Superethics Instead of Superintelligence: Know Thyself, and Apply Science Accordingly

Pim Haselager & Giulio Mecacci (2020)
AJOB Neuroscience, 11:2, 113-119
DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2020.1740353

Abstract

The human species is combining an increased understanding of our cognitive machinery with the development of a technology that can profoundly influence our lives and our ways of living together. Our sciences enable us to see our strengths and weaknesses, and build technology accordingly. What would future historians think of our current attempts to build increasingly smart systems, the purposes for which we employ them, the almost unstoppable goldrush toward ever more commercially relevant implementations, and the risk of superintelligence? We need a more profound reflection on what our science shows us about ourselves, what our technology allows us to do with that, and what, apparently, we aim to do with those insights and applications. As the smartest species on the planet, we don’t need more intelligence. Since we appear to possess an underdeveloped capacity to act ethically and empathically, we rather require the kind of technology that enables us to act more consistently upon ethical principles. The problem is not to formulate ethical rules, it’s to put them into practice. Cognitive neuroscience and AI provide the knowledge and the tools to develop the moral crutches we so clearly require. Why aren’t we building them? We don’t need superintelligence, we need superethics.

The article is here.

Naïve Normativity: The Social Foundation of Moral Cognition

Kristin Andrews
Journal of the American Philosophical Association
Volume 6, Issue 1
January 2020 , pp. 36-56

Abstract

To answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety of social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri's account of social norms but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: the ability to identify agents, sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique.

The info is here.

Social-media companies must flatten the curve of misinformation

Joan Donovan
nature.com
Originally posted 14 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

After blanket coverage of the distortion of the 2016 US election, the role of algorithms in fanning the rise of the far right in the United States and United Kingdom, and of the antivax movement, tech companies have announced policies against misinformation. But they have slacked off on building the infrastructure to do commercial-content moderation and, despite the hype, artificial intelligence is not sophisticated enough to moderate social-media posts without human supervision. Tech companies acknowledge that groups, such as The Internet Research Agency and Cambridge Analytica, used their platforms for large-scale operations to influence elections within and across borders. At the same time, these companies have balked at removing misinformation, which they say is too difficult to identify reliably.

Moderating content after something goes wrong is too late. Preventing misinformation requires curating knowledge and prioritizing science, especially during a public crisis. In my experience, tech companies prefer to downplay the influence of their platforms, rather than to make sure that influence is understood. Proper curation requires these corporations to engage independent researchers, both to identify potential manipulation and to provide context for ‘authoritative content’.

Early this April, I attended a virtual meeting hosted by the World Health Organization, which had convened journalists, medical researchers, social scientists, tech companies and government representatives to discuss health misinformation. This cross-sector collaboration is a promising and necessary start. As I listened, though, I could not help but to feel teleported back to 2017, when independent researchers first began uncovering the data trails of the Russian influence operations. Back then, tech companies were dismissive. If we can take on health misinformation collaboratively now, then we will have a model for future efforts.

The info is here.

Repetition increases Perceived Truth even for Known Falsehoods

Lisa Fazio
PsyArXiv
Originally posted 23 March 20
 
Abstract

Repetition increases belief in false statements. This illusory truth effect occurs with many different types of statements (e.g., trivia facts, news headlines, advertisements), and even occurs when the false statement contradicts participants’ prior knowledge. However, existing studies of the effect of prior knowledge on the illusory truth effect share a common flaw; they measure participants’ knowledge after the experimental manipulation and thus conditionalize responses on posttreatment variables. In the current study, we measure prior knowledge prior to the experimental manipulation and thus provide a cleaner measurement of the causal effect of repetition on belief. We again find that prior knowledge does not protect against the illusory truth effect. Repeated false statements were given higher truth ratings than novel statements, even when they contradicted participants’ prior knowledge.

From the Discussion

As in previous research (Brashier et al., 2017; Fazio et al., 2015), prior knowledge did not protect participants from the illusory truth effect.Repeated falsehoods were rated as being more true than novel falsehoods, even when they both contradicted participants’ prior knowledge. By measuring prior knowledge before the experimental session, this study avoids conditioning on posttreatment variables and provides cleaner evidence for the effect (Montgomery et al., 2018). Whether prior knowledge is measured before or after the manipulation, it is clear that repetition increases belief in falsehoods that contradict existing knowledge.

The research is here.

Restoring the Economy Is the Last Thing We Should Want

Douglas Rushkoff
medium.com
Originally published 27 April 20

Everyone wants to know when we’re going to get the economy started up again, and just how many lives we’re willing to surrender before we do. We’ve all been made to understand the dilemma: The sooner we “open up” American and get back to our jobs, the more likely we spread Covid-19, further overwhelming hospitals and killing more people. Yet the longer we wait, the more people will suffer and die in other ways.

I think this is a false choice. Yes, it may be true that every 1% rise in unemployment leads to a corresponding 1% rise in suicides. And it’s true that an extended freeze of the economy could shorten the lifespan of 6.4 million Americans entering the job market by an average of about two years. But such metrics say less about the human cost of the downturn than they do about the dangerously absolute dependence of workers on traditional employment for basic sustenance — an artifact of an economy that has been intentionally rigged to favor big banks and passive shareholders over small and local businesses that actually provide goods and services in a sustainable way.

In reality, the sooner and more completely we restore the old economy, the faster we simply recreate the conditions that got us sick in the first place and rendered us incapable of mounting an effective response. The economy we’re committed to restoring is no more the victim of the Covid-19 crisis than it is the cause. We have to stop asking when will things get back to normal. They won’t. There is no going back. And that’s actually good news.

The info is here.

What Is 'Decision Fatigue' and How Does It Affect You?

Rachel Fairbank
LifeHacker
Originally published 14 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

Too many decisions result in emotional and mental strain

“These are legitimately difficult decisions,” Fischhoff says, adding that people shouldn’t feel bad about struggling with them. “Feeling bad is adding insult to injury,” he says.

This added complexity to our decisions is leading to decision fatigue, which is the emotional and mental strain that comes when we are forced to make too many choices. Decision fatigue is the reason why thinking through a decision is harder when we are stressed or tired.

“These are difficult decisions because the stakes are often really high, while we are required to master unfamiliar information,” Fischhoff says.

But if all of this sounds like too much, there are actions we can take to reduce decision fatigue. For starters, it’s best to minimize the number of small decisions, such as what to eat for dinner or what to wear, you make in a day. The fewer smaller decisions you have to make, the more bandwidth you’ll have for the bigger one.

For this particular crisis, there are a few more steps you can take, in order to reduce your decision fatigue.

The info is here.

The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative

Samule Bowles & Wendy Carlin
voxeu.org
Originally posted 10 April 20

The COVID-19 pandemic is a blow to self-interest as a value orientation and laissez-faire as a policy paradigm, both already reeling amid mounting public concerns about climate change.  Will the pandemic change our economic narrative, expressing new everyday understandings of how the economy works and how it should work? 

We think so. But it will not be simply a shift to the left on the now anachronistic one-dimensional markets-versus-government continuum shown in Figure 1. A position along the blue line represents a mix of public policies – nationalisation of the railways, for example, towards the left; deregulation of labour markets, for example, towards the right.

COVID-19, for better or worse, brings into focus a third pole in the debate: call it community or civil society. In the absence of this third pole, the conventional language of economics and public policy misses the contribution of social norms and of institutions that are neither governments nor markets – like families, relationships within firms, and community organisations.

There are precedents for the scale of changes that we anticipate. The Great Depression and WWII changed the way we talked about the economy: left to its own devices it would wreak havoc on people’s lives (massive unemployment), “heedless self-interest [is] bad economics” (FDR),1 and governments can effectively pursue the public good (defeat fascism, provide economic security). As the memories of that era faded along with the social solidarity and confidence in collective action that it had fostered, another vernacular took over: “there is no such thing as society” (Thatcher) – you get what you pay for, government is just another special interest group.

