The Data Processing Inequality and bounded rationality

I have long harbored the hunch that information theory, in the classic Shannon sense, and social theory are deeply linked. It has proven to be very difficult to find an audience for this point of view or an opportunity to work on it seriously. Shannon’s information theory is widely respected in engineering disciplines; many social theorists who are unfamiliar with it are loathe to admit that something from engineering should carry essential insights for their own field. Meanwhile, engineers are rarely interested in modeling social systems.

I’ve recently discovered an opportunity to work on this problem through my dissertation work, which is about privacy engineering. Privacy is a subtle social concept but also one that has been rigorously formalized. I’m working on formal privacy theory now and have been reminded of a theorem from information theory: the Data Processing Theorem. What strikes me about this theorem is that is captures an point that comes up again and again in social and political problems, though it’s a point that’s almost never addressed head on.

The Data Processing Inequality (DPI) states that for three random variables, X, Y, and Z, arranged in Markov Chain such that $X \rightarrow Y \rightarrow Z$, then $I(X,Z) \leq I(X,Y)$, where here $I$ stands for mutual information. Mutual information is a measure of how much two random variables carry information about each other. If $I(X,Y) = 0$, that means the variables are independent. $I(X,Y) \geq 0$ always–that’s just a mathematical fact about how it’s defined.

The implications of this for psychology, social theory, and artificial intelligence are I think rather profound. It provides a way of thinking about bounded rationality in a simple and generalizable way–something I’ve been struggling to figure out for a long time.

Suppose that there’s a big world out the, $W$ and there’s am organism, or a person, or a sociotechnical organization within it, $Y$. The world is big and complex, which implies that it has a lot of informational entropy, $H(W)$. Through whatever sensory apparatus is available to $Y$, it acquires some kind of internal sensory state. Because this organism is much small than the world, its entropy is much lower. There are many fewer possible states that the organism can be in, relative to the number of states of the world. $H(W) >> H(Y)$. This in turn bounds the mutual information between the organism and the world: $I(W,Y) \leq H(Y)$

Now let’s suppose the actions that the organism takes, $Z$ depend only on its internal state. It is an agent, reacting to its environment. Well whatever these actions are, they can only be so calibrated to the world as the agent had capacity to absorb the world’s information. I.e., $I(W,Z) \leq H(Y) << H(W)$. The implication is that the more limited the mental capacity of the organism, the more its actions will be approximately independent of the state of the world that precedes it.

There are a lot of interesting implications of this for social theory. Here are a few cases that come to mind.

I've written quite a bit here (blog links) and here (arXiv) about Bostrom’s superintelligence argument and why I’m generally not concerned with the prospect of an artificial intelligence taking over the world. My argument is that there are limits to how much an algorithm can improve itself, and these limits put a stop to exponential intelligence explosions. I’ve been criticized on the grounds that I don’t specify what the limits are, and that if the limits are high enough then maybe relative superintelligence is possible. The Data Processing Inequality gives us another tool for estimating the bounds of an intelligence based on the range of physical states it can possibly be in. How calibrated can a hegemonic agent be to the complexity of the world? It depends on the capacity of that agent to absorb information about the world; that can be measured in information entropy.

A related case is a rendering of Scott’s Seeing Like a State arguments. Why is it that “high modernist” governments failed to successfully control society through scientific intervention? One reason is that the complexity of the system they were trying to manage vastly outsized the complexity of the centralized control mechanisms. Centralized control was very blunt, causing many social problems. Arguably, behavioral targeting and big data centers today equip controlling organizations with more informational capacity (more entropy), but they
still get it wrong sometimes, causing privacy violations, because they can’t model the entirety of the messy world we’re in.

The Data Processing Inequality is also helpful for explaining why the world is so messy. There are a lot of different agents in the world, and each one only has so much bandwidth for taking in information. This means that most agents are acting almost independently from each other. The guiding principle of society isn’t signal, it’s noise. That explains why there are so many disorganized heavy tail distributions in social phenomena.

Importantly, if we let the world at any time slice be informed by the actions of many agents acting nearly independently from each other in the slice before, then that increases the entropy of the world. This increases the challenge for any particular agent to develop an effective controlling strategy. For this reason, we would expect the world to get more out of control the more intelligence agents are on average. The popularity of the personal computer perhaps introduced a lot more entropy into the world, distributed in an agent-by-agent way. Moreover, powerful controlling data centers may increase the world’s entropy, rather than redtucing it. So even if, for example, Amazon were to try to take over the world, the existence of Baidu would be a major obstacle to its plans.

There are a lot of assumptions built into these informal arguments and I’m not wedded to any of them. But my point here is that information theory provides useful tools for thinking about agents in a complex world. There’s potential for using it for modeling sociotechnical systems and their limitations.

Net neutrality

What do I think of net neutrality?

