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False Positivism

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21 pointssmarm12 comments

Solzhenitsyn had a few things to say about relinquishing individual responsibility in favor of group think.

Abandoning the individual for a bleak world of oppression power dynamics and the postmodern notion that there is no objective truth sounds pretty terrible. This reads like Diversity Inclusion and Equity AI nightmare.

"To the degree that individuals refuse to be modeled, they are to blame for the models’ failures to be comprehensive enough to represent the world accurately and equitably"

This translates for me as "See, you desire for privacy is harming others..."

Polack does not seem to be one that makes the theories of the commented (Bratton) clearer by drawing a preliminary untangled map. Before commenting on Bratton's ideas themselves we should (unfortunately) clarify them by reading them directly, as Polack's review does not really work as a summary.

Simplify the question of models/algorithms by pretending these models are simply cold hard scientific facts. The problems still remain - people will interpret them differently. Different people will combine those universal facts with their own differing moral values, to come up with different conclusions on how those facts should be used.

The solution is not to restrict the existence of models/algorithms/facts, but to make explicit the moral values they are combined with when determining policy.

The problem is that the models and algorithms are so complex and sizzly that it can make it more difficult to tease out the implicit moral values that are embedded in the policies that use them.

The bigger problem is this postmodern view creates a bit of a circular problem. Someone needs to decide what the moral values are. Oppressor's are evil (both consciously and unconsciously) and do not have an accurate view of the world. The lived experience of the oppressed situates them to better make this judgement. Once they can make that judgement they gain power. Power corrupts. The oppressed becomes the oppressor. What do you do next? How do you stop the cycle? I suppose Foucault believed that Heterotopia (utopia) is just around the corner, you just need to shift the power around and it will bloom but this doesn't seem logically consistent to me.

How on earth is that postmodern? Unless you define Hume himself as postmodern. It's a classic is/ought problem.

Just because two sets of people have different values doesn't mean one value isn't clearly better than the other. You and I can disagree on something like whether human life has value, but the one who holds it to have value is likely to have a lot more support.

Did postmodernism get redefined to mean anyone who doesn't believe in moral facts?

"Foucault’s ideas gave rise in the 1970s and ’80s to philosophical postmodernism, a movement characterized by broad epistemological skepticism and ethical subjectivism, a general suspicion of reason, and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Postmodernists attacked the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers and others to discover allegedly objective moral values that could serve as a standard for assessing different political systems or for measuring political progress from one historical period to another. According to Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), for example, this project represents a secular faith that must be abandoned. In La Condition postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern Condition) and other writings, Lyotard declared his suspicion of what he called “grand narratives”—putatively rational, overarching accounts, such as Marxism and liberalism, of how the world is or ought to be. He asserted that political conflicts in contemporary societies reflect the clash of incommensurable values and perspectives and are therefore not rationally decidable."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy/Foucau...

Someone should just stick a fork in the term "postmodern" and finally declare it dead. The above meaning I largely agree with, as would Hume. Of course people can have different values, and of course people with different values, faced with the same facts, might come up with different normative conclusions of what should be done about it.

But that's a far cry from how postmodernism is often decried, as something that professes no objective truth at all, or as a bunch of lazy moral relativism, where the value itself changes depending on circumstance.

So you can easily have two people fighting about postmodernism that might even largely agree with each other; that they dislike moral relativism. But one would attack post-modernism, and the other would defend it, neither really quite clear what they are actually talking about. Which seems to be another definition of postmodernism itself.

Anyway. :) Back to your original question. Given the absence of actual moral facts (which I take as axiomatic), I think the answer is limited to some public decision process that decides which moral values are in force, along with an effective way to re-decide frequently in a way that avoids the problems of becoming insular and self-reinforcing.

(Disregarding a few complexities about the quality and stability of the models)

The problem of linking different "facts" and actions is ancient and has a plain solution: the politician applies the weighs of different interests according to the relative power behind those interests (including tactical or strategical considerations about the consequences). I am not sure that to call those interests «moral values» is actually healthy.

One issue we cannot disregard is that not only facts can be tentative: the main issue we have is with tentative solutions - it is more with guessing which solution will be effective (its estimated consequences get weighed according to the interests in order to rank the proposal) than to decide which interpretation of the world is more adequate.

Edit: anyway, Bratton seems to be fully aware and explicit in considering that "fact are less of an issue than solutions" and that "said solutions are to be calibrated subjectively, politically - since an "objective", all-encompassing algorithm is out of reach".

"Property is a burden, we want the experience.

The capitalocommunism way of life is coming, a new political system will be needed. The one-party regime will rule: The Machine.

