Master of Puppets
Master of Puppets
Liminal Spaces: Data and context, rationalism and mysticism, AI and Amistics
This is a Liminal Spaces post. Liminal Spaces is an ever-changing section of Symbols & Rituals. In its current form, I’m using it as a locus for curated ideas and transitional thoughts. As with my recently refined approach to publishing my own essays, my aim here is to be as ruthless as I can about sharing only considered ideas that cut through our collective noise rather than add to it.
Below you’ll find excerpts from a few essays that I’ve recently read and reread and keep thinking about and bringing up in conversations. You’ll also hopefully find that the excerpts speak to one another. My hope with all of them is that they will prompt you to read and consider each of the essays in full.
These are basically the best of the links that I would share too quickly to social media if social media didn’t always leave me feeling sad and sick. Sharing them in this space/format adds a composite layer of resistance and effort and time and thought that I value greatly and social media destroys.
Okay. Enough about me. Godspeed.
1. Big Datasets Are Not Neutral
Some very important things don’t make their way into the data. It’s easier to justify health care decisions in terms of measurable outcomes: increased average longevity or increased numbers of lives saved in emergency room visits, for example. But there are so many important factors that are far harder to measure: happiness, community, tradition, beauty, comfort, and all the oddities that go into “quality of life.”
Consider, for example, a policy proposal that doctors should urge patients to sharply lower their saturated fat intake. This should lead to better health outcomes, at least for those that are easier to measure: heart attack numbers and average longevity. But the focus on easy-to-measure outcomes often diminishes the salience of other downstream consequences: the loss of culinary traditions, disconnection from a culinary heritage, and a reduction in daily culinary joy. It’s easy to dismiss such things as “intangibles.” But actually, what’s more tangible than a good cheese, or a cheerful fondue party with friends?
It’s tempting to use the term intangible when what we really mean is that such things are hard to quantify in our modern institutional environment with the kinds of measuring tools that are used by modern bureaucratic systems. The gap between reality and what’s easy to measure shows up everywhere. Consider cost-benefit analysis, which is supposed to be an objective—and therefore unimpeachable—procedure for making decisions by tallying up expected financial costs and expected financial benefits. But the process is deeply constrained by the kinds of cost information that are easy to gather. It’s relatively straightforward to provide data to support claims about how a certain new overpass might help traffic move efficiently, get people to work faster, and attract more businesses to a downtown. It’s harder to produce data in support of claims about how the overpass might reduce the beauty of a city, or how the noise might affect citizens’ well-being, or how a wall that divides neighborhoods could erode community. From a policy perspective, anything hard to measure can start to fade from sight.
An optimist might hope to get around these problems with better data and metrics. What I want to show here is that these limitations on data are no accident. The basic methodology of data—as collected by real-world institutions obeying real-world forces of economy and scale—systematically leaves out certain kinds of information. Big datasets are not neutral and they are not all-encompassing. There are profound limitations on what large datasets can capture.
—C. Thi Nguyen, The Limits of Data: Data is powerful because it’s universal. The cost is context.
2. Each Enhancement Is an Amputation
Coined by [Neal] Stephenson [in his science fiction novel Seveneves] and named after the Amish, Amistics is the term the people of the repopulated Earth use to describe “the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives.”
For the real Amish, Amistics requires deciding which technologies will fit the Ordnung, or rule of life, and which would undermine it. Every option from roller skates to internal combustion engines to compressed air to power tools is weighed and assessed rather than accepted by default, and to some extent, different communities will interpret the rules differently. But the Amish are unique, in Stephenson’s telling, not so much in the particular decisions they make as the fact that they know they are deciding at all: “All cultures did this, frequently without being consciously aware that they had made collective choices.” The enlightened spacefaring humans of the distant future know that “each enhancement is an amputation,” a surrender of one potentiality in the pursuit of another. They want the choice to be theirs.
[…]
Our tech debates do not begin by deliberating about what kind of future we want and then reasoning about which paths lead to where we want to go. Instead they go backward: we let technology drive where it may, and then after the fact we develop an “ethics of” this or that, as if the technology is the main event and how we want to live is the sideshow. When we do wander to the sideshow, we hear principles like “bias,” “misinformation,” “mental health,” “privacy,” “innovation,” “justice,” “equity,” and “global competitiveness” used as if we all share an understanding of why we’re focused on them and what they even mean.
But which research studies will decide the scientific “consensus”? Who anoints the experts? Whose ethics will be encoded in regulations, laws, and algorithms? Beneath a veneer of debate over how we should apply universal principles to novel technologies, our tech fights are a power struggle over who gets to count as “we” and who is left out—over who will rule whom.
—Brian J. A. Boyd, Why We Need Amistics for AI: Tech ethics needs a breakthrough. The Amish have it.
3. Like Light Kindled from a Leaping Spark
Plato’s emphasis on knowing and defining, rather than sensing, may appear to conflict with the importance of direct experience in the Eleusinian Mysteries. However, his Allegory of the Cave from the Republic, Plato’s Socratic dialogue written around 375 BCE, suggests otherwise. In the allegory, Socrates compares human existence to prisoners shackled in a cave, only able to see shadows cast by firelight onto a wall before them. Having never seen anything else, the prisoners consider these shadows reality. If one prisoner were released and looked directly at the fire, they would first experience pain and confused terror. But through the process of suffering and fear they would come closer to reality. Their worldview would begin to change. Through this process, they become a kind of initiate. However, they are yet to experience the final revelation.
What if, Socrates continues, the prisoner was then dragged from the cave into the sunlight? Once again, they would experience pain because they had always lived in darkness. But eventually they would be able to look at the Sun directly and, Plato writes, “behold what sort of thing it is.” This is the highest stage of initiation, the epopteia.
As Plato writes in his long epistle, the Seventh Letter, the highest philosophical understanding cannot be conveyed through written explanation nor learned like other subjects. It comes through direct, inner experience: “Through unceasing communion with the matter itself and making it your life’s calling, it is born in the soul suddenly, like light kindled from a leaping spark, and from there it sustains itself.”
—Sam Woodward, For Plato, Rationalists and Mystics Can Walk the Same Path: Why did such a keen proponent of reason turn to the Eleusinian Mysteries to explain his ideas about knowledge?