clay

This is a guest-bleg, inspired by Quiggin’s Zombie Economics project.

I teach in NYU’s Journalism department, where we have strong concentrations in both business and science reporting. I’m looking for some way to label and describe a particular flavor of bad economics reporting, so as to make the students more alert to it, as consumers and possible producers of such reporting.

Here’s the backstory. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Tamar Gendler introduced me to the the problem of easy knowledge, the notion that if you believe a particular assertion, you can produce inductive chains that lead to overstated conclusions. “I own this bike” can be seen as an assertion that the person you bought it from was its previous owner.

But of course you don’t know if that guy in the alley had the right to sell it, so an assertion that you own the bike can generate easy knowledge about whether he did. Instead, “I own this bike” should be seen as shorthand for “If the guy in the alley was the previous rightful owner, then I am its current rightful owner.” (Oddly, this also describes the question of the Elder Wand in Harry Potter Vol. 7, pp 741 ff. Tom Riddle died of easy knowledge.)

I was reminded of easy knowledge while reading Thomas Edsall’s “NY Times column”:http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/why-cant-america-be-sweden/ on
Can’t We All Be More Like Nordics? Asymmetric Growth and Institutions in an Interdependent World, a paper by the economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Thierry Verdier. (Acemoglu goes on to discuss this work in a post titled Choosing your own capitalism in a globalised world?.) [click to continue…]

tl;dr The Open Data movement is good at improving service, but bad at
rooting out corruption

Tom Slee has done us a favor by “kicking”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/why-the-open-data-movement-is-a-joke.html “off”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/open-data-movement-redux-tribes-and-contradictions.html a conversation about the values, goals, and coherence of the Open Data movement. I share his sense that the movement has been a disappointment to date. However, as my principles differ from his, my sense of disappointment, and of what to do about it, differ as well.

Before I get to that, I want to position myself relative to Slee’s three summary assertions about the Open Data movement. (The points are Slee’s; the reactions mine.)

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Reading the literature on social media and the Arab Spring, there’s a recurring sentiment I’ve run across:

– Jeff Neumann: Social Media Didn’t Oust Tunisia’s President — The Tunisian People Did

“Did social media have an effect on events in Tunisia? Undoubtedly, yes. Is this a social media revolution? Absolutely not.”

– Achalla Venu: What happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt?

“So the common trait between the revolution in Tunisia and the ongoing revolution in Egypt is — they all are human revolutions not caused by Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr and many others but they all played their part.”

– Jillian York: Not Twitter, Not Wikileaks: A Human Revolution

“I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight. But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi–or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause–by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.”

Despite their affirmation of the importance of social media during the uprisings, these authors (and many others) want to assure us that their analysis remains appropriately human-centered, that they are not making the terrible mistake of describing tools as if they had some sort of agency.

But here’s the funny thing — we describe our tools as having agency all the time. This isn’t a mistake, or an accident. It’s an essential part of our expressive repertoire around technology.
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The debate about social media and autocratic regimes can be (roughly) divided into two camps: idealists and realists. Idealists — my camp — believe social media will, on average, improve leverage for citizens seeking representative government; realists believe it won’t.

Because the events in North Africa and the Middle East are so important, both in themselves and in what they will lead us to expect about the future, I have been reading realist arguments especially closely in this period, and it was in this spirit that I came across Kremlin’s Plan to Prevent a Facebook Revolution, by Andrei Soldatov, an intelligence analyst at Agentura.ru.

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Another question about relevant social science literature, before they revoke my posting privileges:

I spent a lot of time talking to BigCos and people in the Gummint who are evaluating social software. Evaluating Open Source tools poses a problem for them, because they are cheap, simple to set up, and easy to use. These characteristics  defeat the normal IT evaluation process, which is supposed to start with an RFP, take the Office of the CIO 9 months to review the available features, and another 6 months of deployment and training. Free, easy, and good confuses them, and ‘Just try it and see how it goes’ is actively upsetting.

Part of the problem is price signaling — how could a free weblog tool, say, be better than this Very Expensive Content Management System? Part of the problem is feature creep — how could more features not be better? Part of the problem is the imperative for control — the stupider you think your employees are, the more features you will need to constrain their ability to act. Part of the problem is trusting vendors more than your own IT staff, and so on.

And, in the way of these things, the overall effect of this is an unspoken institutional commitment to the expensive and mediocre, simply because alternatives that may be cheap but good are assumed not to exist, and because there are tight social bonds with the vendors who sold them the last round of expensive stuff.

I bring this up because one of my former students, a very smart guy who used to work for the Gummint and now consults for same, is observing this same thing in his current work, and I wonder if anyone has studied this problem — not just price signaling, but the whole constellation of organizational behavior that makes evaluating Open Source tools in comparison with closed source so problematic?

I once said that work on social software formed the experimental wing of political philosophy. I said it to a room full of geeks, not philosophers, by way of exhorting them to consider social ramifications of seemingly technological choices, such as “If you have a point system for good behavior, people will behave to optimize points, not to be good.” (cf. John Quiggans’ post on grades.)