I think it’s bad for my personal self-interest. I am, economically, a part of the newer tech economy of software and data. I believe this economy benefits from net neutrality. I also am somebody who loves The Web as a consumer. I’ve grown up with it. It’s shaped my values.

From a broader perspective, I think ending net neutrality will revitalize U.S. telecom and give it leverage over the ‘tech giants’–Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon—that have been rewarded by net neutrality policies. Telecom is a platform, but it had been turned into a utility platform. Now it can be a full-featured market player. This gives it an opportunity for platform envelopment, moving into the markets of other companies and bundling them in with ISP services.

Since this will introduce competition into the market and other players are very well-established, this could actually be good for consumers because it breaks up an oligopoly in the services that are most user-facing. On the other hand, since ISPs are monopolists in most places, we could also expect Internet-based service experience quality to deteriorate in general.

What this might encourage is a proliferation of alternatives to cable ISPs, which would be interesting. Ending net neutrality creates a much larger design space in products that provision network access. Mobile companies are in this space already. So we could see this regulation as a move in favor of the cell phone companies, not just the ISPs. This too could draw surplus away the big four.

This probably means the end of “The Web”. But we’d already seen the end of “The Web” with the proliferation of apps as a replacement for Internet browsing. IoT provides yet another alternative to “The Web”. I loved the Web as a free, creative place where everyone could make their own website about their cat. It had a great moment. But it’s safe to say that it isn’t what it used to be. In fifteen years it may be that most people no longer visit web sites. They just use connected devices and apps. Ending net neutrality means that the connectivity necessary for these services can be bundled in with the service itself. In the long run, that should be good for consumers and even the possibility of market entry for new firms.

In the long run, I’m not sure “The Web” is that important. Maybe it was a beautiful disruptive moment that will never happen again. Or maybe, if there were many more kinds of alternatives, “The Web” would return to being the quirky, radically free and interesting thing it was before it got so mainstream. Remember when The Web was just The Well (which is still around), and only people who were really curious about it bothered to use it? I don’t, because that was well before my time. But it’s possible that the Internet in its browse-happy form will become something like that again.

I hadn’t really thought about net neutrality very much before, to be honest. Maybe there are some good rebuttals to this argument. I’d love to hear them! But for now, I think I’m willing to give the shuttering of net neutrality a shot.

Marcuse, de Beauvoir, and Badiou: reflections on three strategies

I have written in this blog about three different philosophers who articulated a vision of hope for a more free world, including in their account an understanding of the role of technology. I would like to compare these views because nuanced differences between them may be important.

First, let’s talk about Marcuse, a Frankfurt School thinker whose work was an effective expression of philosophical Marxism that catalyzed the New Left. Marcuse was, like other Frankfurt School thinkers, concerned about the role of technology in society. His proposed remedy was “the transcendent project“, which involves an attempt at advancing “the totality” through an understanding of its logic and action to transform it into something that is better, more free.

As I began to discuss here, there is a problem with this kind of Marxist aspiration for a transformation of all of society through philosophical understanding, which is this: the political and technical totality exists as it does in no small part to manage its own internal information flows. Information asymmetries and differentiation of control structures are a feature, not a bug. The convulsions caused by the Internet as it tears and repairs the social fabric have not created the conditions of unified enlightened understanding. Rather, they have exposed that given nearly boundless access to information, most people will ignore it and maintain, against all evidence to the contrary, the dignity of one who has a valid opinion.

The Internet makes a mockery of expertise, and makes no exception for the expertise necessary for the Marcusian “transcendental project”. Expertise may be replaced with the technological apparati of artificial intelligence and mass data collection, but the latter are a form of capital whose distribution is a part of the totality. If they are having their transcendent effect today, as the proponents of AI claim, this effect is in the hands of a very few. Their motivations are inscrutable. As they have their own opinions and courtiers, writing for them is futile. They are, properly speaking, a great uncertainty that shows that centralized control does not close down all options. It may be that the next defining moment in history is set by the decision of how Jeff Bezos decides to spend his wealth, and that is his decision alone. For “our” purposes–yours, my reader, and mine–this arbitrariness of power must be seen as part of the totality to be transcended, if that is possible.

It probably isn’t. And if it Really isn’t, that may be the best argument for something like the postmodern breakdown of all epistemes. There are at least two strands of postmodern thought coming from the denial of traditional knowledge and university structure. The first is the phenomenological privileging of subjective experience. This approach has the advantage of never being embarrassed by the fact that the Internet is constantly exposing us as fools. Rather, it allows us to narcissistically and uncritically indulge in whatever bubble we find ourselves in. The alternative approach is to explicitly theorize about ones finitude and the radical implications of it, to embrace a kind of realist skepticism or at least acknowledgement of the limitations of the human condition.

It’s this latter approach which was taken up by the existentialists in the mid-20th century. In particular, I keep returning to de Beauvoir as a hopeful voice that recognizes a role for science that is not totalizing, but nevertheless liberatory. De Beauvoir does not take aim, like Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, at societal transformation. Her concern is with individual transformation, which is, given the radical uncertainty of society, a far more tractable problem. Individual ethics are based in local effects, not grand political outcomes. The desirable local effects are personal liberation and liberation of those one comes in contact with. Science, and other activities, is a way of opening new possibilities, not limited to what is instrumental for control.

Such a view of incremental, local, individual empowerment and goodness seems naive in the face of pessimistic views of society’s corruptedness. Whether these be economic or sociological theories of how inequality and oppression are locked into society, and however emotionally compelling and widespread they may be in social media, it is necessary by our previous argument to remember that these views are always mere ideology, not scientific fact, because an accurate totalizing view of society is impossible given real constraints on information flow and use. Totalizing ideologies that are not rigorous in their acceptance of basic realistic points are a symptom of more complex social structure (i.e. the distribution of capitals, the reproduction of many habiti) not a definition of it.

It is consistent for a scientific attitude to deflate political ideology because this deflation is an opening of possibility against both utopian and dystopian trajectories. What’s missing is a scientific proof of this very point, comparable to a Halting Problem or Incompleteness Theorem, but for social understanding.

A last comment, comparing Badiou to de Beauvoir and Marcuse. Badiou’s theory of the Event as the moment that may be seized to effect a transformation is perhaps a synthesis of existentialist and Marxian philosophies. Badiou is still concerned with transcendence, i.e. the moment when, given one assumed structure to life or reality or psychology, one discovers an opening into a renewed life with possibilities that the old model did not allow. But (at least as far as I have read him, which is not enough) he sees the Event as something that comes from without. It cannot be predicted or anticipate within the system but is instead a kind of grace. Without breaking explicitly from professional secularism, Badiou’s work suggests that we must have faith in something outside our understanding to provide an opportunity for transcendence. This is opposed to the more muscular theories described above: Marcuse’s theory of transcendent political activism and de Beauvoir’s active individual projects are not as patient.

I am still young and strong and so prefer the existentialist position on these matters. I am politically engaged to some extent and so, as an extension of my projects of individual freedom, am in search of opportunities for political transcendence as well–a kind of Marcuse light, as politics like science is a field of contest that is reproduced as its games are played and this is its structure. But life has taught me again and again to appreciate Badiou’s point as well, which is the appreciation of the unforeseen opportunity, the scientific and political anomaly.

What does this reflection conclude?

First, it acknowledges the situatedness and fragility of expertise, which deflates grand hopes for transcendent political projects. Pessimistic ideologies that characterize the totality as beyond redemption are false; indeed it is characteristic of the totality that it is incomprehensible. This is a realistic view, and transcendence must take it seriously.

Second, it acknowledges the validity of more localized liberatory projects despite the first point.

Third, it acknowledges that the unexpected event is a feature of the totality to be embraced, contrary to pessimistic ideologies to the contrary. The latter, far from encouraging transcendence, are blinders that prevent the recognition of events.

Because realism requires that we not abandon core logical principles despite our empirical uncertainty, you may permit one more deduction. To the extent that actors in society pursue the de Beauvoiran strategy of engaging in local liberatory projects that affect others, the probability of a Badiousian event in the life of another increases. Solipsism is false, and so (to put it tritely) “random acts of kindness” do have their effect on the totality, in aggregate. In fact, there may be no more radical political agenda than this opening up of spaces of local freedom, which shrugs off the depression of pessimistic ideology and suppression of technical control. Which is not a new view at all. What is perhaps surprising is how easy it may be.

Notes on Clark Kerr’s “The ‘City of Intellect’ in a Century for Foxes?”, in The Uses of the University 5th Edition

I am in my seventh and absolutely, definitely last year of a doctoral program and so have many questions about the future of higher education and whether or not I will be a part of it. For insight, I have procured an e-book copy of Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University (5th Edition, 2001). Clark Kerr was the 20th President of University of California system and became famous among other things for his candid comments on university administration, which included such gems as

“I find that the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.”

…and…

“One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.”

The Uses of the University is a collection of lectures on the topic of the university, most of which we given in the second half of the 20th century. The most recent edition contains a lecture given in the year 2000, after Kerr had retired from administration, but anticipating the future of the university in the 21st century. The title of the lecture is “The ‘City of Intellect’ in a Century for Foxes?”, and it is encouragingly candid and prescient.

To my surprise, Kerr approaches the lecture as a forecasting exercise. Intriguingly, Kerr employs the hedgehog/fox metaphor from Isaiah Berlin in a lecture about forecasting five years before the publication of Tetlock’s 2005 book Expert Political Judgment (review link), which used the fox/hedgehog distinction to cluster properties that were correlated with political expert’s predictive power. Kerr’s lecture is structured partly as the description of a series of future scenarios, reminiscent of scenario planning as a forecasting method. I didn’t expect any of this, and it goes to show perhaps how pervasive scenario thinking was as a 20th century rhetorical technique.

Kerr makes a number of warning about the university in the 20th century, especially with respect to the glory of the university in the 20th century. He makes a historical case for this: universities in the 20th century thrived on new universal access to students, federal investment in universities as the sites of basic research, and general economic prosperity. He doesn’t see these guaranteed in the 20th century, though he also makes the point that in official situations, the only thing a university president should do is discuss the past with pride and the future with apprehension. He has a rather detailed analysis of the incentives guiding this rhetorical strategy as part of the lecture, which makes you wonder how much salt to take the rest of the lecture with.

What are the warnings Kerr makes? Some are a continuation of the problems universities experienced in the 20th century. Military and industrial research funding changed the roles of universities away from liberal arts education into research shop. This was not a neutral process. Undergraduate education suffered, and in 1963 Kerr predicted that this slackening of the quality of undergraduate education would lead to student protests. He was half right; students instead turned their attention externally to politics. Under these conditions, there grew to be a great tension between the “internal justice” of a university that attempted to have equality among its faculty and the permeation of external forces that made more of the professiorate face outward. A period of attempted reforms throguh “participatory democracy” was “a flash in the pan”, resulting mainly in “the creation of courses celebrating ethnic, racial, and gender diversities. “This experience with academic reform illustrated how radical some professors can be when they look at the external world and how conservative when they look inwardly at themselves–a split personality”.

This turn to industrial and military funding and the shift of universities away from training in morality (theology), traditional professions (medicine, law), self-chosen intellectual interest for its own sake, and entrance into elite society towards training for the labor force (including business administration and computer science) is now quite old–at least 50 years. Among other things, Kerr predicts, this means that we will be feeling the effects of the hollowing out of the education system that happened as higher education deprioritized teaching in favor of research. The baby boomers who went through this era of vocational university education become, in Kerr’s analysis, an enormous class of retirees by 2030, putting new strain on the economy at large. Meanwhile, without naming computers and the Internet, Kerr acknowledged that the “electronic revolution” is the first major change to affect universities for three hundred years, and could radically alter their role in society. He speaks highly of Peter Drucker, who in 1997 was already calling the university “a failure” that would be made obsolete by long-distance learning.

In an intriguing comment on aging baby boomers, which Kerr discusses under the heading “The Methuselah Scenario”, is that the political contest between retirees and new workers will break down partly along racial lines: “Nasty warfare may take place between the old and the young, parents and children, retired Anglos and labor force minorities.” Almost twenty years later, this line makes me wonder how much current racial tensions are connected to age and aging. Have we seen the baby boomer retirees rise as a political class to vigorously defend the welfare state from plutocratic sabotage? Will we?

Kerr discusses the scenario of the ‘disintegration of the integrated university’. The old model of medicine, agriculture, and law integrated into one system is coming apart as external forces become controlling factors within the university. Kerr sees this in part as a source of ethical crises for universities.

“Integration into the external world inevitably leads to disintegration of the university internally. What are perceived by some as the injustices in the external labor market penetrate the system of economic rewards on campus, replacing policies of internal justice. Commitments to external interests lead to internal conflicts over the impartiality of the search for truth. Ideologies conflict. Friendships and loyalties flow increasingly outward. Spouses, who once held the academic community together as a social unit, now have their own jobs. “Alma Mater Dear” to whom we “sing a joyful chorus” becomes an almost laughable idea.”

A factor in this disintegration is globalization, which Kerr identifies with the mobility of those professors who are most able to get external funding. These professors have increased bargaining power and can use “the banner of departmental autonomy” to fight among themselves for industrial contracts. Without oversight mechanisms, “the university is helpless in the face of the combined onslaught of aggressive industry and entrepreneurial faculty members”.

Perhaps most fascinating for me, because it resonates with some of my more esoteric passions, is Kerr’s section on “The fractionalization of the academic guild“. Subject matter interest breaks knowledge into tiny disconnected topics–"Once upon a time, the entire academic enterprise originated in and remained connected to philosophy." The tension between "internal justice" and the "injustices of the external labor market" creates a conflict over monetary rewards. Poignantly, "fractionalization also increases over differing convictions about social justice, over whether it should be defined as equality of opportunity or equality of results, the latter often taking the form of equality of representation. This may turn out to be the penultimate ideological battle on campus."

And then:

The ultimate conflict may occur over models of the university itself, whether to support the traditional or the “postmodern” model. The traditional model is based on the enlightenment of the eighteenth century–rationality, scientific processes of thought, the search for truth, objectivity, “knowledge for its own sake and for its practical applications.” And the traditional university, to quote the Berkeley philosopher John Searle, “attempts to be apolitical or at least politically neutral.” The university of postmodernism thinks that all discourse is political anyway, and it seeks to use the university for beneficial rather than repressive political ends… The postmodernists are attempting to challenge certain assumptions about the nature of truth, objectivity, rationality, reality, and intellectual quality.”