Digitalization is to put information about us and the world into computers.

The more information we have (IoT, GPS, Cookies…), the more means to share it we have (smartphone, 5G, high-speed Internet) and the more capability of computing we have (Algorithm, IA); the more we can combine them to create new services and to outperform the old ways. Every bite of our lives tend to be digitalized and businesses build “as a service” whenever it’s possible. It costs less: better allocation of resources. That’s all. No more property, only the experience.

No need to possess anything, your revenue or a basic income will grant you access to the life you need and you want based on what has been digitalized. The algorithm will know better than you do.

You feel that you are losing your freedom? If the algorithm and the digital world can manipulate and serve you for your best interest (or for the best interest of somebody else or something else), maybe it’s because you were never free.

We were never free.

Only, this time it’s the machine we have built that controls the causes of our actions and thoughts, and less and less an unknown environment. But we don’t control the machines, we merely is the cause of their existence. We haven’t (nobody has) create them, companies have. And the aim of all companies is to make money. If they don’t optimize the way they are making money, they will be bought and reoptmized by Warren Buffet’s kind of people, or the competition will crush them. The fittest survive.

The Democratic control is inexistent our leaders don’t know much about the digital revolution, we don’t know much about it, nobody does and nobody is nowhere to be found. It’s just happening.

Companies have created machines to make money in the free market, democratic and technological frame of our days.

The form of the companies is determined by this frame.

Will we be able to digitalize and externalize our whole life as a service?

Is VR the beginning and Neuralink the final project?

Will we be happy?

Where are we heading to?"

https://medium.com/hackernoon/life-as-a-service-laas-no-more...

I've been writing about this subject. The tech revolution is coming. You have folks like Andrew Yang who is talking about UBI because this is coming. The message is right, but way too soon.

What matters most will be the maslow hierarchy of needs.

Clean water is around but certainly not widely available and we have some concerns about 'clean' if you read about endocrine blockers.

Food is nowhere near automated. When can produce food in a factory using a fraction of sq ft and virtually no labour. This will be key to the breakthrough. the problem with urban sprawl is that you eliminate and push away farming. Those farmers are pushed away from clean water and internet. Septic systems etc.

Roof and bed for everyone is coming along with 3d printed homes. You dont need crazy housing inspections and rules. It needs to be solid.

When the government or whoever comes in and provides these things, they become the world ruler.

I question your assertion. It seems like providing a "roof and bed" is actually a solved problem in terms of manufacturing. I say manufacturing specifically because you bring up 3D printed homes. The problems with housing supply are due to social externalities rather than lack of innovation.

"When the government or whoever comes in and provides these things, they become the world ruler." I also challenge this because governments have tried to provide nearly free housing, food, water, and even direct payments from the government. But these efforts have not worked as well as hoped and the idea has not swept the world into a new paradigm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe

>I question your assertion. It seems like providing a "roof and bed" is actually a solved problem in terms of manufacturing. I say manufacturing specifically because you bring up 3D printed homes. The problems with housing supply are due to social externalities rather than lack of innovation.

I think I understand what you're saying. You're right in that sense, but in the sense/context of the tech revolution. We're talking about FREE or less than free. About covering the maslows needs to allow things to happen.

We can't do that with current systems like modular homes or anything that takes human involvement in setup. Robots on the otherhand can build 3d printed homes in a fully automated manner. At least theoretically.

>I also challenge this because governments have tried to provide nearly free housing, food, water, and even direct payments from the government. But these efforts have not worked as well as hoped and the idea has not swept the world into a new paradigm.

The government has provided 'highly costly housing in very short terms' in so displacing the function of very lean charities at tax payer cost. That's why it doesn't work well. Communism failed in 1989 proving it's not a true net-positive relationship.

The idea that we might be able to make it net-positive using automation and computers. Effectively by using the gulags of robots. China could free their uyghyur slaves and laogai. Vietnam could free their slaves. North Korea could free their kwalliso slaves. It's not just the communist countries which have government owned slaves in forced labour camps. Places like Japan have penal labour. You are forced to work to produce goods for very cheap to sell to Japanese companies. The Japanese penal slaves are what is keeping Japan from debt collapse. Did you know if you're accused of a crime it's 99.9% you're going to prison for a period much longer than most places in the world.

>Pruitt–Igoe

Communism has many examples of these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka

This is a symptom of large government. Greece and Venezuela has lots of these as well. The exact opposite of what I am proposing. The tech revolution has the ability to come in and be successful where communism failed. 100% of the objective is to not have humans involved.

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