The ML community recognizes the importance of anticipating and mitigating the potential negative impacts of benchmark research. In this position paper, we argue that more attention needs to be paid to areas of ethical risk that lie at the technical and scientific core of ML benchmarks. We identify overlooked structural similarities between human IQ and ML benchmarks. Human intelligence and ML benchmarks share similarities in setting standards for describing, evaluating and comparing performance on tasks relevant to intelligence. This enables us (...) to unlock lessons from feminist philosophy of science scholarship that need to be considered by the ML benchmark community. Finally, we outline practical recommendations for benchmark research ethics and ethics review. (shrink)

An increasing number of regulations propose the notion of ‘AI audits’ as an enforcement mechanism for achieving transparency and accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite some converging norms around various forms of AI auditing, auditing for the purpose of compliance and assurance currently have little to no agreed upon practices, procedures, taxonomies, and standards. We propose the ‘criterion audit’ as an operationalizable compliance and assurance external audit framework. We model elements of this approach after financial auditing practices, and argue (...) that AI audits should similarly provide assurance to their stakeholders about AI organizations’ ability to govern their algorithms in ways that mitigate harms and uphold human values. We discuss the necessary conditions for the criterion audit, and provide a procedural blueprint for performing an audit engagement in practice. We illustrate how this framework can be adapted to current regulations by deriving the criteria on which ‘bias audits’ for hiring algorithms can be performed, as required by the recently effective New York City Local Law 144 of 2021. We conclude by offering critical discussion on the benefits, inherent limitations, and implementation challenges of applying practices of the more mature financial auditing industry to AI auditing where robust guardrails against quality assurance issues are only starting to emerge. Our discussion as informed by experiences in performing these audits in practice highlights the critical role that an audit ecosystem plays in ensuring the effectiveness of such methodology. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to conflict are oriented towards establishing consensus, either in the form of a resolution of the conflict or in the form of an ‘agree-to-disagree’ standstill between the stakeholders. In this paper, we criticize these traditional approaches, each for specific reasons, and we propose and develop the agonistic approach to conflict. Based on Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democratic theory, the agonistic approach to conflict is more welcoming of dissensus, replacing discussion stoppers with discussion starters and replacing standstills with contestation. We (...) illustrate such replacements and develop this approach, we analyse technological conflicts in a concrete R&D setting: the global hydrogen economy. From this context, we focus on the conflict between the proponents of blue hydrogen and those of green hydrogen. We conclude by highlighting the advantage of the agonistic approach but also drawing attention to its own specific risk, namely, antagonism. (shrink)

The inclusion of stakeholders in science is one of the core ideas in the field of responsible innovation. Conspiracists, however, are not your garden-variety stakeholders. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the conflict between conspiracists and science is deep and intractable. In this paper, we ask how the game of responsible innovation can be played with those who believe that the game is rigged. Understanding the relationship between conspiracism and responsible innovation is necessary in order to understand the unvisited corners (...) of the science-society interface in the post-pandemic future. We claim that pluralism, already part of the philosophical background that spurred responsible innovation, can offer insights into how conspiracism can be approached. As a case in point, we develop these insights starting from the policy on conspiracism developed in 2021 by the European Commission. We show that the ideal of inclusion can only be extended to conspiracists by accepting a pluralist framework, and we explain this pluralist response. (shrink)

This paper presents an explanation for why the mayor of Hamelin did not pay, by means of a fiction. It is probably influenced by films or children’s television that I have forgotten.

Review of J.B. Kennedy The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues (Acumen, 2011).

At 287c of the Statesman the Eleatic Visitor — or, more deeply, Plato — faces a daunting task. Because statesmanship has been shown to collaborate with “countless” other arts that share with it the work of “caring” for the city, to understand statesmanship requires distinguishing these arts into an intelligible set of kinds and recognizing how these might go together. Accordingly, the Visitor abandons the mode of division he has practiced without exception up until this moment, bifurcation or “halving,” and (...) offers, instead, a sorting of the arts into fifteen kinds of work. How was Plato able to get his bearings towards the heterogeneous multiplicity of the arts in order to do this sorting? In this paper I suggest that he may have found a paradigm in the double octave matrix of notes from which, according to contemporary musical theory, the seven musical “modes” are drawn. To show the plausibility of this suggestion, I first reconstruct the double octave matrix, which was later to be called the Greater Perfect System, and then show a striking series of points of substantive and structural analogy that hold between this matrix and the Visitor’s division of the arts into fifteen kinds. (shrink)

Aristotle distinguishes between four causes (Phy., B, 3; PsA, B, 11, 94a20-24): a) Material cause: that from which; the antecedent out of which a thing comes to be and persists. E.g. the bronze of the statue; the silver of the bowl b) Formal cause: essence; the form or the archetype, i.e. the statement of the essence and its genera and the parts in definition; the whole and the co-positing. E.g. the relation 2:1 and generally number as cause of the (...) class='Hi'>octave c) Efficient cause: the primary source of the change or coming to rest. E.g. The seed, the advisor and the father; generally: what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed. d) Final cause: cause in the sense of end or the good or that for the sake of which a thing is done. E.g. health as the cause of walking about The four causes are causes of the thing as it is itself. As the word cause has several senses, there are several causes of the same thing as that thing and not merely in virtue of a concomitant attribute: ‘Both the art of the sculptor and the bronze are causes of the statue. These are causes of the statue qua statue, not in virtue of anything else that it may be- only not in the same way.’ (Phy., B, 3) 1) Other senses of cause Aristotle distinguishes proper from accidental cause: while it is its sculptor who is the proper cause of a statue, Socrates, the sculptor, is the accidental cause. (Phy., B, 3) Moreover, he distinguishes potential from actual cause, the ‘house builder’ from ‘house-builder building.’ (Phy., B, 3) In Physics (B, 3) Aristotle makes three distinctions between causes by their multiplication he achieves twelve sorts of causes: ‘All these various uses, however, come to six in number, under each of which again the usage is twofold. Cause means either what is particular or a genus, or an incidental attribute or a genus of that, and these either as a complex or each by itself; and all six either as actual or as potential.’ In Metaphysics (Λ, 1069b32-34) he distinguishes between three causes: ‘The causes and the principles, then, are three, two being the pair of contraries of which one is formula and the form and the other is privation, and the third being the matter.’ 2) Cause and knowledge A question is indeed a search for the cause. (e.g. PsA., B, 11, 94a36-38) Knowing the cause is the necessary condition of scientific knowledge (PsA., B, 11, 94a20-21) In fact, ‘men do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the ‘why’ of (which is to grasp the primary cause).’ (Phy., A, 1) ‘To know the essential nature of a thing is the same as to know the cause of a thing’s existence.’ (PsA., B, 8, 93a4-5) ‘Where demonstration is possible,’ Aristotle says, ‘one who can give no account which includes the cause has no scientific knowledge. If, then, we suppose a syllogism in which, though A necessarily inheres in C, yet B, the middle term of the demonstration, is not necessarily connected with A and C, then the man who argues thus has no reasoned knowledge of the conclusion, since this conclusion does not owe its necessity to the middle term: for though the conclusion is necessary, the mediating link is a contingent fact.’ (PsA., A, 6, 74b) . (shrink)

Proportional relationships of simple numbers were commonly used in architecture during the Renaissance period. These proportional relationships were based on the primary musical consonances of the Greek musical system: the octave (2:1), fifth (3:2), and fourth (4:3). In a similar manner, Obrecht uses the proportional relationships created by periods of rest and the last notes of the cantus firmus segments. These proportional relationships are found in the same voice as the cantus firmus, and appear when the statements of the (...) cantus firmus segments are absent. Together with the statements of the cantus firmus segments, these proportional relationships provide the entire form and structure for the various parts of Obrecht's segmentation masses. (shrink)

The book is very well structured to support practical skills development in understanding DSGE modelling through exercises to graduate a user knowledge on macroeconomic application relevant for policy decisions through use of scientific programs like DYNARE /IRIS, appropriate for use with MatLab/Octave. The author also provided useful references for the more inquisitive reader or practitioner to develop his / her ontological quest for further knowledge in the macroeconomic management of a state (Jackson, 2016). On the basis of relevance of (...) its contents pertaining to theoretical application of macroeconomic policy and management of an economy, I strongly recommend this book to anyone preparing for graduate courses in Economics and related areas like Econometrics, Economic Policy Management and also, to the practitioner-researcher engaged in macroeconomic model construction and policy formulation. (shrink)