… Any further politicization of the university will, of course, alienate much of the public at large. While most acknowledge that the traditional university was partially politicized already, postmodernism will further raise questions of whether the critical function of the university is based on political orientation rather than on nonpolitical scientific analysis.”

I could go on endlessly about this topic; I’ll try to be brief. First, as per Lyotard’s early analysis of the term, postmodernism is as much as result of the permeation of the university by industrial interests as anything else. Second, we are seeing, right now today in Congress and on the news etc., the eroded trust that a large portion of the public has of university “expertise”, as they assume (having perhaps internalized a reductivist version of the postmodern message despite or maybe because they were being taught by teaching assistants instead of professors) that the professoriate is politically biased. And now the students are in revolt over Free Speech again as a result.

Kerr entertains for a paragraph the possibility of a Hobbesian doomsday free-for-all over the university before considering more mundane possibilities such as a continuation of the status quo. Adapting to new telecommunications (including “virtual universities”), new amazing discoveries in biological sciences, and higher education as a step in mid-career advancement are all in Kerr’s more pragmatic view of the future. The permeability of the university can bring good as well as bad as it is influenced by traffic back and forth across its borders. “The drawbridge is now down. Who and what shall cross over it?”

Kerr counts three major wildcards determining the future of the university. The first is overall economic productivity, the second is fluctuations in returns to a higher education. The third is the United States’ role in the global economy “as other nations or unions of nations (for example, the EU) may catch up with and even surpass it. The quality of education and training for all citizens will be to this contest. The American university may no longer be supreme.” Fourth, student unrest turning universities into the “independent critic”. And fifth, the battles within the professoriate, “over academic merit versus social justice in treatment of students, over internal justice in the professional reward system versus the pressures of external markets, over the better model for the university–modern or post-modern.”

He concludes with three wishes for the open-minded, cunning, savvy administrator of the future, the “fox”:

1. Careful study of new information technologies and their role.
2. “An open, in-depth debate…between the proponents of the traditional and the postmodern university instead of the sniper shots of guerilla warfare…”
3. An “in-depth discussion…about the ethical systems of the future university”. “Now the ethical problems are found more in the flow of contacts between the academic and the external worlds. There have never been so many ethical problems swirling about as today.”

Contextual Integrity as a field

There was a nice small gathering of nearby researchers (and one important call-in) working on Contextual Integrity at Princeton’s CITP today. It was a nice opportunity to share what we’ve been working on and make plans for the future.

There was a really nice range of different contributions: systems engineering for privacy policy enforcement, empirical survey work testing contextualized privacy expectations, a proposal for a participatory design approach to identifying privacy norms in marginalized communities, a qualitative study on how children understand privacy, and an analysis of the privacy implications of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, among other work.

What was great is that everybody was on the same page about what we were after: getting a better understanding of what privacy really is, so that we can design between policies, educational tools, and technologies that preserve it. For one reason or another, the people in the room had been attracted to Contextual Integrity. Many of us have reservations about the theory in one way or another, but we all see its value and potential.

One note of consensus was that we should try to organize a workshop dedicated specifically to Contextual Integrity, and widening what we accomplished today to bring in more researchers. Today’s meeting was a convenience sample, leaving out a lot of important perspectives.

Another interesting thing that happened today was a general acknowledgment that Contextual Integrity is not a static framework. As a theory, it is subject to change as scholars critique and contribute to it through their empirical and theoretical work. A few of us are excited about the possibility of a Contextual Integrity 2.0, extending the original theory to fill theoretical gaps that have been identified in it.

I’d articulate the aspiration of the meeting today as being about letting Contextual Integrity grow from being a framework into a field–a community of people working together to cultivate something, in this case, a kind of knowledge.

Appearance, deed, and thing: meta-theory of the politics of technology

Flammarion engraving

Much is written today about the political and social consequences of technology. This writing often maintains that this inquiry into politics and society is distinct from the scientific understanding that informs the technology itself. This essay argues that this distinction is an error. Truly, there is only one science of technology and its politics.

Appearance, deed, and thing

There are worthwhile distinctions made between how our experience of the world feels to us directly (appearance), how we can best act strategically in the world (deed), and how the world is “in itself” or, in a sense, despite ourselves (individually) (thing).

Appearance

The world as we experience it has been given the name “phenomenon” (late Latin from Greek phainomenon ‘thing appearing to view’) and so “phenomenology” is the study of what we colloquially call today our “lived experience”. Some anthropological methods are a kind of social phenomenology, and some scholars will deny that there is anything beyond phenomenology. Those that claim to have a more effective strategy or truer picture of the world may have rhetorical power, powers that work on the lived experience of the more oppressed people because they have not been adequately debunked and shown to be situated, relativized. The solution to social and political problems, to these scholars, is more phenomenology.*

Deed

There are others that see things differently. A perhaps more normal attitude is that the outcomes of ones actions are more important that how the world feels. Things can feel one way now and another way tomorrow; does it much matter? If one holds some beliefs that don’t work when practically applied, one can correct oneself. The name for this philosophical attitude is pragmatism, (from Greek pragma, ‘deed’). There are many people, including some scholars, who find this approach entirely sufficient. The solution to social and political problems is more pragmatism. Sometimes this involves writing off impractical ideas and the people who hold them either useless or as mere pawns. It is their loss.