Behind the basic point of this throwaway line, though, is something that has been puzzling me for some time. Like all groups with shared pursuit of shared goals, mediated groups need governance, which is to say rules for losing. It has to be the case that at least some participants in a group are willing to regard not getting their way as both legitimate and acceptable, or the groups would simply fork with every non-unanimous decision, and dividing groups with powers of two in the denominator would atomize even huge collectives after a handful of such decisions.

And so, several years ago, I began reading classics of social contract theory. After the initial excitement of seeing the similarities between Federalist Papers #10 and the Slashdot moderation system, though, I bumped into two key ways in which the arrangement of constitutions didn’t fit with the sort of rules for losing that are essential on the net.

The first is the concern, in recent centuries, about reining in majoritarian tyranny — preventing 50.1% of the polity from simply voting themselves into a permanent advantage over the other 49.9%.

This is something of a concern online, but its also clear that the really novel threat to group action in mediated fora is the tyranny of the individual. Even in systems not constructed around consensus, one or a small group of people determined to upset the proceedings can do enormous damage.

The second is the concern, at the center of the debate since Hobbes, about how leaders are to be legitimated, and under what circumstances, if any, they can be removed and replaced. This concern seems to stem in large part from physical and political facts — to a first approximation, each person is a citizen of one and only one country, and can’t readily switch citizenship should they object to the policies of that country. In the troika of exit, voice and loyalty, much political theory assumes that exiting is off the table for most people.

Online, though, inflexible one-to-one mappings of member to group are rare. One can contribute to Apache _and_ Linux, comment on MeFi _and_ BoingBoing, and so on. Indeed, the two most normal cases of governance on the net are the cabal (there is no cabal) and benevolent dictatorship, as with Linus and Linux or Guido of Python, whose acronymed title, BDFL, stands for “Benevolent Dictator For Life.” What keeps these dictators benevolent is precisely that membership in various groups is non-exclusive, and switching allegiances is under the user’s control, with no analog for rules of state.

So what I want to ask of the collected wisdom of CT readers is this: what one or two works would you pick, from any discipline, that best illuminate the group governance issues we see on the net, as different from political thought about the real world? (Mine would be Exit, Voice and Loyalty, and Logic of Collective Action.)

The distinction between sociology and anthropology, as I learned it, is the distinction between the study of industrial and non-industrial societies. (Obviously false at the margins, but as a rough and ready definition it seems servicable, esp. as so many people offer this answer to the basic question.)

My interest in tagging has led me to assume that any such label is a social construct mainly held in place by its beneficiaries, rather than being something true about the world (and one of my many crank beliefs is that the ability of academic departments to defend the edge cases of such definitions is going to take a hit in a networked society.) However, since I have posting privileges at CT this week, I’d like to run the thought experiment a different way.

Sociologists and anthropologists of living culture have different outlooks and tools. What would change if they were each dispatched to the other’s research sites? If organizational behavior were the primary tool for understanding hunting raids, or if board meetings were viewed through an anthropological lens?

I think we can all construct a world where interesting results would appear (and obviously some of that work is being done already), but would the results be _better_ than what we have today, or just novel? Is one discipline more transportable than the other? Could one simply disappear, or subsume the other, with little loss of intellectual value, or could they merge as equals?

Put another way, if we strip away the historical bias of the kinds of societies being observed, how different are the core values, tools, and intuitions of the two (one and a half?) disciplines?

Thanks to Henry for the invitation to guest-post. I’m a long-time reader and admirer of CT, and my goal this week is to ask a couple of questions that I don’t think have obvious answers, but which I think are quite important to the development of a networked society, and about which CT readers may have a lot to say.

The first question is pedagogical: it’s obvious, both from observing my own students and from paying attention to social media, that the work students have always done in groups is now migrating online. What, if anything, should the academy do to adapt?

The poster child for this change, of course, is Chris Avenir, who was the admin for a large Facebook group discussing chemistry homework from Ryerson University. <a href=”http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/03/19/student-wont-be-expelled-over-facebook-study-group”>Avenir was threatened with expulsion</a> (though he was not expelled), and was given a 0 out of 10 for the homework being discussed on the site.

While the decision over his expulsion was still pending, Avenir said “But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials.”

After deciding not to expel Avenir, Technology Dean James Norrie said “Are we Luddites here at Ryerson? No, but our academic misconduct code says if work is to be done individually and students collaborate, that’s cheating, whether it’s by Facebook, fax or mimeograph.”

Now, my natural inclination is to think Avenir is right and Norrie is wrong — that learning is a basically social activity, and that the model that treats the effort as an exercise in quality control of individual minds is not merely silly but hypocritical — as Avenir notes, discussion, both formal and informal, is a large part of the pedagogical landscape.

And yet I also know that there are fields where problems are complex but answers are simple — there are an infinite number of mathematical formulae for which 42 is the answer, but your possession of that number only operates as proof that you understand a particular formula if I also trust that you weren’t just handed the answer.

So, to adopt The Economist’s old motto of “Simplify, then exaggerate”, here’s a false dichotomy: does the growth of networked support for student-to-student study mark the appearance of the previously invisible but critical engine of learning, or will its normalization set up a harmful social gradient, where nerd kids give likeable kids the right answers with no work?

And should the response on the part of the academy be a) “We should support this important change”, b) “We have never really cared what students do outside class, and this is no different”, or c) “Deep socialization of study is a core threat to academic integrity, so this must be stopped”?