Posts Tagged ‘governance’

To what extent can we quantify human action?

Given rapidly expanding computational capacity and the proliferation of cheap sensors, there is a large, distributed trend towards human quantification. Wired Magazine confidently threw it on the cover of its July 2009 issue, celebrating self-tracking as popularized by the Nike + iPod system. It’s certainly a trend with a lot of momentum, and I imagine a lot of success will be had by people building businesses around it, but I’m increasingly worried about the way in which the concept is treated in gushing terms and without an understanding of its limitations.

To be clear, I think there is solid evidence that making explicit certain types of information can induce better behavior. One of the best examples is the feedback loop created by displaying energy use in real-time to homeowners, a practice that has been shown to reduce energy consumption. In fact, anyone who has driven a Prius can probably attest to their effort to keep the real-time MPG monitor in the higher numbers, an effort that changed my driving habit for the more efficient.

But I think too much exuberance for human quantification runs the risk of falling prey to a form of techno-utopianism that has already stricken many fields.

This post was catalyzed by two recent articles. The first, by copyright crusader turned political reformer, Larry Lessig, is an extended critique of the drive towards more transparency in government. He writes,

“We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust.”

For Lessig, the work of groups like the Sunlight Foundation or MAPLight (“money and politics: illuminating the connection”) are too simplistic. The problems these groups rightfully seek to fix are too complex to be solved by transparency alone.

“This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding–at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency.”

Now, perhaps the people who need to know the entire story – the trial judges, the political decision-makers – will take the time to look past a simplistic “money + politician = bribe” equation, but I think the worry is legitimate. The reason for the worry is the seductiveness of simplicity.

This is a point Paul Krugman makes strongly in his recent essay about failure of economists to predict or avoid the current recession. As he chronicles the shortcomings of modern economic thought, he writes,

“As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”

The “impressive-looking mathematics” are the economic models that academics have conceived and investors embraced. The short-comings of these have been noted time-and-again by critics like Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Richard Bookstaber (whose book I reviewed here), but these are minority voices. Bookstaber’s Congressional testimony is actually quoted by Krugman:

One thing that seems clear is that risk models that are designed to function in normal market conditions should not be relied upon to predict outcomes in times of crisis. On this account, VaR doesn’t kill banks; executives who don’t recognize the limits of VaR [the value-at-risk financial model] kill banks. As Bookstaber put it, “one has to look beyond VaR, to culprits such as sheer stupidity or collective management failure: The risk managers missed the growing inventory [of risky assets], or did not have the courage of their conviction to insist on its reduction, or the senior management was not willing to heed their demands. In other words, models succeed because they meet the needs of real human beings, and VaR was just what they needed during the boom.

This, to me, is the same point that Lessig was making – technologically-induced simplicity (in the form of “money + politician = bribe” or VaR) is seductive and likely to be misinterpreted to the detriment of society.

Certainly some people understand this. Carl Malamud, who has led an impressive effort to opening up government, responded to Lessig’s article as such,

“Lessig’s point is that transparency, naked and by itself, with no broader and deeper aims, will not automatically produce good results, and may indeed produce randomness in our government or far worse. Merely revealing data is not enough. One must work with it, work with policy, and monitor effects. Transparency without a long-term commitment to policy is transparency without context, transparency that is merely naked…”

The parallel for Krugman’s world is, very likely, the work of behavioral economists who are placing humanity’s knack for irrational activity within the framework of economic thought. However, in his vehement response to Krugman’s essay, U Chicago professor John Cochrane writes,

“The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research…”

This is what Lessig calls “the problem of attention-span,” and even were Krugman and Cochrane to coalesce into a sophisticated macroeconomic theory that took into account the limits of human quantification, I fear the simple, erroneous models will win the day (again).

Update: Tim Wu responds to Lessig’s piece with an important reminder that civic virtue is the key ingredient, not technology.

[Image Credit 1 and 2]

In Tim Wu’s new review of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, the Columbia Law professor spends considerable time explaining how the economics of media have historically led to a consolidation that many would see as anathema to the diverse marketplace of ideas that we want. His discussion is well worth a read, but what I thought was most important from the piece was his mention of the many threats to the generative Internet:

“But I must part company with Zittrain over his main and more somber argument: that security crises will form the driving narrative of the Internet’s future. I do not doubt that there will be never-ending security problems and reactions. But the question is not whether cybersecurity will matter, but whether it will matter most. Zittrain’s security saga does not look to me like a full account of the future. He is leaving out many of the external forces that will change the Internet. One is the power of government, which, especially overseas, has begun reshaping the network to fit its obsessions. Another is the combined forces of language and culture, which are driving a once-global Internet into something more like a series of national ones: a Japanese Internet, a Spanish Internet, and so on.

But most important, the real story may lie in the power of industry structure and the long trend toward centralized control in the media industries. Over the last decade, the Internet has become interwoven with media and communications industries collectively worth trillions, with economics all of their own. Unlike Zittrain, I think that industry dynamics, more than a demand for safe appliances, will determine the future of this strange and extraordinary medium.”

A Typology of Threats to the ‘Net

So which threat is the most disconcerting? He points to four:

1. Zittrain‘s security-driven adoption of sterile devices,
2. Wu‘s economic-driven centralization,
3. Zuckerman‘s culture- and language-driven splintered Internet, or
4. Barlow‘s government intervention

Personally, I’m inclined to think a splintered net is the most troublesome because it destroys the forum for international conversation and deliberation we wanted the Internet to become. But what macro trend concerns you?

David Weinberger, in an early essay for Publius explained that “Rules are norms that have failed.” In his reasoning, the majority of human action is not governed by explicit rules; instead, tacit governance – norms, conventions and expectations – dictate the appropriate behavior in most cases. Where explicit governance is needed, the norm based approach has failed. Roads need explicit speed limits to avoid people’s tendency to cause accidents. “The overwhelming preponderance on the Net of tacit governance over explicit is a sign of the Net’s depth, importance, humanity, health and success.”

This tacit governance is connected to the civic technologies extolled by Zittrain. Those technologies, like Wikipedia or the Internet, which require constant care and effort to be successful, rely on mix of tacit and explicit governance. On the one hand, the Internet Engineering Task Force decides through “rough consensus,” often by humming. On the other, Wikipedia has an extensive list of rules and policies (of which one is to “ignore all rules”).

This mix of governance strategies hints at an effort to capture the civic ethic which allows these technologies to avoid formal, external institutional rule-making. Partly as a result of a technopanic over online porn, the Communications Decency Act was passed to regulate online speech. Because badware is so pervasive, McAfee and Symantec have a tidy business of combating it. Both of these are purely explicit governance which can have numerous complications.

How do we govern the Internet and technologies in either purely tacit manners or through a mix which minimizes explicit rules? I think it comes back to the civic ethic which can motivate heroes like Ghandi or just a simple Wikipedian who deletes a malicious edit. The question, then, is how to capture this civic ethic and expand it to new fields? This is more than a technological question, but by designing the tools and understanding the motivations of civic engagers, we can seek to expand this.