Thing

There are others that see things still differently. A perhaps diminishing portion of the population holds theories of how the world works that transcend both their own lived experience and individual practical applications. Scientific theories about the physical nature of the universe, though tested pragmatically and through the phenomena apparent to the scientists, are based in a higher claim about their value. As Bourdieu (2004) argues, the whole field of science depends on the accepted condition that scientists fairly contend for a “monopoly on the arbitration of the real”. Scientific theories are tested through contest, with a deliberate effort by all parties to prove their theory to be the greatest. These conditions of contest hold science to a more demanding standard than pragmatism, as results of applying a pragmatic attitude will depend on the local conditions of action. Scientific theories are, in principle, accountable to the real (from late Latin realis, from Latin res ‘thing’); these scientists may
be called ‘realists’ in general, though there are many flavors of realism as, appropriately, theories of what is real and how to discover reality have come and gone (see post-positivism and critical realism, for example).

Realists may or may not be concerned with social and political problems. Realists may ask: What is a social problem? What do solutions to these problems look like?

By this account, these three foci and their corresponding methodological approaches are not equivalent to each other. Phenomenology concerns itself with documenting the multiplicity of appearances. Pragmatism introduces something over and above this: a sorting or evaluation of appearances based on some goals or desired outcomes. Realism introduces something over and above pragmatism: an attempt at objectivity based on the contest of different theories across a wide range of goals. ‘Disinterested’ inquiry, or equivalently inquiry that is maximally inclusive of all interests, further refines the evaluation of which appearances are valid.

If this account sounds disparaging of phenomenology as merely a part of higher and more advanced forms of inquiry, that is truly how it is intended. However, it is equally notable that to live up to its own standard of disinterestedness, realism must include phenomenology fully within itself.

Nature and technology

It would be delightful if we could live forever in a world of appearances that takes the shape that we desire of it when we reason about it critically enough. But this is not how any but the luckiest live.

Rather, the world acts on us in ways that we do not anticipate. Things appear to us unbidden; they are born, and sometimes this is called ‘nature’ (from Latin natura ‘birth, nature, quality,’ from nat- ‘born’). The first snow of Winter comes as a surprise after a long warm Autumn. We did nothing to summon it, it was always there. For thousands of years humanity has worked to master nature through pragmatic deeds and realistic science. Now, very little of nature has been untouched by human hands. The stars are still things in themselves. Our planetary world is one we have made.

“Technology” (from Greek tekhnologia ‘systematic treatment,’ from tekhnē ‘art, craft’) is what we call those things that are made by skillful human deed. A glance out the window into a city, or at the device one uses to read this blog post, is all one needs to confirm that the world is full of technology. Sitting in the interior of an apartment now, literally everything in my field of vision except perhaps my own two hands and the potted plant are technological artifacts.

Science and technology studies: political appearances

According to one narrative, Winner (1980) famously asked the galling question “Do artifacts have politics?” and spawned a field of study** that questions the social consequences of technology. Science and Technology Studies (STS) is, purportedly, this field.
The insight this field claims as their own is that technology has social impact that is politically interesting, the specifics of this design determine these impacts, and that the social context of the design therefore influences the consequences of the technology. At its most ambitious, STS attempts to take the specifics of the technology out of the explanatory loop, showing instead how politics drives design and implementation to further political ends.

Anthropological methods are popular among STS scholars, who often commit themselves to revealing appearances that demonstrate the political origins and impacts of technology. The STS researcher might asked, rhetorically, “Did you know that this interactive console is designed and used for surveillance?”

We can nod sagely at these observations. Indeed, things appear to people in myriad ways, and critical analysis of those appearances does expose that there is a multiplicity of ways of looking at things. But what does one do with this picture?

The pragmatic turn back to realism

When one starts to ask the pragmatic question “What is to be done?”, one leaves the domain of mere appearances and begins to question the consequences of one’s deeds. This leads one to take actions and observe the unanticipated results. Suddenly, one is engaging in experimentation, and new kinds of knowledge are necessary. One needs to study organizational theory to understand the role of h technology within a firm, economics to understand how it interacts with the economy. One quickly leaves the field of study known as “science and technology studies” as soon as one begins to consider ones practical effects.

Worse (!), the pragmatist quickly discovers that discovering the impact of ones deeds requires an analysis of probabilities and the difficulty techniques of sampling data and correcting for bias. These techniques have been proven through the vigorous contest of the realists, and the pragmatist discovers that many tools–technologies–have been invented and provisioned for them to make it easier to use these robust strategies. The pragmatist begins to use, without understanding them, all the fruits of science. Their successes are alienated from their narrow lived experience, which are not enough to account for the miracles the= world–one others have invented for them–performs for them every day.

The pragmatist must draw the following conclusions. The world is full of technology, is constituted by it. The world is also full of politics. Indeed, the world is both politics and technology; politics is a technology; technology is form of politics. The world that must be mastered, for pragmatic purposes, is this politico-technical*** world.

What is technical about the world is that it is a world of things created through deed. These things manifest themselves in appearances in myriad and often unpredictable ways.

What is political about the world is that it is a contest of interests. To the most naive student, it may be a shock that technology is part of this contest of interests, but truly this is the most extreme naivete. What adolescent is not exposed to some form of arms race, whether it be in sports equipment, cosmetics, transportation, recreation, etc. What adult does not encounter the reality of technology’s role in their own business or home, and the choice of what to procure and use.

The pragmatist must be struck by the sheer obviousness of the observation that artifacts “have” politics, though they must also acknowledge that “things” are different from the deeds that create them and the appearances they create. There are, after all, many mistakes in design. The effects of technology may as often be due to incompetence as they are to political intent. And to determine the difference, one must contest the designer of the technology on their own terms, in the engineering discourse that has attempted to prove which qualities of a thing survive scrutiny across all interests. The pragmatist engaging the politico-technical world has to ask: “What is real?”

The real thing

“What is real?” This is the scientific question. It has been asked again and again for thousands of years for reasons not unlike those traced in this essay. The scientific struggle is the political struggle for mastery over our own politico-technical world, over the reality that is being constantly reinvented as things through human deeds.

There are no short cuts to answering this question. There are only many ways to cop out. These steps take one backward into striving for ones local interest or, further, into mere appearance, with its potential for indulgence and delusion. This is the darkness of ignorance. Forward, far ahead, is a horizon, an opening, a strange new light.

* This narrow view of the ‘privilege of subjectivity’ is perhaps a cause of recent confusion over free speech on college campuses. Realism, as proposed in this essay, is a possible alternative to that.

** It has been claimed that this field of study does not exist, much to the annoyance of those working within it.

*** I believe this term is no uglier than the now commonly used “sociotechnical”.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. Science of science and reflexivity. Polity, 2004.

Winner, Langdon. “Do artifacts have politics?.” Daedalus (1980): 121-136.

managerialism, continued

I’ve begun preliminary skimmings of Enteman’s Managerialism. It is a dense work of analytic philosophy, thick with argument. Sporadic summaries may not do it justice. That said, the principle of this blog is that the bar for ‘publication’ is low.

According to its introduction, Enteman’s Managerialism is written by a philosophy professor (Willard Enteman) who kept finding that the “great thinkers”–Adam Smith, Karl Marx–and the theories espoused in their writing kept getting debunked by his students. Contemporary examples showed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the United States was not a capitalist country whose only alternative was socialism. In his observation, the United States in 1993 was neither strictly speaking capitalist, nor was it socialist. There was a theoretical gap that needed to be filled.

One of the concepts reintroduced by Enteman is Robert Dahl‘s concept of polyarchy, or “rule by many”. A polyarchy is neither a dictatorship nor a democracy, but rather is a form of government where many different people with different interests, but then again probably not everybody, is in charge. It represents some necessary but probably insufficient conditions for democracy.

This view of power seems evidently correct in most political units within the United States. Now I am wondering if I should be reading Dahl instead of Enteman. It appears that Dahl was mainly offering this political theory in contrast to a view that posited that political power was mainly held by a single dominant elite. In a polyarchy, power is held by many different kinds of elites in contest with each other. At its democratic best, these elites are responsive to citizen interests in a pluralistic way, and this works out despite the inability of most people to participate in government.

I certainly recommend the Wikipedia articles linked above. I find I’m sympathetic to this view, having come around to something like it myself but through the perhaps unlikely path of Bourdieu.

This still limits the discussion of political power in terms of the powers of particular people. Managerialism, if I’m reading it right, makes the case that individual power is not atomic but is due to organizational power. This makes sense; we can look at powerful individuals having an influence on government, but a more useful lens could look to powerful companies and civil society organizations, because these shape the incentives of the powerful people within them.

I should make a shift I’ve made just now explicit. When we talk about democracy, we are often talking about a formal government, like a sovereign nation or municipal government. But when we talk about powerful organizations in society, we are no longer just talking about elected officials and their appointees. We are talking about several different classes of organizations–businesses, civil society organizations, and governments among them–interacting with each other.

It may be that that’s all there is to it. Maybe Capitalism is an ideology that argues for more power to businesses, Socialism is an ideology that argues for more power to formal government, and Democracy is an ideology that argues for more power to civil society institutions. These are zero-sum ideologies. Managerialism would be a theory that acknowledges the tussle between these sectors at the organizational level, as opposed to at the atomic individual level.

The reason why this is a relevant perspective to engage with today is that there has probably in recent years been a transfer of power (I might say ‘control’) from government to corporations–especially Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple). Frank Pasquale makes the argument for this in a recent piece. He writes and speaks with a particular policy agenda that is far better researched than this blog post. But a good deal of the work is framed around the surprise that ‘governance’ might shift to a private company in the first place. This is a framing that will always be striking to those who are invested in the politics of the state; the very word “govern” is unmarkedly used for formal government and then surprising when used to refer to something else.

Managerialism, then, may be a way of pointing to an option where more power is held by non-state actors. Crucially, though, managerialism is not the same thing as neoliberalism, because neoliberalism is based on laissez-faire market ideology and contempory information infrastructure oligopolies look nothing like laissez-faire markets! Calling the transfer of power from government to corporation today neoliberalism is quite anachronistic and misleading, really!

Perhaps managerialism, like polyarchy, is a descriptive term of a set of political conditions that does not represent an ideal, but a reality with potential to become an ideal. In that case, it’s worth investigating managerialism more carefully and determining what it is and isn’t, and why it is on the rise.

beginning Enteman’s Managerialism

I’ve been writing about managerialism without having done my homework.

Today I got a new book in the mail, Willard Enteman’s Managerialism: The Emergence of a New Ideology, a work of analytic political philosophy that came out in 1993. The gist of the book is that none of the dominant world ideologies of the time–capitalism, socialism, and democracy–actually describe the world as it functions.

Enter Enteman’s managerialism, which considers a society composed of organizations, not individuals, and social decisions as a consequence of the decisions of organizational managers.

It’s striking that this political theory has been around for so long, though it is perhaps more relevant today because of large digital platforms.

How to promote employees using machine learning without societal bias

Though it may at first read as being callous, a managerialist stance on inequality in statistical classification can help untangle some of the rhetoric around this tricky issue.

Consider the example that’s been in the news lately:

Suppose a company begins to use an algorithm to make decisions about which employees to promote. It uses a classifier trained on past data about who has been promoted. Because of societal bias, women are systematically under-promoted; this is reflected in the data set. The algorithm, naively trained on the historical data, reproduces the historical bias.

This example describes a bad situation. It is bad from a social justice perspective; by assumption, it would be better if men and women had equal opportunity in this work place.

It is also bad from a managerialist perspective. Why? Because if the point of using an algorithm were not to correct for societal biases introducing irrelevancies into the promotion decision, then it would not make managerial sense to change business practices over to using an algorithm. The whole point of using an algorithm is to improve on human decision-making. This is a poor match of an algorithm to a problem.

Unfortunately, what makes this example compelling is precisely what makes it a bad example of using an algorithm in this context. The only variables discussed in the example are the socially salient ones thick with political implications: gender, and promotion. What are more universal concerns than gender relations and socioeconomic status?!

But from a managerialist perspective, promotions should be issued based on a number of factors not mentioned in the example. What factors are these? That’s a great and difficult question. Promotions can reward hard work and loyalty. They can also be issued to those who demonstrate capacity for leadership, which can be a function of how well they get along with other members of the organization. There may be a number of features that predict these desirable qualities, most of which will have to do with working conditions within the company as opposed to qualities inherent in the employee (such as their past education, or their gender).

If one were to start to use machine learning intelligently to solve this problem, then one would go about solving it in a way entirely unlike the procedure in the problematic example. One would rather draw on soundly sourced domain expertise to develop a model of the relationship between relevant, work-related factors. For many of the key parts of the model, such as general relationships between personality type, leadership style, and cooperation with colleagues, one would look outside the organization for gold standard data that was sampled responsibly.

Once the organization has this model, then it can apply it to its own employees. For this to work, employees would need to provide significant detail about themselves, and the company would need to provide contextual information about the conditions under which employees work, as these may be confounding factors.

Part of the merit of building and fitting such a model would be that, because it is based on a lot of new and objective scientific considerations, it would produce novel results in recommending promotions. Again, if the algorithm merely reproduced past results, it would not be worth the investment in building the model.

When the algorithm is introduced, it ideally is used in a way that maintains traditional promotion processes in parallel so that the two kinds of results can be compared. Evaluation of the algorithm’s performance, relative to traditional methods, is a long, arduous process full of potential insights. Using the algorithm as an intervention at first allows the company to develop a causal understanding its impact. Insights from the evaluation can be factored back into the algorithm, improving the latter.

In all these cases, the company must keep its business goals firmly in mind. If they do this, then the rest of the logic of their method falls out of data science best practices, which are grounded in mathematical principles of statistics. While the political implications of poorly managed machine learning are troubling, effective management of machine learning which takes the precautions necessary to develop objectivity is ultimately a corrective to social bias. This is a case where sounds science and managerialist motives and social justice are aligned.