Another opportunity for a long-needed fundamental shift in the economic vernacular is now unfolding. COVID-19, along with climate change, could be the equivalent of the Great Depression and WWII in forcing a sea change in economic thinking and policy.

The info is here.

What do we mean by 'killing' and 'letting die'?

Ivar R. Hannikainen, Anibal Monasterio-Astobiza, & David Rodríguez-Arias
www.bioxphi.org
Originally published 22 Feb 20

Bioethicists have long asked how to distinguish killing from letting die. Opponents of the legalization of euthanasia routinely invoke this distinction to explain why withholding life-sustaining treatment may be morally permissible, while euthanasia is not. The underlying assumption is that, when physicians refrain from applying life-sustaining treatment, they merely let the patient die. In contrast, a doctor who provided a lethal injection would thereby be 'killing' them. At a broader level, this view implies that 'killing' and 'letting die' are terms we use to distinguish actions from omissions that result in death.

Theorists such as Gert, Culver and Clouser (1998/2015) advanced a radically different understanding of this fundamental bioethical distinction. In a germinal paper, they argue that to 'kill' involves a contextual assessment of whether the doctor violated a prior duty. In turn, whether the doctor violated their duty—namely, to preserve the patient's life—depends on the patient's preferences. (They actually argued for a more sophisticated view according to which only some preferences, i.e., refusals, constrain a doctor's duty—while others, i.e., requests, do not.) This view is qualitatively different from the first (what we call commissive) view. On this alternative view, which we refer to as deontic, 'killing' and 'letting die' serve to differentiate patient deaths that result from breaches of medical duty from those that do not.

How well does each of these theoretical perspectives capture people's use of the killing versus letting die distinction? In a recent paper published in Bioethics, our goal was to develop an understanding of the considerations that carve this bioethical distinction in non-philosophers' minds.

We invited a group of laypeople, unfamiliar with this bioethical debate and lacking any formal training in the health sciences, to take part in a short study. Each participant was asked to consider a set of three hypothetical scenarios in which a terminally ill patient dies, while we manipulated two features of the scenario: (1) the physician's involvement, and (2) the patient's wishes.

The info is here.

Measuring Two Distinct Psychological Threats of COVID-19 and their Unique Impacts on Wellbeing and Adherence to Public Health Behaviors

Kachanoff, F., Bigman, Y., Kapsaskis, K., &
Gray, K.  (2020, April 2).
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5zr3w

Abstract

COVID-19 threatens lives, livelihoods, and civic institutions. Although public health initiatives (i.e., social distancing) help manage its impact, these initiatives can further sever our connections to people and institutions that affirm our identities. Three studies (N=1,195) validated a brief 10-item COVID-19 threat scale that assesses 1) realistic threats to physical or financial safety, and 2) symbolic threats to one’s sociocultural identity. Studies reveal that both realistic and symbolic threat predict higher anxiety and lower wellbeing, and demonstrate convergent validity with other measures of threat sensitivity. Importantly, the two kinds of threat diverge in their relationship to public health behaviors (e.g., social distancing): Realistic threat predicted greater self-reported compliance, whereas symbolic threat predicted less self-reported compliance to these social-disconnection initiatives. Symbolic threat also predicted using creative ways to affirm identity even in isolation. Our findings highlight how social psychological theory can be leveraged to understand and predict people’s behavior in pandemics.

From the General Discussion:

Symbolic and realistic threats also had significant yet different consequences for self-reported adherence to and support of public health initiatives essential to stopping the spread of the virus (i.e., social distancing, hand washing). People who perceived high levels of realistic threat to their (and their group’s) physical and financial security reported greater adherence and support for such practices. In direct contrast, people who perceived more symbolic threat to what it means to be an American, reported less support for and adherence to public health guidelines. However, if people do engage in social distancing, symbolic threat is positively associated with finding creative ways to enact and express their social (e.g., national) identity even in isolation.