Changing Perceptions about Harm Can Temper Moral Outrage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jordan Wylie and Ana Gantman: “Comprehensive sex education works. Years of research show that it is much more effective than an abstinence-only approach at preventing teen pregnancy. In fact, abstinence-only programs may actually increase unplanned pregnancies and can contribute to harmful shaming and sexist attitudes.

Yet abstinence, or “sexual risk avoidance,” programs persist in the U.S. Why? Ultimately many people believe that teenagers should not have sex. If adolescents just abstain, they reason, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases will no longer be a problem. By contrast, comprehensive sex education operates under the premise that some young people do engage in sexual behavior, so it is worthwhile to help them understand how to avoid unwanted outcomes. For dedicated abstinence-only advocates, however, that approach is morally wrong.

Given the deeply held moral beliefs many people bring to this topic, it’s easy to think the debate over sex ed is doomed to a stalemate between those who want to ban it and those who want to promote it. And this is just one of several subjects where policy makers face a tough choice: ban or prohibit a potentially harmful activity, or allow it to continue while mitigating the harm. Mitigation options include needle-exchange programs that help people who use intravenous drugs lower their risk of contracting blood-borne illnesses. Another example is mandatory waiting periods for firearms purchases, which allow people to possess firearms but also reduce homicides.

These harm-reduction strategies are often effective, but they can be unpopular. That’s because issues like sexual behavior, drug use and gun ownership involve highly moralized opinions. Research shows that when people feel moral outrage toward a behavior, they are more likely to support policies that aim to completely stop that activity rather than make it safer.

But our research suggests that not all expressions of moral outrage are alike. Through a series of studies that involved surveying more than 1,000 Americans, we found that, in some cases, people base their moral opposition on the harm that an action causes. In those instances, if you can find ways to make an activity safer, you can also make it more morally acceptable…(More)”

Global Digital Governance Through the Back Door of Corporate Regulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Orit Fischman Afori: “Today, societal life is increasingly conducted in the digital sphere, in which two core attributes are prominent: this sphere is entirely controlled by enormous technology companies, and these companies are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This reality generates a severe threat to democratic principles and human rights. Therefore, regulating the conduct of the companies ruling the digital sphere is an urgent agenda worldwide. Policymakers and legislatures around the world are taking their first steps in establishing a digital governance regime, with leading proposals in the EU. Although it is understood that there is a necessity to adopt a comprehensive framework for imposing accountability standards on technology companies and on the operation of AI technologies, traditional perceptions regarding the limits of intervention in the private sector and contemporary perceptions regarding the limits of antitrust tools hinder such legal moves.

Given the obstacles inherent in the use of existing legal means for introducing a digital governance regime, this article proposes a new path of corporate governance regulations. The proposal, belonging to a “second wave” of regulatory models for the digital sphere, is based on the understanding that the current complex technological reality requires sophisticated and pragmatic legal measures for establishing an effective framework for digital governance norms. Corporate governance is a system of rules and practices by which companies are guided and controlled. Because the digital sphere is governed by private corporations, it seems reasonable to introduce the desired digital governance principles through a framework that regulates corporations. The bedrock of corporate governance is promoting principles of corporate accountability, which are translated into a wide array of obligations. In the last two decades, corporate accountability has evolved into a new domain of corporate social responsibility (CSR), promoting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) purposes not aimed at maximizing profits in the short term. The various benefits of the complex corporate governance mechanisms may be used to promote the desired digital governance regime that would be applied by the technology companies. A key advantage of the corporate governance mechanism is its potential to serve as a vehicle to promulgate norms in the era of multinational corporations. Because the digital sphere is governed by a few giant US companies, corporate governance may be leveraged to promote digital governance principles with a global reach in a uniform manner…(More)”

Math for Future Scientists: Require Statistics, Not Calculus

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Robert C. Thornett: “The common requirement to pass calculus in order to major in a science is a killer of students’ dreams. And it unnecessarily limits the pool of future scientists.

Charles Darwin is a classic example of a genius naturalist who was not a natural at math. As a young man, he sailed around the world aboard the HMS Beagle and explored the giant tortoises and iguanas of the Galapagos, the rainforests of Brazil, and the coral reefs of the South Pacific. From these sorts of direct engagements with nature, he developed his theory of evolution, which revolutionized science. But Darwin wrote in his autobiography that after studying math as a young man, he found that “it was repugnant to me.” When statistics stumped Darwin during his experiments investigating the advantages of crossbreeding plants, he called his cousin, the statistician Francis Galton, to try to make sense of the numbers.

Similarly, Thomas Edison said that as a boy he had a “distaste for mathematics.” But this did not stop him from becoming one of the most famous scientific inventors of all time. “I can always hire a mathematician,” said Edison, “but they can’t hire me.” Edison was so interested in chemistry that at the age of 13, when he got a job as a newsboy and concessionaire on the Grand Trunk Railroad, he brought a chemistry set aboard so he could do experiments during layovers. Math and science are distinctly different fields, and a talent for one does not imply a talent for the other.

