help meteorologists and journalists cover connections between weather, news, and climate in real time, and to alert public and private organizations and individuals about particular local conditions related to climate change, its impacts, or its solutions.

Realtime Climate monitors local weather and events across the U.S. and generates alerts when certain conditions are met or expected. These alerts provide links to science-based analyses and visualizations—including locality-specific, high-quality graphics—that can help explain events in the context of climate change….

Alerts are sent when particular conditions occur or are forecast to occur in the next few days. Examples include:

  • Unusual heat (single day and multi-day)
  • Heat Index
  • Unusual Rainfall
  • Coastal Flooding
  • Air Quality
  • Allergies
  • Seasonal shifts (spring leaf-out, etc.)
  • Ice/snow cover (Great Lakes)
  • Cicadas
  • High local or regional production of solar or wind energy

More conditions will be added soon, including:

  • Drought
  • Wildfire
  • and many more…(More)”.

Who’s Afraid of Big Numbers?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Aiyana Green and Steven Strogatz at the New York Times: “Billions” and “trillions” seem to be an inescapable part of our conversations these days, whether the subject is Jeff Bezos’s net worth or President Biden’s proposed budget. Yet nearly everyone has trouble making sense of such big numbers. Is there any way to get a feel for them? As it turns out, there is. If we can relate big numbers to something familiar, they start to feel much more tangible, almost palpable.

For example, consider Senator Bernie Sanders’s signature reference to “millionaires and billionaires.” Politics aside, are these levels of wealth really comparable? Intellectually, we all know that billionaires have a lot more money than millionaires do, but intuitively it’s hard to feel the difference, because most of us haven’t experienced what it’s like to have that much money.

In contrast, everyone knows what the passage of time feels like. So consider how long it would take for a million seconds to tick by. Do the math, and you’ll find that a million seconds is about 12 days. And a billion seconds? That’s about 32 years. Suddenly the vastness of the gulf between a million and a billion becomes obvious. A million seconds is a brief vacation; a billion seconds is a major fraction of a lifetime.

Comparisons to ordinary distances provide another way to make sense of big numbers. Here in Ithaca, we have a scale model of the solar system known as the Sagan Walk, in which all the planets and the gaps between them are reduced by a factor of five billion. At that scale, the sun becomes the size of a serving plate, Earth is a small pea and Jupiter is a brussels sprout. To walk from Earth to the sun takes just a few dozen footsteps, whereas Pluto is a 15-minute hike across town. Strolling through the solar system, you gain a visceral understanding of astronomical distances that you don’t get from looking at a book or visiting a planetarium. Your body grasps it even if your mind cannot….(More)”.

Why Business Schools Need to Teach Experimentation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth R. Tenney, Elaine Costa, and Ruchi M. Watson at Harvard Business Review: “…The value of experiments in nonscientific organizations is quite high. Instead of calling in managers to solve every puzzle or dispute large and small (Should we make the background yellow or blue? Should we improve basic functionality or add new features? Are staff properly supported and incentivized to provide rapid responses?), teams can run experiments and measure outcomes of interest and, armed with new data, decide for themselves, or at least put forward a proposal grounded in relevant information. The data also provide tangible deliverables to show to stakeholders to demonstrate progress and accountability.

Experiments spur innovation. They can provide proof of concept and a degree of confidence in new ideas before taking bigger risks and scaling up. When done well, with data collected and interpreted objectively, experiments can also provide a corrective for faulty intuition, inaccurate assumptions, or overconfidence. The scientific method (which powers experiments) is the gold standard of tools to combat bias and answer questions objectively.

But as more and more companies are embracing a culture of experimentation, they face a major challenge: talent. Experiments are difficult to do well. Some challenges include special statistical knowledge, clear problem definition, and interpretation of the results. And it’s not enough to have the skillset. Experiments should ideally be done iteratively, building on prior knowledge and working toward deeper understanding of the question at hand. There are also the issues of managers’ preparedness to override their intuition when data disagree with it, and their ability to navigate hierarchy and bureaucracy to implement changes based on the experiments’ outcomes.

Some companies seem to be hiring small armies of PhDs to meet these competency challenges. (Amazon, for example, employs more than 100 PhD economists.) This isn’t surprising, given that PhDs receive years of training — and that the shrinking tenure-track market in academia has created a glut of PhDs. Other companies are developing employees in-house, training them in narrow, industry-specific methodologies. For example, General Mills recently hired for their innovator incubator group, called g-works, advertising for employees who are “using entrepreneurial skills and an experimental mindset” in what they called a “test and learn environment, with rapid experimentation to validate or invalidate assumptions.” Other companies — including Fidelity, LinkedIn, and Aetna — have hired consultants to conduct experiments, among them Irrational Labs, cofounded by Duke University’s Dan Ariely and the behavioral economist Kristen Berman….(More)”.

Politics, Public Goods, and Corporate Nudging in the HTTP/2 Standardization Process

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sylvia E. Peacock: “The goal is to map out some policy problems attached to using a club good approach instead of a public good approach to manage our internet protocols, specifically the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Behavioral and information economics theory are used to evaluate the standardization process of our current generation HTTP/2 (2.0). The HTTP update under scrutiny is a recently released HTTP/2 version based on Google’s SPDY, which introduces several company-specific and best practice applications, side by side. A content analysis of email discussions extracted from a publicly accessible IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) email server shows how the club good approach of the working group leads to an underperformance in the outcomes of the standardization process. An important conclusion is that in some areas of the IETF, standardization activities may need to include public consultations, crowdsourced volunteers, or an official call for public participation to increase public oversight and more democratically manage our intangible public goods….(More)”.

Serving the Citizens—Not the Bureaucracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Sascha Haselmayer: “In a volatile and changing world, one government function is in a position to address challenges ranging from climate change to equity to local development: procurement. Too long confined to a mission of cost savings and compliance, procurement—particularly at the local level, where decisions have a real and immediate impact on citizens—has the potential to become a significant catalyst of change.

In 2021 alone, cities around the globe will spend an estimated $6.4 trillion, or 8 percent of GDP, on procurement.1 Despite this vast buying power, city procurement faces several challenges, including resistance to the idea that procurement can be creative, strategic, economically formidable—and even an affirming experience for professional staff, citizens, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders.

Unfortunately, city procurement is far from ready to overcome these hurdles. Interviews with city leaders and procurement experts point to a common failing: city procurement today is structured to serve bureaucracies—not citizens.

City procurement is in a state of creative tension. Leaders want it to be a creative engine for change, but they underfund procurement teams and foster a compliance culture that leaves no room for much-needed creative and critical thinking. In short: procurement needs a mission.

In this report, we propose cities reimagine procurement as a public service, which can unlock a world of ideas for change and improvement. The vision presented in this report is based on six strategic measures that can help cities get started. The path forward involves not only taking concrete actions, such as reducing barriers to participation of diverse suppliers, but also adopting a new mindset about the purpose and potential of procurement. By doing so, cities can reduce costs and develop creative, engaging solutions to citywide problems. We also offer detailed insights, ideas, and best practices for how practitioners can realize this new vision.

Better city procurement offers the promise of a vast return on investment. Cost savings stand to exceed 15 percent across the board, and local development may benefit by multiplying the participation of small and disadvantaged businesses. Clarity of mission and the required professional skills can lead to new, pioneering innovations. Technology and the right data can lead to sustained performance and better outcomes. A healthy supplier ecosystem can deliver new supplier talent that is aligned with the goals of the city to reduce carbon emissions, serve complex needs, and diversify the supply chain.

All of this not in service of the bureaucracy but of the citizen….(More)”.

Examining the Intersection of Behavioral Science and Advocacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Collection of the Behavioral Scientist by Cintia Hinojosa and Evan Nesterak: “Over the past year, everyone’s lives have been touched by issues that intersect science and advocacy—the pandemic, climate change, police violence, voting, protests, the list goes on. 

These issues compel us, as a society and individuals, toward understanding. We collect new data, design experiments, test our theories. They also inspire us to examine our personal beliefs and values, our roles and responsibilities as individuals within society. 

Perhaps no one feels these forces more than social and behavioral scientists. As members of fields dedicated to the study of social and behavioral phenomena, they are in the unique position of understanding these issues from a scientific perspective, while also navigating their inevitable personal impact. This dynamic brings up questions about the role of scientists in a changing world. To what extent should they engage in advocacy or activism on social and political issues? Should they be impartial investigators, active advocates, something in between? 

t also raises other questions, like does taking a public stance on an issue affect scientific integrity? How should scientists interact with those setting policies? What happens when the lines between an evidence-based stance and a political position become blurred? What should scientists do when science itself becomes a partisan issue? 

To learn more about how social and behavioral scientists are navigating this terrain, we put out a call inviting them to share their ideas, observations, personal reflections, and the questions they’re grappling with. We gave them 100-250 words to share what was on their mind. Not easy for such a complex and consequential topic.

The responses, collected and curated below, revealed a number of themes, which we’ve organized into two parts….(More)”.

Is It Time for a U.S. Department of Science?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Essay by Anthony Mills: “The Biden administration made history earlier this year by elevating the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a cabinet-level post. There have long been science advisory bodies within the White House, and there are a number of executive agencies that deal with science, some of them cabinet-level. But this will be the first time in U.S. history that the president’s science advisor will be part of his cabinet.

It is a welcome effort to restore the integrity of science, at a moment when science has been thrust onto the center-stage of public life — as something indispensable to political decision-making as well as a source of controversy and distrust. Some have urged the administration to go even further, calling for the creation of a new federal department of science. Such calls to centralize science have a long history, and have grown louder during the coronavirus pandemic, spurred by our government’s haphazard response.

But more centralization is not the way to restore the integrity of science. Centralization has its place, especially during national emergencies. Too much of it, however, is bad for science. As a rule, science flourishes in a decentralized research environment, which balances the need for public support, effective organization, and political accountability with scientific independence and institutional diversity. The Biden administration’s move is welcome. But there is risk in what it could lead to next: an American Ministry of Science. And there is an opportunity to create a needed alternative….(More)”.