Reimagining Help

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by Nesta: “Now more than ever, there is a need to help people live well in their homes and communities. The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the importance of diversifying sources of help beyond the hospital, and of drawing on support from friends, neighbours, local organisations and charities to ensure people can live healthy lives. We must think more flexibly about what ‘help’ means, and how the right help can make a huge difference.

While medical care is fundamental to saving lives, people need more than a ‘fix’ to live well every day. If we are to support people to reach their goals, we must move away from ʻexpertsʼ holding the knowledge and power, and instead draw on people’s own knowledge, relationships, strengths and purpose to determine solutions that work best for them.

We believe there is an opportunity to ‘reimagine help’ by applying insights from the field of behaviour change research to a wide range of organisations and places – community facilities, local charities and businesses, employment and housing support, as well as health and care services, all of which play a role in supporting people to reach their goals in a way that feels right for them….

Nesta, Macmillan Cancer Support, the British Heart Foundation and the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change have worked together to develop a universal model of ‘Good Help’ underpinned by behavioural evidence, which can be understood and accessed by everyone. We analysed and simplified decades of behaviour change research and practice, and worked with a group of 30 practitioners and people with lived experience to iterate and cross-check the behavioural evidence against real life experiences. Dartington Service Design Lab helped to structure and format the evidence in a way that makes it easy for everyone to understand.

Collectively, we have produced a guide which outlines eight characteristics of Good Help, which aims to support practitioners, system leaders (such as service managers, charity directors or commissioners) and any person working in a direct ‘helping’ organisation to:

  • Understand the behaviour change evidence that underpins Good Help
  • Develop new ideas or adapt offers of Good Help, which can be tested out in their own organisations or local communities….(More)”.

Digital Minilateralism: How governments cooperate on digital governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A policy paper by Tanya Filer and Antonio Weiss: “New research from the Digital State Project argues for the critical function of small, agile, digitally enabled and focused networks of leaders to foster strong international cooperation on digital governance issues.

This type of cooperative working, described as ‘digital minilateralism’, has a role to play in shaping how individual governments learn, adopt and govern the use of new and emerging technologies, and how they create common or aligned policies. It is also important as cross-border digital infrastructure and services become increasingly common….

Key findings: 

  • Already beginning to prove effective, digital minilateralism has a role to play in shaping how individual governments learn, adopt and govern the use of new and emerging technologies, and how they create common or aligned policy.
  • National governments should recognise and reinforce the strategic value of digital minilaterals without stamping out, through over-bureaucratisation, the qualities of trust, open conversation, and ad-hocness in which their value lies.
  • As digital minilateral networks grow and mature, they will need to find mechanisms through which to retain (or adapt) their core principles while scaling across more boundaries.
  • To demonstrate their value to the global community, digital multilaterals must feed into formal multilateral conversations and arrangements. …(More)“.

Why Coming Up With Effective Interventions To Address COVID-19 Is So Hard

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Neil Lewis Jr.: “It has been hard to measure the effects of the novel coronavirus. Not only is COVID-19 far-reaching — it’s touched nearly every corner of the globe at this point — but its toll on society has also been devastating. It is responsible for the deaths of over 905,000 people around the world, and more than 190,000 people in the United States alone. The associated economic fallout has been crippling. In the U.S., more people lost their jobs in the first three months of the pandemic than in the first two years of the Great Recession. Yes, there are some signs the economy might be recovering, but the truth is, we’re just beginning to understand the pandemic’s full impact, and we don’t yet know what the virus has in store for us.

This is all complicated by the fact that we’re still figuring out how best to combat the pandemic. Without a vaccine readily available, it has been challenging to get people to engage in enough of the behaviors that can help slow the virus. Some policy makers have turned to social and behavioral scientists for guidance, which is encouraging because this doesn’t always happen. We’ve seen many universities ignore the warnings of behavioral scientists and reopen their campuses, only to have to quickly shut them back down.

But this has also meant that there are a lot of new studies to wade through. In the field of psychology alone, between Feb. 10 and Aug. 30, 541 papers about COVID-19 were uploaded to the field’s primary preprint server, PsyArXiv. With so much research to wade through, it’s hard to know what to trust — and I say that as someone who makes a living researching what types of interventions motivate people to change their behaviors.

As I tell my students, if you want to use behavioral science research to address real-world problems, you have to look very closely at the details. Often, a simple question like, “What research should policy makers and practitioners use to help combat the pandemic?” is surprisingly difficult to answer.

For starters, there are often key differences between the lab (or the people and situations some social scientists typically study as part of our day-to-day research) and the real world (or the people and situations policy-makers and practitioners have in mind when crafting interventions).

Take, for example, the fact that social scientists tend to study people from richer countries that are generally highly educated, industrialized, democratic and in the Western hemisphere. And some social scientific fields (e.g., psychology) focus overwhelmingly on whiter, wealthier and more highly educated groups of people within those nations.

This is a major issue in the social sciences and something that researchers have been talking about for decades. But it’s important to mention now, too, as Black and brown people have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus — they are dying at much higher rates than white people and working more of the lower-paying “essential” jobs that expose them to greater risks. Here you can start to see very real research limitations creep in: The people whose lives have been most adversely affected by the virus have largely been excluded from the studies that are supposed to help them. When samples and the methods used are not representative of the real world, it becomes very difficult to reach accurate and actionable conclusions….(More)”.

Enhancing Digital Equity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Massimo Ragnedda on “Connecting the Digital Underclass…This book highlights how, in principle, digital technologies present an opportunity to reduce social disparities, tackle social exclusion, enhance social and civil rights, and promote equity. However, to achieve these goals, it is necessary to promote digital equity and connect the digital underclass.

The book focuses on how the advent of technologies may become a barrier to social mobility and how, by concentrating resources and wealth in few hands, the digital revolution is giving rise to the digital oligarchy, further penalizing the digital underclass. Socially-disadvantaged people, living at the margins of digital society, are penalized both in terms of accessing-using-benefits (three levels of digital divide) but also in understanding-programming-treatment of new digital technologies (three levels of algorithms divide). The advent and implementation of tools that rely on algorithms to make decisions has further penalized specific social categories by normalizing inequalities in the name of efficiency and rationalization….(More)”.

Coding Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Maureen Webb: “Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to “build out” democracy into cyberspace.

Webb travels to Berlin, where she visits the Chaos Communication Camp, a flagship event in the hacker world; to Silicon Valley, where she reports on the Apple-FBI case, the significance of Russian troll farms, and the hacking of tractor software by desperate farmers; to Barcelona, to meet the hacker group XNet, which has helped bring nearly 100 prominent Spanish bankers and politicians to justice for their role in the 2008 financial crisis; and to Harvard and MIT, to investigate the institutionalization of hacking. Webb describes an amazing array of hacker experiments that could dramatically change the current political economy. These ambitious hacks aim to displace such tech monoliths as Facebook and Amazon; enable worker cooperatives to kill platforms like Uber; give people control over their data; automate trust; and provide citizens a real say in governance, along with capacity to reach consensus. Coding Democracy is not just another optimistic declaration of technological utopianism; instead, it provides the tools for an urgently needed upgrade of democracy in the digital era….(More)”.

The forecasting fallacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Alex Murrell: “Marketers are prone to a prediction.

You’ll find them in the annual tirade of trend decks. In the PowerPoint projections of self-proclaimed prophets. In the feeds of forecasters and futurists. They crop up on every conference stage. They make their mark on every marketing magazine. And they work their way into every white paper.

To understand the extent of our forecasting fascination, I analysed the websites of three management consultancies looking for predictions with time frames ranging from 2025 to 2050. Whilst one prediction may be published multiple times, the size of the numbers still shocked me. Deloitte’s site makes 6904 predictions. McKinsey & Company make 4296. And Boston Consulting Group, 3679.

In total, these three companies’ websites include just shy of 15,000 predictions stretching out over the next 30 years.

But it doesn’t stop there.

My analysis finished in the year 2050 not because the predictions came to an end but because my enthusiasm did.

Search the sites and you’ll find forecasts stretching all the way to the year 2100. We’re still finding our feet in this century but some, it seems, already understand the next.

I believe the vast majority of these to be not forecasts but fantasies. Snake oil dressed up as science. Fiction masquerading as fact.

This article assesses how predictions have performed in five fields. It argues that poor projections have propagated throughout our society and proliferated throughout our industry. It argues that our fixation with forecasts is fundamentally flawed.

So instead of focussing on the future, let’s take a moment to look at the predictions of the past. Let’s see how our projections panned out….

Viewed through the lens of Tetlock, it becomes clear that the 15,000 predictions with which I began this article are not forecasts but fantasies.

The projections look precise. They sound scientific. But these forecasts are nothing more than delusions with decimal places. Snake oil dressed up as statistics. Fiction masquerading as fact. They provide a feeling of certainty but they deliver anything but.

In his 1998 book The Fortune Sellers, the business writer William A. Sherden quantified our consensual hallucination: 

“Each year the prediction industry showers us with $200 billion in (mostly erroneous) information. The forecasting track records for all types of experts are universally poor, whether we consider scientifically oriented professionals, such as economists, demographers, meteorologists, and seismologists, or psychic and astrological forecasters whose names are household words.” 

The comparison between professional predictors and fortune tellers is apt.

From tarot cards to tea leaves, palmistry to pyromancy, clear visions of cloudy futures have always been sold to susceptible audiences. 

Today, marketers are one such audience.

It’s time we opened our eyes….(More)”.

Guide to Responsible Tech: How to Get Involved & Build a Better Tech Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Resource by All Tech Is Human: “How do you get involved in the growing Responsible Tech field? This guide is a comprehensive look at the vibrant Responsible Tech ecosystem. Aimed at college students, grad students, and young professionals, the “Responsible Tech Guide” is a mix of advice, career profiles, education journeys, and organizations in the space. Developed by All Tech Is Human, an organization committed to informing & inspiring the next generation of responsible technologists & changemakers….(More)”.

The Hype Machine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sinan Aral on “How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health–and How We Must Adapt”: “Drawing on two decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the biggest, most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. Aral shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior-influencing levers to both Russian hackers and brand marketers—to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth to the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real impact of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the effect of social media on our kids.

In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight…(More)”.

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jill Lepore: “The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists—“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.

The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale….(More)”.

Innovation Policy, Structural Inequality, and COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Shobita Parthasarathy: “COVID-19 has shown the world that public policies tend to benefit the most privileged among us, and innovation policy is no exception. While the US government’s approach to innovation—research funding and patent policies and programs that value scientists’ and private sector freedoms—has been copied around the world due to its apparent success, I argue that it has hurt poor and marginalized communities. It has limited our understanding of health disparities and how to address them, and hampered access to essential technologies due to both lack of coordination and high cost. Fair and equal treatment of vulnerable citizens requires sensitive and dedicated policies that attend explicitly to the fact that the benefits of innovation do not simply trickle down….(More)”.