Personal website – any views expressed herein are my own unless otherwise obvious
‘An algorithm is a precisely-defined sequence of rules telling how to produce specified output information from given input information in a finite number of steps. A particular representation of an algorithm is called a program, just as we use the word “data” to stand for a particular representation of “information”.’
– Donald E. Knuth (1974, p. 323) [Computer Science and its Relation to Mathematics. The American Mathematical Monthly, 81(4), 323–343]
“Costs and benefits should be calculated over the lifetime of the proposal. Proposals involving infrastructure such as roads, railways and new buildings are appraised over a 60 year period. Refurbishment of existing buildings is considered over 30 years. For proposals involving administrative changes a ten year period is used as a standard measure. For interventions likely to have significant costs or benefits beyond 60 years, such as vaccination programmes, or nuclear waste storage, a suitable appraisal period should be discussed with and formally agreed by the Treasury at the start of work on the proposal.”
The Green Book (2022, p. 9)
‘The universities minister, Michelle Donelan, wants to chop courses where “fewer than 60% of graduates are in professional employment or further study within 15 months of graduating”. She misunderstands the point of studying the arts. […] The point of an English degree is to inspire those who take it with such a love of literature that they spend the next decade serving in bars while trying to complete their Great Work. And if that doesn’t fly, they must become English teachers, handing on the same curse of loving literature to future generations, their collective misery deepening like a coastal shelf, just as our collective understanding of the works grows because of their efforts.’
– Stewart Lee (2022, 3 June). Tory contempt for the arts means we face a second dark age. The Guardian.
“You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
“I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
“It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.”
“Being a reductionist is a bit like being a logical positivist or a member of the Old Left – an aura of doctrinaire naiveté hangs over him.”
– Jaegwon Kim (1989, p. 32). The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 63(3), 31-47
From the long version of the abstract:
“An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society’s most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which individuals operate. Along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both academic and policy communities, we now believe this was a mistake. Results from such interventions have been disappointingly modest. But more importantly, they have guided many (though by no means all) behavioral scientists to frame policy problems in individual, not systemic, terms: to adopt what we call the “i-frame,” rather than the “s-frame.” The difference may be more consequential than those who have operated within the i-frame have understood, in deflecting attention and support away from s-frame policies. Indeed, highlighting the i-frame is a long-established objective of corporate opponents of concerted systemic action such as regulation and taxation.”
And the confessional conclusion:
“… if the right s-frame solutions were available but not implemented all along, it is likely that behavioral scientists’ enthusiasm for the i-frame has actively reduced attention to, and support for, systemic reform, as corporations interested in blocking change intend. We have been unwitting accomplices to forces opposed to helping create a better society.”
Chater, Nick and Loewenstein, George F., The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray (March 1, 2022). Available at SSRN.
If you are interested in the UK remaining a democracy then it is essential that you learn about the Public Order Bill, which is currently (early June 2022) at committee stage. Here’s Adam Wagner (Barrister, Doughty Street Chambers) – bold emphasis added:
“In this country, our tradition is that protest is something that is permitted. It is not seen as a social evil; it is seen as a social good. A certain level of disruption is inevitable in any successful protest. That is how you get people’s attention: you disrupt, and you put yourself in front of them. That is not a new thing; it is very old. It goes back to the suffragettes, who I am sure many people giving evidence will mention. Every social movement in history that has a protest element has always used an element of disruption…”
“For the most part, the mechanisms that the Bill puts in place essentially criminalise peaceful protest. That is what the Bill does: it criminalises peaceful protest in a way that has not been done before. It treats peaceful protest like knife crime, drug dealing or terrorism. I do not mean that metaphorically; I mean it directly. Serious crime disruption orders and terrorism disruption orders stop people doing something in future—those are the kinds of methods we have used to disrupt terrorism, knife crime, drug dealing and gang violence. I have been involved in lots of cases involving those kinds of orders. If the Bill is used by police—they will be under pressure to use it in particular instances—the end result will be lots more protesters in the criminal courts, in very long and complicated trials that involve looking at the proportionality of the protest in question, as we saw with the Colston statue case. But it will be 100 times more, because all these offences have a reasonable excuse […]. I think that is one thing you will see. The other thing you will see is a lot more protesters in prison—and a lot more peaceful protesters in prison.”
– Adam Wagner (Barrister, Doughty Street Chambers), evidence provided to the Public Order Bill Committee (9 June 2022)
“In order for certain jobs to confer high income and special advantages, it is important for their incumbents to have various means of excluding others from access to them. This is also sometimes referred to as a process of social closure, in which access to a position becomes restricted. One way of doing this is by creating requirements that are very costly for people to fulfill. Educational credentials often have this character: high levels of schooling generate high income in part because there are significant restrictions on the supply of highly educated people. Admissions procedures, tuition costs, risk-aversion to large loans by low-income people, and so on, all tend to block access to higher education, to the benefit of those in jobs that require such qualifications.”
– Wright, E. O. (2009, p. 104). [Understanding Class: Towards an Integrated Analytical Approach. New Left Review, 60, 101–116.]
“We are witnessing the emergence of algorithmically infused societies who are shaped by deeply entangled algorithmic and human processes and behaviour […]. Algorithms—and the tools, services and platforms they power—mediate social, economic and political processes by shaping a wide range of activities and decision-making practices across many areas. Algorithmic influence can be observed in how people consume information or cultural artefacts and how they interact with others. This influence is also increasingly tangible in many high-stakes areas, such as healthcare, credit scoring, law enforcement and employment. Although algorithms can provide many benefits, including efficiency, objectivity, auditability, fairness and social good, they can also amplify—either inadvertently or purposefully—existing inequalities and biases in society, or might even introduce new ones.”
– Wagner, C., Strohmaier, M., Olteanu, A., Kıcıman, E., Contractor, N., & Eliassi-Rad, T. (2021) [Measuring algorithmically infused societies. Nature, 595(7866), 197–204.]
“The problems of gender and racial bias in our information systems are complex, but some of their key causes are plain as day […]. When data teams are primarily composed of people from dominant groups, those perspectives come to exert outsized influence on the decisions being made—to the exclusion of other identities and perspectives. This is not usually intentional; it comes from the ignorance of being on top. We describe this deficiency as a privilege hazard.”
– Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.