Adversarial classification
July 24, 2017 — April 22, 2023
Content warning:
Discussion of hot-button contentious issues, such as gender identities, and Israel-Palestine affairs, upon which I conspicuously avoid taking a position, while analysing the semantics of public debate about these issues. This will risk being considered favouring a side. But also, since I am talking about weaponisation of meaning, I do not see an option other than considering contentious issues where meaning is weaponised, which is kind of the point.
1 Case study: A Chair
2 When categories have value
Case study on gender
3 When categories are teams
Israel, Palestine
Likud, Hamas, Israelis, Palestinians, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, genocide.
4 Arguing the boundaries of categories
TODO: likelihood principle, compressions, \(\mathfrak{M}\)-open…
4.1 Decision theory
Motte and Bailey. P-hack thyself.
5 Recommender systems and collective culture
See recommender dynamics.
6 Incoming
To read: Sen and Wasow (2016).
Jon Stokes, Google’s Colosseum
This map is contentious precisely because of its role in our red vs. blue power struggle, as a way of elevating some voices and silencing others. As such, it’s a remarkable example of the main point I’m trying to make in this post: the act of extracting a limited feature set from a natural paradigm, and then representing those higher-value features in a cultural product of some kind, is always about power on some level.
See also Affirming the Consequent and Tribal thermodynamics.
Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade, The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism
While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”—the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life—has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes.