Value Alignment: "Acculturating" Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

edited 121320, re-edited 121622

Before AGI arrives, we need to figure out how to make AI understand, adopt, and retain our goals. -- Max Tegmark (2019) in Brockman (ed.) [1]

Value alignment is not a problem new or unique to the pursuits of artificial intelligence researchers. Value alignment has long been seen as a general and ancient problem: for governance, for education, for all forms of social control. It is often generally referred to as values- or moral- or citizenship education, or even indoctrination or brainwashing or group-think.

Value Alignment? What are values? A profusion of ideas. Writings on AI behavior often tend to loosely use interchangeably the words, behavior, goals, wants, and values. In this essay I will use examples, described in English, of commonly easily observable human actions focusing on values.

Part of the problem in dealing with values is that the term "value" in used in many different contexts, not necessarily compatible among themselves, and often based on a consensus more hoped for than actual. For example,

1. Promotional (as in marketing): presuming a high degree of consensus on certain values, e.g., "Our new cars have arrived! Don't miss out on the many values we offer."

2. Explanatory (promise of effectiveness): assuming consensus on certain cause-effect relationships, e.g. "Their training will inculcate values of obedience and alacrity."

3. Focus of contention (judgement of desirability): "The contract is so vague as to be of little value in confronting problems."

4. Discursive modification (turn of phrase): creating an abstraction believed to provide a needed de-personalization for general (scientific) investigation, e.g. “A term indicating an item which someone values, valued or will (might) value we will call a “value.”

5. Theoretical: demarcating limits for analysis, e.g. “A value is a hidden variable, of which behavioral instances are indicators.” (Below, we will use a variation of examples 4 and 5.)

6. The manifestation of value pursuit or maintenance may be impeded by lack by the valuer of any of the following: rationality, knowledge, ability, circumstantial impediment, and priority.[2]

Whose value is it? What kind of value? Forty or some years ago, I was taking a graduate course in mathematics in an evening class during a winter semester. There were eight students in the course: seven who had degrees in mathematics and I, a philosophy graduate. They were there clearly enjoying themselves but for the late hours. I, interested but not enraptured, was there to accumulate credits for state certification as a mathematics teacher. After copying three chalkboards of a proof, the instructor stopped and, looking at the boards, muttered, “No, that step won’t work. Something’s missing.” After another short pause, he almost jumped into the board and wrote a formula, (I forget the formula.) and continued on with another board of proof.

I was lost. I had never seen that formula before which was clearly an identity. It equated the number “1” with some log of a function containing an imaginary argument. Up until that point, I thought I had been following the proof very closely. I looked around to my classmates to see whom I might ask later for explanation. They seemed as perplexed as I was.

One of them actually spoke up and said, “Is that a step in the proof?” The professor asked, “How many of you have taken Math 636 (or something like that). No one raised his hands. The prof continued, “Well, when you do, you will understand it completely! There are four methods to prove something: deduction, induction, seduction and intimidation. So, for now, you will have to take it on faith! By the way, which method of proof I am using here?” And he resumed filling the boards.

The discussion among the students at the end of class, after the professor had gone, was somewhat heated. The math majors, for whom the proof was valued intrinsically, I thought, were close to revolt. One said, “I didn’t major in math to take things on faith!” I, for whom the proof was mostly of extrinsic value, found it to be minorly disappointing.

But, what is a Value? What is Value Alignment? To put it most succinctly,

7. A value, V, is a constellation (a set of prioritizations) of defense and pursuit contingencies relating to V. (The apparent circularity here is intentional. See Concept as Abstraction. A hindrance in developing intelligence?)
It is not "free-floating", i.e. "V is a value" implies "Someone values (valued or might value) V."

8. A value is not a feeling nor an episode of behavior, but a disposition to behave in certain ways under certain conditions, unless stifled by certain standard conditions of impediment. For example, valuing a cup of coffee does not mean one is now imbibing nor ever again will imbibe a cup of coffee. (One might, despite valuing coffee for the taste and for the caffeine, need to give it up for the sake of one's blood pressure.) Similarly, sleeping people have not lost their values; just their ability to manifest those values while unconscious. (See Trait vs. Behavior: the sometimes non-science of learning.)

9. A given behavior-type may under different conditions manifest itself in the pursuit, maintenance or defense of different values.

10. Values Alignment is achieved when a consensus among different parties on values and their conditions of manifestation is achieved.[3]

The Intrinsic-Extrinsic Dimensions of Value seem to mark an important boundary between humans and robotic AGI. (Perhaps not with cyborgs built from some animal nervous tissue.) Extrinsic values indicate dispositions which can be chained into a sequence, the final link of which is designated as the "intrinsic" value. This is called by some theorists a "sacred" or "fundamental" value.[4]

Humans have intrinsic values to pursue because they have basic needs. They have basic needs because they are organisms that have to find and use sources of air, water, food, shelter, etc. These basic needs have a more or less "natural" priority. Maslow offers an interesting model that he calls a "Hierarchy of Needs."

Acquiring items at the bottom level of the pyramid requires little more than one's animal abilities. But the second level up, with companionship and affiliation, already requires some value alignment, normally inculcated through random encounter or with applications or withdrawals of pain and pleasure. These encounters are often strengthened by verbal communication and evolutionarily built-in dispositions of acquisition, affiliation and their naturally accompanying emotions.

But what can substitute to establish needs, and consequently values, for AGI, lacking the capability of pain or pleasure? Needs, alone, won't do it. There is an ambiguity in the use of the word, need, which often produces a confusion between need as merely technical cause, and need as approved or promoted cause. For example, a robber may need a gun to terrorize his otherwise blasé victims; but, we, disapprovingly deny the robber's need for gun because, more fundamentally, we disapprove of robbery.

Another example is when Sam says to friend Harry, "You really ought to buy a new jacket." Harry replies, "What do I need a new jacket for? This one is just fine for when it's cold." Sam insists, "But it looks kind of worn. Shabby is not stylish anymore." Harry argues he needs the jacket for its function, an extrinsic value. Stylish clothes do not seem to be much, if at all, valued (intrinsically) by him. [5]

Of course, Maslow's model is one among many. It is likely that depending which groups you investigate you would come up with substantially different priorities. For example, Gert Hofstede identifies nationality groups according to such dimensions as Power Distance, Individualism, Assertiveness, Avoidance of Uncertainty, and Long-Short Term Orientation. It is very likely that the priorities built into Maslow's model would be substantially reorganized depending how a population is selected choosing among variants of these five of Hofstede's dimensions. [5b]

Whose Values Should AGI Be Aligned With? Who will wait for answers?

Even if we give robots the ability to learn what we want, an important question remains that AI alone won’t be able to answer. We can try to align with a person’s internal values, but there’s more than one person involved here. … How to combine people’s values when they might be in conflict is an important problem we need to solve. — Anca Dragan (2019) [6]

I have not heard nor read that the general consensus is that The Trolley Problem [7] has been solved. Nor have I seen, heard nor read that auto-makers have stopped rushing to put "self-driving" vehicles on the market, despite collateral damages involving them.

Despite the profusion of glad tidings of burgeoning crowds of marketeers, there seems to be little consensus among professional researchers and users of AI as to the safety of its present state of development.[8]

Consequently, I am even less sanguine that anyone with the capability to do so, is holding back from constructing AI for military purposes, albeit it is still may be quite primitive or indiscriminate in its effects. I suspect that the fear of being caught at a military disadvantage offsets any worries about lack of value alignment with their AI adjuncts or about the "collateral casualties" among their targets.

See, also, Rozycki,EG (2010) The Indeterminacy of Consensus: masking ambiguity and vagueness in decision.

For more recent comment, see (Quanta Magazine, Dec 20,2022) Mitchell,M What Does It Mean To Align AI With Human Values?

Cordially--- EGR


FOOTNOTES

[1] Tegmark, M “Let’s Aspire to More than Making Ourselves Obsolete” p. 85 in John Brockman (ed.), Possible Minds. 25 Ways of Looking at AI. Penguin. New York. 2019.

[2] See The Conditions for Active Valuing.

[3] See Short Articles on "Sacred" Values

[4] See “Sacred Values” in US Public Schools: pretending there is no conflict.

[5] See NEEDS ASSESSMENT: A Fraud?

[5b] Hofstede G, Hofstede GJ & Mindov, M (2010) Cultures and Organizations. Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival. New York. McGraw-Hill.

[6] Dragan, A , “Putting the Human in the AI Equation.” p.136 in Brockman. See, also, Clabaugh,GK & Rozycki,EG (2007) The Nature of Consensus.

[7] See Self-Driving Cars, Run-Away Trams, & “Unavoidable” Accidents

[8] See John Brockman (2019), throughout. Also, there is a natural tendency for the breadth of consensus on criteria to diminish, proportionally, as research becomes more intense, precise and specialized; especially when choice of criteria bears on economic or political interests.

Learning Common Sense: tricks and false consensus?

updated 061418

AI still lacks what most 10-year-olds possess: ordinary common sense. -- Paul Allen, quoted in C Gohd "It’s Really Hard to Give AI “Common Sense” [1]

...once (AI) becomes very large, and it has thousands of units per layer and maybe hundreds of layers, then it becomes quite un-understandable. - T Jaakkola, MIT [2]

AI is useless until it learns how to explain itself. -- L James Towards Data Science[2]

"It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree." -- Baudelaire [3]

"Playing" with Deception. Many of the games adults play with even very young children work at getting them to recognize that sometimes what they see, hear, feel or remember can be misleading. Even one-year olds can be introduced to "peek-a-boo" in which they learn that the immediate disappearance brought about by covering one's eyes does not, by itself, make what they have just seen, go away.

Two-year olds can be surprised and entertained with a game called, "I caught your nose," where the adult or older, less naive child, uses curled forefinger and middle finger of one hand to gently clasp the younger's nose, moves the hand away while sliding the thumb in between the two fingers and says "I caught your nose."

I have seen such games played hundreds of times. The naive child's initial reaction is usually one of surprise -- although sometimes one of dismay or even shock -- but, as the "nose-holding" hand opens up empty and the adult says, "feel you face" the child, relieved, will smile or even laugh and invite: "Do it again."

But playing with deception most likely only works under two (among many possible other) conditions. These are that

1. the children are more or less "normal," i.e. healthy, awake, and undistracted by such things as a wet diaper or hunger and

2. the experiences of the learners bring them to develop a sense of probability concerning what they perceive in contrast to other options that might occur.

If, for example, a person playing peek-a-boo hides or, say, dons a mask, while the child is covering its eyes, the experience will likely not teach much about what is likely to happen under which circumstances. Nor will it happen if the child is developmentally too under- or overdeveloped to benefit from the interaction.[4]

Deception games in educational contexts are usually a kind of training in "normality," e.g. merely covering the eyes does not change what's "really there." Or, if something's where it should be, say, you nose on your face, then it can't also be somewhere else. This is training in what we call "common sense."

However, a sense of "normality" is different from "common sense." As children grow, they might get training in a more sophisticated, less "common," form of "common sense." For older children we might use a poem such as

As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks.
Every sack had seven cats.
Every cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?

One or more students hurry to do the arithmetic and come up with 2401. We "correct" them by saying that the answer is "one", because I, alone, was going to St. Ives. The teaching point is usually to get them to read more carefully.

But a more insightful student might point out that the poem does not originally indicate, "I alone was going to St. Ives." It's possible, therefore, had I already had (unmentioned) co-travelers, that at least 2402 were going to St. Ives. The original teaching point -- Read Carefully! -- fails, but is (hopefully) compensated for by the discussion of the possible assumptions and what they let us infer.

Even relatively sophisticated adults can be fooled by clever illusionists who appear to make coins disappear and, then, pull them from a spectator's ear. Trained scientists have been known to insist that they have seen individuals bend spoons without touching them. Illusionist's confederates are "seen" to get cut in half and survive the sawblade's mutilation. And elephants can disappear in a puff of smoke!

In such circumstance, however, the victims of the illusion either

1. are not able to carefully examine the surroundings of the events, for e.g. being seated in an audience; or,

2. are generally ignorant of techniques of illusion, e.g. coin-palming, or attention-distraction,

which, though employed in their present circumstances, are rare in day-to-day experience.

Of greater concern to us, perhaps, should be the abundant presence of illusionists of political and commercial enterprise armed with well-established research on psychological biases and manipulation techniques. Educational institutions have yet to catch up with, much less keep abreast of, these clever people.

Both schooling and experience, in general, work toward refining "common sense" even to the point of supplanting it with something else. But a socially important, very problematic conception of these processes is the common myth that some substantial residues of the original "common sense" remain as a substrate, so to speak, of newer learnings. The myth holds it that the residues remain not merely as individual inclinations and skills, but as widely shared, if only latent, tools all can rely on.[5]

Consider the following conversation between an employer (E) and a prospective job-holder (P):

E: P, I've brought you in, P, to ask you to run our Department of X.

P: But E, as a Y manager, I haven't had any experience really working with X!"

E: Yeah; but, you've been successful with Y. And your heart's in the right place. I feel we'll get along just fine. So when it comes to working with X, just rely on your common sense!"[6]

Whether or not we find such a conversation problematic might well depend on the kind of organization E and P will be involved in. If it is, say, a small but expanding family-owned-and-run retail operation, that is one thing. However, if it is a middle-sized medical-surgical establishment, or a large kitchen-facilities factory, other concerns arise.

As Joan Woodward [8] has long argued, there are important and complex relations between organizational structure, staff social relations, and productivity.[9]

What is Common? What Makes Sense? A typical definition of common sense from The Cambridge English Dictionary gives us:[10]

The basic level of practical knowledge and judgment that we all need to help us live in a reasonable and safe way.
Examples: Windsurfing is perfectly safe as long as you have/use some common sense.

Note how many terms presume anterior "definition": basic level, practical, knowledge, judgment, reasonable, perfectly, safe. But what level is "basic?" What kind of information is "knowledge?" Who does "we all?" refer to? What is "reasonable;" what is "safe?"

Our natural languages use terms that are often vague and ambiguous, highly dependent on situation. Many of our linguistic choices are based on our belief that others can understand and trust us even though we vacillate in choice of words -- not meaning "literally" what we say -- to color our speech with our own values, moods and intentions.[11] We make them functionally precise ("clear" enough) by adjusting them, ad hoc, to the contexts we use them in and in relying (perhaps, wrongly) on our assumptions of normality.

Consider the following example of an all-too typical conversation,

Harry: Snow again! It's May! I've lived here all my life and never before seen so much snow!
Jack: Uh-huh. It shows how global warming is just a fraud!"
Harry: What makes you think so?"
Jack: It's obvious to anyone who has any common sense." More snow, less warmth!

A critical claim here is "More snow, less warmth!" This is common sense to millions of people, in the U.S. at least. We may say they are mistaken, but the falsity of their premise does not necessarily affect the logic of their argument. The argument may be based on a "confusion" between the notions of "climate," a characterization of weather events over extended periods of time and with large areas of occurrence; and, "weather," states of the atmosphere, e.g. phenomena of temperature change, precipitation, etc. considered from restricted perspectives which are more likely to be experienced by individuals or smaller populations. Breadth of perspective is independent, one would think, of commonality.

When was the last time a poll was taken to ascertain which individuals living under which conditions share common agreement on the assumptions underlying the definitions of the Cambridge English Dictionary? [12]

Depending upon where they are located and how informed they are, they may well be exercising their "common sense" even though it brings them to false conclusions. Recall only how phlogiston once provided a scientifically acceptable theory of combustion. Recall, also, that despite the efforts of Lister and Pasteur, many educated people rejected bacterial action as a cause of infection.

Every linguistic transaction is a wager which may not gain "high predictive probability" by being written down in "black and white" or entered as code into a computer program. Just as arguments can be valid without being sound, so can valid arguments yield falsehoods though they rest on common sense.

To continue with similar considerations, go to The Indeterminacy of Consensus: masking ambiguity and vagueness in decision.

-- Cordially, EGR


Footnotes and References

[1] quoted in Chelsea Gohd (Futurism, 3/11/ 2018) It’s Really Hard to Give AI “Common Sense

[2] Knight, W (MIT Technology Review, 4/11/18) The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
See also James, L Towards Data Science (2018) AI is useless until it learns how to explain itself.

[3] Baudelaire, C Intimate Journals XCIX
See also G Clabaugh & E Rozycki (1999) The Nature of Consensus

[4]"Developmentally appropriate" is one of those educational concepts that is both theoretically dense and vague as well as hard to specify a non-circular definition for. See Redden & Frederick below.[7]

[5] See Rozycki, E (2014) Common Sense, or Merely Common Hubris?

[6] See Rozycki, E (2017) Hard Practical Questions? Handle Them or Dodge Them! Here's How

[7] Redden, JP & Frederick, S (2011) Unpacking Unpacking: Greater Detail Can Reduce Perceived Likelihood Journal Of Experimental Psychology

[8] Joan Woodward, Industrial Organization. Theory and Practice. Reprint. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)

[9] See, also Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education.

[10]The Cambridge English Dictionary on 'common sense'

[11] See Rozycki, E (2016) Three Human Dimensions of Conceptualization

[12] See Rozycki, E (2016) All Definition Ultimately Rests on Stipulation, i.e. Communal Agreement.

Describing vs Defining. Does it make much practical difference?

Why don't we teach children definitions for everyday objects? Wouldn't it help them to have a definition of their mother, or their toy train so that they could recognize them?

It seems not likely. Most kids wouldn't need such definitions. Barring disruptions to family life, children usually recognize their parents or toys. Besides, if they "needed" such definitions, would they need to know, in advance, how to use them? Learning to use definitions is usually what happens during schooling and many schooled people don't learn to do it well, anyway.

But in order to learn to use specific definitions of their parents and toys, would children need to learn how first how to use even prior definitions to recognize the specific ones of their parents and toys? But, then, etc. etc.

How do we avoid this logical regress?

Suppose Harry is someone we all know. It is an everyday kind of question to ask, "Can you describe Harry?" It is somehow odd to ask, "Can you define Harry?" This contrast between what it is not unusual to ask with what it is strange to ask points out an important difference between the activities of describing and defining.

Consider, again, the difference between the following answers to the question "Who is the town coroner?"

1. She's the elderly woman who lives in the green house on Logan Street.
2. He or she is the doctor who is elected to conduct official medical inquiries for the town.

We intuit that describing and defining are, in some ways, similar activities but normally differ in, at least, three dimensions: focus, criteria used, and range. The chart sketched below lays out some differences.

	FOCUS	CRITERIA	RANGE
DESCRIBE	A unique(?) individual	Easily recognizable, Often accidental	Specific, ...
DEFINE	(A "typical" individual) A class (or set)	(...) Essential Sometimes difficult to ...	Strives for ..., free from ...

Scanning the chart, as incomplete as it is, you can see some items which would be problematic for an intelligence, natural or artificial, that relied on only memory and abstraction for categorization, e.g. uniqueness, typicality, context, for a few. (For more on this see Concept as Abstraction)

For a completed chart and an expansion on this essay with practice exercises to explore the relationship between between describing and defining, see https://goo.gl/atrf21 .


Cordially,

--EGR

Constricting Social Ideals: breaking the values-action link to ensure "stability."

(re-edited 11/22/17)

"Stability," said the Controller, "stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability."--- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1989)

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved. -- J. Lepore (2014)[1]

Education is not just human cognition. It's about preparing children for their future as well-adjusted global citizens: mentally, emotionally, socially, physically, and personally. -- W. McKenzie (2014)[1a]

Introduction. Although saber-rattling by politicians never seems to disappear entirely, generalized, widespread nation-to-nation warfare is a losing proposition for all sides, given the interlocking economic and social relationships of, especially, the biggest and richest nations. (See Dunnigan, 1983)[2] The primary thesis of this essay is that, for the sake of "stability," -- survival, even -- large modernly weaponized, culturally and socially diverse nations will press to develop citizens who, if "rational" appeals to them would likely fail, can be managed via distractions or by the promotion of cross-purposes.

Thanks, D van der Made

Not only schools[3], but institutions in every facet of life have long worked to such ends.[3a] How is such distractive, pacifying "education" to be done? By severing the rational bonds between what is publicly preached as socially desirable from those actions individuals or subgroups might take in the pursuit of their personal understandings of such public preachments.

Institutional procedures are developed, often inadvertently, which interfere with, or subordinate, the efforts which individuals perceive to be rationally related to their pursuit of espoused social goals. Help, even with good intentions, is often less desired than is individual obedience to procedure. For example, leaders of many kinds would prefer "good citizenship" to be interpreted as "following the law" no matter that many people would hold certain laws to be immoral. Leaders prefer to risk errors of group-think, e.g. lynchings or vigilanteism or social activism, than to yield legitimacy to independent, even if "right," in someone's view, outsider opinion. Orthodoxy-vs-Heresy conflicts are long-recognized examples of such conflict.

Disruption, Innovation or Fundamental Failure? The word, "disrupt," has long had negative connotations, as in such usages as "disrupt a ceremony, a meeting, a speaker, etc." However, in today's United States of America, "Disruptive Innovation" (Christensen & Eyring, 2014)[4] has become used to re-characterize an institution's misfortune more optimistically as a unfortunate, collateral event, but, still, more importantly, as a contribution to organizational progress.

American parents and politicians, too, have long complained that schools, especially public schools, teach things disruptive of community, church and family traditions. For example, physical education, New Math, racial tolerance, sex education, audio-lingual foreign language methods, gender equality, core curricula, critical thinking and the other subject matters have long been condemned as disruptive by influential groups of public, private, political and corporate representatives.

How are the public schools doing? It depends on whom you ask at what point in the political calendar. It also depends on which public schools you are referring to. Even less likely to elicit an open public response is "which students you are focussing on?" The politically safe attitude for would-be office holders over the last century and more has been to claim that public schooling needs reform.(Rozycki, 2004)[5] Indeed, banking, commerce, state government and the courts are often claimed to need reform; but only education, almost uniquely, public education, has long been politically vulnerable enough to allow the often random interventions of "reformers" of all stripes.(Rozycki, 2001)[6]

Which Values Does Public Education Support?[7]

"Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and who is struck with it."-- Joseph Stalin in Interview with H. G. Wells, (1934)

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried from time to time. -- Winston Churchill to House of Commons, 11/11/47

Which values does public education support? There are, it appears, more basic issues hidden as presumptions. One is : "Whose values does public education support?" And consequently, "Why their values and not those of others?" And "In what way are these values 'democratic'?" These are the elephants in room often left disregarded by hasty focus on the topic question.

Determining whose values persistently influence education, then, seems to be a pertinent inquiry, both politically and morally. But such a pursuit is distractive. It typically leads off into well-practiced expatiation of politics and ethics. These areas, being more familiar and entertaining, seldom get us near a practical answer for the question, except perhaps with a sentimental slogan bolstered by a false consensus, e.g. "We all want what's best for all the children!"[8] Or, if we avoid sloganeering -- difficult in most public venues, we drop the question and agree to disagree on … whatever "we feel" it is. (Clabaugh & Rozycki, 1999b)[9]

But let's consider an even more shunned elephant-in-the-room than the values taught . A second even more fundamental issue is this: On what basis do we judge that a person values something? How can you "teach values" if you don't know what indicates that someone has learned them?

