A Big 'What If?' 

 

Harry T. Cook
By
Harry T. Cook
6/27/14


As important as any prose that has for some time appeared in the New York Times were the following 149 words from the paper's recent review of two books* that focused on the broadening and deepening effect upon society of what the reviewer called "Big Data."

 

"Both books reveal -- mostly through their flaws -- that the Big Data debate needs grounding in philosophy. When Big Data allows us to automate decision-making, or at least contextualize every decision with a trove of data about its likely consequences, we need to grapple with the question of just how much we want to leave to chance and to those simple, low-tech, unautomated options of democratic contestation and deliberation.

 

"As we gain the capacity to predict and even preempt crises, we risk eliminating the very kinds of experimental behaviors that have been conducive to social innovation. Occasionally, someone needs to break the law, engage in an act of civil disobedience or simply refuse to do something the rest of us find useful. The temptation of Big Data lies precisely in allowing us to identify and make such loopholes unavailable to deviants, who might actually be dissidents in disguise."

 

The reviewer, Eugene Morozov of The New Republic, invited philosophers into the discussion. This aspirant philosopher** begins the invited intervention with the final words of the last sentence of the paragraph above suggesting that deviants might actually be dissidents in disguise.

 

A deviant in that analysis would be one who, knowing something of the risks involved in making such and such a behavioral choice, goes ahead and does what he or she has decided to do, never minding the risks and the probable consequences of doing so, which others see and prefer to avoid.

 

When so-called Big Data can so accurately forecast an outcome of a particular behavior and that outcome is sure to be injurious or fatal to the one upon whom it is visited, it could be said that one who engaged in it might be a danger to himself or others -- part of the definition of deviant psychosis.

 

Among such "deviants" who immediately come to mind are Socrates and the mythical constructs of Antigone and Jesus Christ. Fixed in history are those who chose to give themselves to the emancipation of the American colonies from the reign of George III. Moving forward in time, the deviants would include Henry David Thoreau, Eugene V. Debs, John T. Scopes, Walter Reuther, Mohandas Gandhi, Malcom X, Jonathon Daniels, Martin Luther King Jr. and anyone who walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.

 

In Sophocles' imagination, Antigone surely knew what would befall her if she interred her brother Polyneices. The New Testament evangelists depicted Jesus as knowing where he was headed and what would happen when he got there. The evangelist Luke tells of Christ "setting his face toward Jerusalem" -- the Greek at that place meaning "a grimace of determination." Debs went to prison and knew even that was not the end of it. Walter Reuther courted injury and death for his trouble. Gandhi and King were on the path of martyrdom from the beginning but only gradually became aware of its cost.

 

What if Sophocles had not invented Antigone or the evangelists Jesus Christ? Where would the labor movement have been without Debs and Reuther? Gandhi and King gave passive resistance to intolerable injustice a name that is above every name.

 

Each of the above-mentioned was once considered a deviant. History does not judge them so. None of them had or needed Big Data forecasts of what would befall them if they followed their consciences. Even if they did not know entirely what they were getting into, and if they may not have appreciated fully that they might not emerge from it unscathed, they went ahead and said and did what they believed needed to be said and done.

 

The "knowing" thing has to do with what philosophers argue about endlessly, and that is epistemology -- the theory of knowing and knowledge, e.g. how we know what we know and can know that what we know is worth knowing or necessary to know. Excuse the philosophy-speak.

 

Just taking two of the more immediate figures -- Gandhi and King -- we can safely say that their life experiences before willingly exposing themselves to the dangers of challenging race, class and religious prejudices might not have prepared them for the ends to which each came. They did not "know" through earlier experience the dread consequences of their intended behavior. Yet, by being alert to the malign spirits of their respective ages, they eventually gained more than an inkling of what they were likely to encounter in their jousting with irrational bias.

 

However, it seems clear that any revelations of Big Data would not have forestalled them in their quiet determination to try to overcome that bias -- not for themselves, but for those whom they undertook to represent in the cultural and political clashes of their times. But what if they had known in advance the worst and because of that knowledge had turned back?

 

It hurts even to think of the world we now inhabit absent what they did and said and the price they paid for doing so. Achilles and Hector were Greek mythology's paragons of the warrior class. Gandhi and King? True martyrs they were to the twin causes of justice and human dignity.

 

*The Naked Future by Patrick Tucker and Social Physics by Alex Pentland

** The essayist majored in philosophy as well as English in his undergraduate years.

 


Copyright 2014 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

Readers Write 
Essay 6/20/14: Doctrine or Information?

 

Harris Tyler, Cincinnati, OH:

Your liberal bias shows in your essay about the Bowdoin Christian students. You are as intolerant as the administration of that college. I'll bet the Jews and the Muslims would be treated with kid gloves there, and you would be applauding. Why do we pick on Christians in a Christian nation?

 

Euni Rose, Southfield, MI:

To put it short and sweet, I say, "God bless this Bowdoin organization and keep it FAR AWAY FROM US!

 

Brian Orrock McHugh, Silver City, NM:

I do not think that banning such groups as that at Bowdoin College ever accomplishes anything positive. I must say, though, that I do not feel that way when it comes to hate speech, especially from my perspective as a gay man. I shall have to confess that I find the blathering of groups like fundamentalist evangelical Christians to be in fact hate speech. Perhaps what Bowdoin College should have done was to adopt a policy that says that groups which denigrate and insult and do not respect the thoughts, feelings, and lifestyles of other people, and which create division and encourage the abuse of others, will not be accepted within the community. Alas, I feel that America is as I said in the response which you published today has entered what may be a long period of disintegration. I think that this is one of the reasons why my partner, Dennis, and I choose not to spend our latter days in [America].

 

Adele Alexander, Portland, OR:

I was a member of the Methodist Student Movement in my college years at a state university. Our headquarters were at the Methodist church near campus. It never dawned on us to seek the use of university buildings or facilities for our activities. Is our country going backwards?

 

Phyllis Grant, Pasadena, CA:

You sound as if you are a member of the ACLU or at least a sympathizer. Me, too. I think the people who run Bowdoin College did the exactly right thing in calling out that supposed "Christian" student group. Those kids have lots of years ahead of them to turn into hard-bitten conservatives. Let them learn the liberal part of liberal arts at a place like Bowdoin.

 

Janet L. Kinzinger, Milford, MI:

". . .if there is freedom of religion in America, surely there is also freedom from religion." If only that were true given the political infestation of the religious right and the Baggers. Certainly, I do enjoy a certain degree of freedom from religion these days, with gratitude I might add. Regardless, the above is going in my collection of quotes, and shall even reside on the refrigerator door for awhile.

 

Fred Fenton, Concord, CA:

Another president of Bowdoin, the Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain, said, "But the cause for which we fought was higher, our thoughts wider...That was our power." The role of the university is to encourage wider thought, not to endorse narrow, sectarian doctrines or to house groups that endorse them.

What do you think?
I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at [email protected].