Book by Policy studies assume the existence of baseline parameters – such as honest governments doing their best to create public value, publics responding in good faith, and both parties relying on a policy-making process which aligns with the public interest. In such circumstances, policy goals are expected to be produced through mechanisms in which the public can articulate its preferences and policy-makers are expected to listen to what has been said in determining their governments’ courses of action. While these conditions are found in some governments, there is evidence from around the world that much policy-making occurs without these pre-conditions and processes. Unlike situations which produce what can be thought of as ‘good’ public policy, ‘bad’ public policy is a more common outcome. How this happens and what makes for bad public policy are the subjects of this Element…(More)”.
In Uncertain Times, Get Curious
Chapter (and book) by Elizabeth Weingarten: “Questions flow from curiosity. If we want to live and love the questions of our lives—How to live a life of purpose? Who am I in the aftermath of a big change or transition? What kind of person do I want to become as I grow older?—we must first ask them into conscious existence.
Many people have written entire books defining and redefining curiosity. But for me, the most helpful definition comes from a philosophy professor, Perry Zurn, and a systems neuroscientist, Dani Bassett: “For too long—and still too often—curiosity has been oversimplified,” they write, typically “reduced to the simple act of raising a hand or voicing a question, especially from behind a desk or a podium. . . . Scholars generally boil it down to ‘information-seeking’ behavior or a ‘desire to know.’ But curiosity is more than a feeling and certainly more than an act. And curiosity is always more than a single move or a single question.”Curiosity works, they write, by “linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together.”It is complex, mutating, unpredictable, and transformational. It is, fundamentally, an act of connection, an act of creating relationships between ideas and people. Asking questions then, becoming curious, is not just about wanting to find the answer—it is also about our need to connect, with ourselves, with others, with the world.
And this, perhaps, is why our deeper questions are hardly ever satisfied by Google or by fast, easy answers from the people I refer to as the Charlatans of Certainty—the gurus, influencers, and “experts” peddling simple solutions to all the complex problems you face. This is also the reason there is no one-size-fits-all formula for cultivating curiosity—particularly the kind that allows us to live and love our questions, especially the questions that are hard to love, like “How can I live with chronic pain?” or “How do I extricate myself from a challenging relationship?” This kind of curiosity is a special flavor…(More)”. See also: Inquiry as Infrastructure: Defining Good Questions in the Age of Data and AI.
The Weaponization of Expertise
Book by Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson: “Experts are not infallible. Treating them as such has done us all a grave disservice and, as The Weaponization of Expertise makes painfully clear, given rise to the very populism that all-knowing experts and their elite coterie decry. Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson use the devastating example of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate their case, revealing how the hubris of all-too-human experts undermined—perhaps irreparably—public faith in elite policymaking. Paradoxically, by turning science into dogmatism, the overweening elite response has also proved deeply corrosive to expertise itself—in effect, doing exactly what elite policymakers accuse their critics of doing.
A much-needed corrective to a dangerous blind faith in expertise, The Weaponization of Expertise identifies a cluster of pathologies that have enveloped many institutions meant to help referee expert knowledge, in particular a disavowal of the doubt, uncertainty, and counterarguments that are crucial to the accumulation of knowledge. At a time when trust in expertise and faith in institutions are most needed and most lacking, this work issues a stark reminder that a crisis of misinformation may well begin at the top…(More)”.
Artificial Intelligence and Big Data
Book edited by Frans L. Leeuw and Michael Bamberger: “…explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data contribute to the evaluation of the rule of law (covering legal arrangements, empirical legal research, law and technology, and international law), and social and economic development programs in both industrialized and developing countries. Issues of ethics and bias in the use of AI are also addressed and indicators of the growth of knowledge in the field are discussed.
Interdisciplinary and international in scope, and bringing together leading academics and practitioners from across the globe, the book explores the applications of AI and big data in Rule of Law and development evaluation, identifies differences in the approaches used in the two fields, and how each could learn from the approaches used in the other, as well as differences in the AI-related issues addressed in industrialized nations compared to those addressed in Africa and Asia.
Artificial Intelligence and Big Data is an essential read for researchers, academics and students working in the fields of Rule of Law and Development, and researchers in institutions working on new applications in AI will all benefit from the book’s practical insights…(More)”.
Behavioral AI: Unleash Decision Making with Data
Book by Rogayeh Tabrizi: “…delivers an intuitive roadmap to help organizations disentangle the complexity of their data to create tangible and lasting value. The book explains how to balance the multiple disciplines that power AI and behavioral economics using a combination of the right questions and insightful problem solving.