This risks a lengthy diversion into esoteric philosophy or psychology. Yet, it does invite some investigation essential to planning wise and effective interventions.[10]

Teaching Values: how should this be done?

School Days, school days, Dear old golden rule days
Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick
(Music by Gus Edwards; Lyrics by Will D. Cobb, 1907)

American public schools have long been charged to "teach values." But what this means remains after many years controversial and somewhat vague, at best. Tough talk about about holding someone, somewhere — usually teachers — "accountable" even though hickory sticks are long gone. (Anyway, no one ever really checked to see if they were very, if at all, effective.)

The easy response by schools to the value-teaching mandate in times when criticism of them is not too vehement is to have teachers mimic preachers. Teaching is Preaching. At the same time, in order to avoid disappointment, little effort has, in the past been expended by trying to ascertain their effects. This lack has been over-compensated for in the past three decades by increasingly disruptive (in the pessimistic sense) program of school testing. Yet, despite much expenditure, few practical changes for the better have resulted.

Talk is cheap. We live in a cultural of hyperbole where people, especially children, are often induced to talk up what they may not personally value or even know. What is it that can we rely on to show that a person values something? Normally it is that he or she works to acquire it. Or recommends it to others. Or, once acquired, takes care of it. Or tries to defend it against harm or disesteem. Actually, any of these might do. But, how do you test for values acquired in a mass-teaching environment, especially in a culture where, for the sake of cost-cutting, superficialities are conceded to be acceptable as though they were thorough examinations?

Looking for Excuses.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. -- Groucho Marx

If we really wanted to verify that someone valued something we would check to see if that person pursues, promotes, sustains or defends what we think he or she values (or purports to value). The quickest and most common way to get at this is to consider what excuses a person makes for himself or herself when they "let themselves down." Whichever excuses we accept as reasonable are indicators of what we believe to be preconditions for connecting a person's values to the behavior that manifests commitments to those values.

This is more complex than it appears: at any given moment a person may be inactive. For example, he or she may be sleeping, or lost in a book. She or he, nonetheless, may be said, still, to value expensive chocolate, or foreign movies, or their friends' admiration, or her or his alma mater's school song, if she or he did so before falling asleep.

Consider our friend, Harry, who is overweight and flabby. Yet, he claims he really values being in top physical condition, which is quite far from his present physical state. Is he deluding himself, or lying? Not necessarily, because he may believe that he faces substantial, or, at present, insuperable, impediments blocking his pursuit of a buff body.

What might these impediments be? Harry's belief that either

a. he lacks the knowledge, at this moment, to get himself into shape. Or

b. he is not physically able to do what is required to get him into shape. Or

c. he is not where he could work on getting into shape. Or

d, he has a deadline he won't meet if he lets it go right now. Or

e. he is not, at the moment, "in the mood" to get to exercising for the buff body he seeks.

The impediments are, in respective order, lack of knowledge, lack of ability, lack of opportunity, lack of priority and lack of mood, (some vague kind of "emotional consonance"?). These are not unusual excuses for inactivity in pursuing, at a given time, what one claims to value.

But, by turning the impediments inside out, as it were, we generate conditions practically necessary for planning and evaluating educational goals. Also, satisfying these conditions may be sufficient to transform values inculcated into active pursuits. That is both their promise and their danger. (See Rozycki, 1979)[11]

All this is somewhat complicated. Little wonder that educators of all sorts, including parents, are still fumbling around with the problem.[12] The closest we seem to solving it is in situations of very high interest or compulsion which are given close attention to action, e.g. in scouting, sports or military training. In other more relaxed or forgiving learning situations training success drops off exponentially.[13]

Active and Passive Valuing: the realities of prioritization. An ancient, though banal distinction is important to continue our undertaking:

a. Instrumental values, sometimes called extrinsic, are those pursued in order to extend the pursuit to something they are necessary for. One earns money, for example, not to eat or wear it, but because it is instrumental to obtaining food and shelter.

b. Intrinsic values are those pursued for their own sake, e.g. pleasure, health.

Note that something may be both intrinsic and extrinsic depending upon one's perspective, e.g. exercise may be done both because it feels good and it leads to better health. Better health may be pursued because it enables a broader experience of pleasures.

Our friend Harry's excuses for his observed lethargy will be the conditions for what we will call "active valuing." These conditions, briefly put, are: knowledge, ability, opportunity, priority and motivation. The lethargic Harry we observe today still "passively values" physical health, but believing he is faced with an impediment, is doing nothing to pursue it: " You didn't get any physical exercise today! I thought you wanted to get into shape." "I do; but I sprained my lower back this morning and need to take it easy for a day!"

That is, Harry will actively pursue a value (here, a healthy physical condition) provided he believes he

1. (Knowledge) has the knowledge of what and how to so pursue it; and

2. (Ability) has the (physical and mental )ability to pursue it; and

3. (Opportunity) has the opportunity to pursue it; and

4. (Priority) has no present object of higher value whose pursuit impedes this one; and

5. (Motivation) has the will, is in the mood, is inspired to, the pursuit.

(Test these conditions out, e.g. "Harry has no knowledge of what to do or how to do it to improve his health." Note that the lack of any one of them would provide him an excuse for his lack of activity.)

We begin to understand how easy it is to beg off being responsible for non-performance for doing what is expected of you. You didn't get your late-return IRS tax-forms done by July? Hope someone "understands." You weren't sure exactly what the deadline date meant. Or, you didn't understand the complicated instructions. Or, you were busy nursing your sick mother. Or, you didn't get back from your European vacation in time, etc., etc.

Seeing how complex the relationship is between valuing something and demonstrating that you do, you can see why it is so difficult to teach people values, especially moral values which often require you to forego something you really want.

Passive values and Akrasia. Passive values are what philosophers refer to as dispositions (psychologists, as habits). Active values are episodes of unimpeded action toward those values. The educator's problem is how to get passive values to become active, i.e. to get a student's professions of esteem, wanting, or liking to become behaviors of promotion, pursuit, maintenance or defense.(Rozycki, 1994) [14]

Note the following: if Harry insisted that he very much valued physical well-being and yet continued in his lethargy despite admitting that he believed he had the knowledge, ability, opportunity, priority and motivation to pursue that value, we might well wonder if he was less than rational or mentally disturbed.

Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics invents a term for such a condition: akrasia. This is basically a covering term for our lack of will to pursue what we know we ought. It is not unimportant, however, since showing too many signs of akrasia, whether of irrationality or mental disturbance, invites intervention in one's life by state authorities concerned with particular abnormalities of this sort.[15] But akrasia is precisely the general disruption of values-action links.

Changing resistence into acquiescence. We suggested above that identifying the conditions for linking disposition to active behavior offered both promise and danger. Let's expand on that point. An individual's values often conflict with those of others. Powerholders have long used the active-passive distinction to convert opposition to their values from resistence into acquiescence. Such are the practical, socially defensive uses to which they have been put in governing organizations throughout history: the conversion of the natural dispositions of individuals to actively pursue what they value into a "socially acceptable" kind of passive valuing. This is how one turns people into soldiers, or soldiers into "peaceable" citizens or "overenthusiastic" students into quiet seat-warmers.[15a]

Since it is active valuing, the pursuit of values, which might cause conflict where values are not shared, certain policy directions can be drawn immediately from the above formulations. If it is a mission of the schools in a multicultural society to forestall conflict between different cultural subgroups, then

a. this mission is served by policies which promote "passive valuing", i.e. some kind of esteeming which does not involve the pursuit of that which is esteemed -- typical of so-called "appreciation" courses or of values clarification classes;

b. this mission is also served by policies which gainsay any of the conditions given above necessary to connecting action with value, i.e. the conditions of rationality, knowledge, ability, opportunity and consistency.

Thus, recalling the conditions for an individual's active valuing, knowledge, ability, opportunity, priority, and motivation, a rational -- not necessarily moral -- school policy serving the social goal of reduced conflict might promote ignorance, incompetence, unequal opportunity, or inconsistency of conduct, or irrationality. Hardly anyone would think such aims educational; our considerations are suggestive, however, as to the persistence of these ills despite continued exhortation to eradicate them.

Must Conflicting Values Lead to Open Conflict?

"To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, (the Romans) call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. " -- Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 56 – after 117)

Condoned, even, esteemed, social practices of yesteryear, e.g. subjugation of people on the bases of gender, race, religion, etc., which are condemned (at least, orally) nowadays as evils in our multicultural democracy, were relatively successful in maintaining a kind of social stability and suppressing open conflict in other contexts: shortly put, ancient social practices more or less produced, in the short run, at least what Tacitus characterizes as Roman practice of "peace-making."[16]

It is only when we open up to questions of morality that the costs of "peace" begin to provoke investigation. But if educational environments are burdened with promoting not only intellectual or skills development, but, also, morality, how then can they, then, meet expectations that they support social stability and reduced conflict? It could happen, if morality becomes confused with group-think.

Pursuing Schooling Aims: Intellectual and Moral. The organizational values which tend to be of highest priority are:

a. to reduce or stultify individual propensities to act out conflicts; that is, to actively pursue values, i.e. by "vigorous" opposition; and
b. to make a plausible attempt to meet goals formulated by outside controllers.

But plausibility is likely inversely related to discernment. Thus, institutions of all kinds relax in trying to produce people with the discernment to evaluate organizational aims in more than a superficial manner. The boss decides what the philosophy means. And his or her bosses decide for him or her, if he or she doesn't know. The question gets passed up and around until it gets lost or forgotten.

About schools, Harry Broudy pointedly notes:

Especially awkward for the public schools are the accounts of the civic and political process. … The school operates on the principle that it must reinforce the ideals the community professes and not the behavior that it tolerates. Yet it is difficult to keep up the pretense that the behavior of officials, elected and appointed, does not violate professed ideals. For one thing, the mass media are exposing the pretense daily; almost hourly. … How much of this can the school teach as part of the social studies or social science curriculum? -- (Broudy 1981. 23.)[17]

American schools are not intended to be merely intellectual training centers. They have been burdened by ancient traditions of inculcating morality, more recently repackaged as "values education."

Staff in American schools, whether public or private, presumably undertake to bring their charges to display behavior that pursues, promotes, sustains or defends things they might not if left alone to their individual pursuit. In this sense, the school a sort of back-up system to the vagaries of family, community and state educational efforts. Schools are to promote both individual and social goals.

Democracy and multiculturalism (diversity) can give rise to sometimes open conflict among educators, family, community and state. Many of these struggles are, in effect, a form of cultural warfare. Long-held communal, ethnic and familial biases, even though traditionally esteemed in their contexts, are often deprecated in some schools -- particularly in public schools -- as prejudice and injustice, for example, annihilation, racism, sexism, and class or religious bias.

Thus, importantly, in a multicultural democracy, the schools are believed to reinforce, and enhance, no small part of what students are preached to about in family, church, community and state. This reinforcing endeavor is especially professed to be prevalent in the public schools. And always foremost in the demands made of public education is that the schools promote the values of domestic peace and stability

What is overlooked -- more likely, disregarded -- is that individual goals and social goals not infrequently conflict. So it is that, for example, issues of racial or sexual segregation, religious and class bias, and the submission to school and general legal authority have given and continue to give rise to controversy and conflict in education.

What to Do? Keep on Truckin'.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. -- Winston Churchill

"Group versus Individual" is not, per se a problem. It is a fluctuation in the distribution of perceived costs and benefits between and among individuals and groups. This is a dynamic that all organizations, all people have to deal with to survive. (Consider the current, vehement gun-control debate.[19]) Except for hermit-like individuals who eschew relationships with all other human beings, this dynamic functions to address perceived problems that arise living in a community, or in living in a community among other communities.(Coser, 1956)[20]

We can see from the chart below that conflict can benefit a group. But it is important to ask, whom does conflict benefit when it benefits a group? Not everybody in a group may get the same benefits nor pay the same costs. And the kinds of costs and benefits there are may vary considerably among group members. Who does the sweating and who gets the glory? What do they pay and what do they get for it?

In a world of change, in a dynamic society of non-omniscient beings, such questions are not answered once and for all. The dynamic is not merely repetitive orbits, but a helix, a tendril cycling around, searching as it progresses through time. Its responses to perceived difficulties, as Charles Lindblom [21] has put it, are "muddlings-through," which provide those of us who live in relatively free democracies additional cycles for the sake of adjustment for what we seek as improvement.[21a]

Supreme Court Justice Hans Raj Khanna writes of India what may be easily applied to any country with a constitutional government:

If the Indian constitution is our heritage bequeathed to us by our founding fathers, no less are we, the people of India, the trustees and custodians of the values which pulsate within its provisions! A constitution is not a parchment of paper, it is a way of life and has to be lived up to. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and in the final analysis, its only keepers are the people. Imbecility of men, history teaches us, always invites the impudence of power.[22]

——----
Cordially, EGR


REFERENCES & FOOTNOTES (re-edited 11/19/17)

[1] Lepore, J (6/23/2014) "The Disruption Machine." The New Yorker. Available as pdf at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine

[1a]McKenzie, W (June 16, 2014) See "No Planned Obsolescence in Education."

[2] Dunnigan. James F How to Make War. New York. Quill. 1983 See Chapter 25 "Victory goes to the Bigger Battalions: The Cost of War."

[3] Rozycki, E. (5/2/11) "The Functions of Schooling"

[3a] Rozycki, E. (5/2/11) "The Quest for Loyalty: Oaths, Promises, Contracts, & Vows"

[4] Christensen, C M.; Eyring, J. (2011), The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education, New York, New York, USA: John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-1-11-806348-4.

[5] Rozycki, E. (2004)"The Need for and Possibilities of Educational Reform."

[6] Rozycki, E. (2001) "The Evils of Public Schools." Educational Horizons, