Thanks for continuing this thread – you really captured my intent better than I originally expressed

I have to say its been a bit disconcerting to learn this week that quite a few CS folks I have talked with accept Anderson’s formulation, to some degree. What’s scary here is that this is precisely how we relinquish control to the machines – if we give up our agency, I suppose we’ll get what we deserve.

While I’ve had some success swaying perspectives in conversations (some of this philosophy stuff is actually quite practical), the tougher argument to develop is that there “is no experimental method that is purely inductive, not even neural networks.” These implicit forms of knowledge representation are so counter-intuitive, that we don’t really know how to think about them yet.

I think its possible (and important) to tease out the specific intentional choices that go into deciding how and what to count, as you have done with the PageRank algorithm here.

This was another example I came across a few months ago that struck me as problematic in similar ways:
Crowded Wisdom.

We had better pre-empt this quickly, before “they” decide to feed their behavioural auto-classification systems the schemes in the DSM …

cheers.