You’ll learn why intellectual diversity and combining subject matter experts in psychology, behavior, economics, physics, computer science, and engineering is essential to creating advanced AI solutions. You’ll also discover:
- How behavioral economics principles influence data models and governance architectures and make digital transformation processes more efficient and effective
- Discussions of the most important barriers to value in typical big data and AI projects and how to bring them down
- The most effective methodology to help shorten the long, wasteful process of “boiling the ocean of data”
An exciting and essential resource for managers, executives, board members, and other business leaders engaged or interested in harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and big data, Behavioral AI will also benefit data and machine learning professionals…(More)”
A Century of Tomorrows
Book by Glenn Adamson: “For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests and prophets, the realm of astrologers and seers. Then, in the twentieth century, futurologists emerged, claiming that data and design could make planning into a rational certainty. Over time, many of these technologists and trend forecasters amassed power as public intellectuals, even as their predictions proved less than reliable. Now, amid political and ecological crises of our own making, we drown in a cacophony of potential futures-including, possibly, no future at all.
A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. Beneath the chaos of competing tomorrows, Adamson reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what’s next. Helping him to tell this story are remarkable characters, including self-proclaimed futurologists such as Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, as well as an eclectic array of other visionaries who have influenced our thinking about the world ahead: Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin, Shulamith Firestone and Sun Ra, Marcus Garvey and Timothy Leary, and more.
Arriving at a moment of collective anxiety and fragile hope, Adamson’s extraordinary bookshows how our projections for the future are, always and ultimately, debates about the present. For tomorrow is contained within the only thing we can ever truly know: today…(More)”.
Working With Cracks
An excerpt from Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems by Adam Kahane: “Systems are structured to keep producing the behaviors and results they are producing, and therefore often seem solid and unchangeable—but they are not. They are built, and they collapse. They crack and are cracked, which opens up new possibilities that some people find frightening and others find hopeful. Radical engagement involves looking for, moving toward, and working with these cracks—not ignoring or shying away from them. We do this by seeking out and working with openings, alongside others who are doing the same…
Al Etmanski has pioneered the transformation of the living conditions of Canadians with disabilities, away from segregation, dependency, and second-class status toward connection, agency, and justice. I have spoken with him and studied what he and others have written about his decades of experience, and especially about how his strategy and approach have evolved and enabled him to make the contributions he has. He has advanced through repeatedly searching out and working with openings or cracks (breakdowns and bright spots) in the social-economic-political-institutional-cultural “disability system.”..(More)”.
Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information
Book by Rahul Bhargava: “…new toolkit for data storytelling in community settings, one purpose-built for goals like inclusion, empowerment, and impact. Data science and visualization has spread into new domains it was designed for – community organizing, education, journalism, civic governance, and more. The dominant computational methods and processes, which have not changed in response, are causing significant discriminatory and harmful impacts, documented by leading scholars across a variety of populations. Informed by 15 years of collaborations in academic and professional settings with nonprofits and marginalized populations, the book articulates a new approach for aligning the processes and media of data work with social good outcomes, learning from the practices of newspapers, museums, community groups, artists, and libraries.
This book introduces a community-driven framework as a response to the urgent need to realign data theories and methods around justice and empowerment to avoid further replicating harmful power dynamics and ensure everyone has a seat at the table in data-centered community processes. It offers a broader toolbox for working with data and presenting it, pushing beyond the limited vocabulary of surveys, spreadsheets, charts and graphs…(More)”.
The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us
Book by Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall: “We spend much of our waking lives communicating with others. How does each moment of interaction shape not only our relationships but also our worldviews? And how can we create moments of connection that improve our health and well-being, particularly in a world in which people are feeling increasingly isolated?
Drawing from their extensive research, Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall establish a new way to think about our relational life: as existing within “social biomes”—complex ecosystems of moments of interaction with others. Each interaction we have, no matter how unimportant or mundane it might seem, is a building block of our identities and beliefs. Consequently, the choices we make about how we interact and who we interact with—and whether we interact at all—matter more than we might know. Merolla and Hall offer a sympathetic, practical guide to our vital yet complicated social lives and propose realistic ways to embrace and enhance connection and hope…(More)”.
The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters
Book by Diane Coyle: “The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy? Coyle makes the case for a new framework, one that takes into consideration current economic realities.
Coyle explains why economic statistics matter. They are essential for guiding better economic policies; they involve questions of freedom, justice, life, and death. Governments use statistics that affect people’s lives in ways large and small. The metrics for economic growth were developed when a lack of physical rather than natural capital was the binding constraint on growth, intangible value was less important, and the pressing economic policy challenge was managing demand rather than supply. Today’s challenges are different. Growth in living standards in rich economies has slowed, despite remarkable innovation, particularly in digital technologies. As a result, politics is contentious and democracy strained.
Coyle argues that to understand the current economy, we need different data collected in a different framework of categories and definitions, and she offers some suggestions about what this would entail. Only with a new approach to measurement will we be able to achieve the right kind of growth for the benefit of all…(More)”.