According to professor emeritus Andrew Hacker of Queens College of the City University of New York, less than five percent of Americans will ever use any higher math at all in their jobs, including not only calculus but algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. And less than one percent will ever use calculus on the job. Born in 1929 and holding a PhD from Princeton, Hacker taught college political science for decades and has also been a math professor. His book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions argues that not only college students but high school students should not be required to take algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or calculus at all. Hacker points out that not passing ninth grade algebra is the foremost academic indicator that a student will drop out of high school.

Before the objections tumble forth, I should emphasize that both Hacker and I like math and neither of us wants to remove all math requirements; we want to improve them. And I believe high school students should be required to study algebra and geometry. But Hacker’s larger argument is that both high schools and colleges should switch to teaching more useful types of math that can help students navigate the real world. He says American schools teach basic arithmetic well up to around middle school, but they stop there when they should continue teaching what he calls “adult arithmetic” or “sophisticated arithmetic” rather than veer off into more abstract types of math…(More)”.

Why its Time for a New Approach to Civic Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Anthony Zacharzewski: “…It’s true that there has been some recent innovation around this theme, including tools designed to support audio and video-based deliberation…However, the needs of modern participation and democracy are changing in a far more fundamental way, and the civic tech field needs to do more to keep pace.

For years, civic tech has focused on the things that digital tools do well – data, numbers, and text. It has often emphasised written comments, voting ideas up and down, and the statistical analysis of responses. And perhaps most tellingly, it has focused on single events, whether participatory budgeting processes or major events such as the Conference on the Future of Europe. 

Many of these approaches are essentially digitised versions of physical processes, but we are starting to realise now that one-off processes are not enough. Rather, civic tech tools need to bring people into longer-term conversations, with wider participation. 

This is where the next generation of civic tech tools needs to focus. 

Today, it is easy for a participant in a participatory budgeting process to use a polished digital interface to suggest an idea or to vote.

However, nothing on these platforms enables people to stay in the democratic conversation once they have had their say, to stay informed on the issues in their area, or to find opportunities to participate elsewhere. Even platforms such as Decidim and Consul, which allow people to participate in multiple different processes, still have a fundamentally process- and discussion-based model…(More)”

How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo: “A ground-breaking account which shows how the public sector must adapt, but also persevere, in order to advance technology and innovation

From self-driving cars to smart grids, governments are experimenting with new technologies to significantly change the way we live. Innovation has become vitally important to states across the world.

Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo explore how public bodies pursue innovation, looking at how new policies are designed and implemented. Spanning Europe, the USA and Asia, the authors show how different institutions finance new technologies and share cutting-edge information. They argue for the importance of ‘agile stability’, demonstrating that in order to successfully innovate, state organizations have to move nimbly like start-ups and yet ensure stability at the same time. And that, particularly in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments need both long-term policy and dynamic capabilities to handle crises.

This vital account explores the complex and often contradictory positions of innovating public bodies—and shows how they can overcome financial and political resistance to change for the good of us all…(More)”.

Rethinking Intelligence In A More-Than-Human World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Amanda Rees: “We spend a lot of time debating intelligence — what does it mean? Who has it? And especially lately — can technology help us create or enhance it?

But for a species that relies on its self-declared “wisdom” to differentiate itself from all other animals, a species that consistently defines itself as intelligent and rational, Homo sapiens tends to do some strikingly foolish things — creating the climate crisis, for example, or threatening the survival of our world with nuclear disaster, or creating ever-more-powerful and pervasive algorithms. 

If we are in fact to be “wise,” we need to learn to manage a range of different and potentially existential risks relating to (and often created by) our technological interventions in the bio-social ecologies we inhabit. We need, in short, to rethink what it means to be intelligent. 

Points Of Origin

Part of the problem is that we think of both “intelligence” and “agency” as objective, identifiable, measurable human characteristics. But they’re not. At least in part, both concepts are instead the product of specific historical circumstances. “Agency,” for example, emerges with the European Enlightenment, perhaps best encapsulated in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” Writing in the late 15th century, Mirandola revels in the fact that to humanity alone “it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills. … On man … the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit.”

In other words, what makes humans unique is their possession of the God-given capacity to exercise free will — to take rational, self-conscious action in order to achieve specific ends. Today, this remains the model of agency that underpins significant and influential areas of public discourse. It resonates strongly with neoliberalist reforms of economic policy, for example, as well as with debates on public health responsibility and welfare spending. 

A few hundred years later, the modern version of “intelligence” appears, again in Europe, where it came to be understood as a capacity for ordered, rational, problem-solving, pattern-recognizing cognition. Through the work of the eugenicist Francis Galton, among others, intelligence soon came to be regarded as an innate quality possessed by individuals to greater or lesser degree, which could be used to sort populations into hierarchies of social access and economic reward…(More)”.

Cloud labs and remote research aren’t the future of science – they’re here

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tom Ireland: “Cloud labs mean anybody, anywhere can conduct experiments by remote control, using nothing more than their web browser. Experiments are programmed through a subscription-based online interface – software then coordinates robots and automated scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data. Friday night is Emerald’s busiest time of the week, as scientists schedule experiments to run while they relax with their families over the weekend.

There are still some things robots can’t do, for example lifting giant carboys (containers for liquids) or unwrapping samples sent by mail, and there are a few instruments that just can’t be automated. Hence the people in blue coats, who look a little like pickers in an Amazon warehouse. It turns out that they are, in fact, mostly former Amazon employees.

Plugging an experiment into a browser forces researchers to translate the exact details of every step into unambiguous code

Emerald originally employed scientists and lab technicians to help the facility run smoothly, but they were creatively stifled with so little to do. Poaching Amazon employees has turned out to be an improvement. “We pay them twice what they were getting at Amazon to do something way more fulfilling than stuffing toilet paper into boxes,” says Frezza. “You’re keeping someone’s drug-discovery experiment running at full speed.”

Further south in the San Francisco Bay Area are two more cloud labs, run by the company Strateos. Racks of gleaming life science instruments – incubators, mixers, mass spectrometers, PCR machines – sit humming inside large Perspex boxes known as workcells. The setup is arguably even more futuristic than at Emerald. Here, reagents and samples whizz to the correct workcell on hi-tech magnetic conveyor belts and are gently loaded into place by dextrous robot arms. Researchers’ experiments are “delocalised”, as Strateos’s executive director of operations, Marc Siladi, puts it…(More)”.

Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “As the world confronts the fast catastrophe of Covid and the slow calamity of climate change, we also face a third, less visible emergency: a crisis of imagination. We can easily picture ecological disaster or futures dominated by technology. But we struggle to imagine a world in which people thrive and where we improve our democracy, welfare, neighbourhoods or education. Many are resigned to fatalism—yet they desperately want transformational social change.

This book argues that, although the threats are real, we can use creative imagination to achieve a better future: visualising where we want to go and how to get there. Political and social thinker Geoff Mulgan offers lessons we can learn from the past, and methods we can use now to open up thinking about the future and spark action.

Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy and history, Mulgan shows how we can recharge our collective imagination. From Socrates to Star Wars, he provides a roadmap for the future….(More)”.

Nudging Science Towards Fairer Evaluations: Evidence From Peer Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Inna Smirnova, Daniel M. Romero, and Misha Teplitskiy: “Peer review is widely used to select scientific projects for funding and publication, but there is growing evidence that it is biased towards prestigious individuals and institutions. Although anonymizing submissions can reduce prestige bias, many organizations do not implement anonymization, in part because enforcing it can be prohibitively costly. Here, we examine whether nudging but not forcing authors to anonymize their submissions reduces prestige bias. We partnered with IOP Publishing, one of the largest academic publishers, which adopted a policy strongly encouraging authors to anonymize their submissions and staggered the policy rollout across its physics journal portfolio. We examine 156,015 submissions to 57 peer-reviewed journals received between January 2018 and February 2022 and measure author prestige with citations accrued at submission time. Higher prestige first authors were less likely to anonymize. Nevertheless, for low-prestige authors, the policy increased positive peer reviews by 2.4% and acceptance by 5.6%. For middle- and high-prestige authors, the policy decreased positive reviews (1.8% and 1%) and final acceptance (4.6% and 2.2%). The policy did not have unintended consequences on reviewer recruitment or the characteristics of submitting authors. Overall, nudges are a simple, low-cost, and effective method to reduce prestige bias and should be considered by organizations for which enforced-anonymization is impractical…(More)”.

Blue Spoons: Sparking Communication About Appropriate Technology Use

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, João F. Pugliese, Jonathan Robinson & Frank Schilbach: “An enduring puzzle regarding technology adoption in developing countries is that new technologies often diffuse slowly through the social network. Two of the key predictions of the canonical epidemiological model of technology diffusion are that forums to share information and higher returns to technology should both spur social transmission. We design a large-scale experiment to test these predictions among farmers in Western Kenya, and we fail to find support for either. However, in the same context, we introduce a technology that diffuses very fast: a simple kitchen spoon (painted in blue) to measure out how much fertilizer to use. We develop a model that explains both the failure of the standard approaches and the surprising success of this new technology. The core idea of the model is that not all information is reliable, and farmers are reluctant to develop a reputation of passing along false information. The model and data suggest that there is value in developing simple, transparent technologies to facilitate communication…(More)”.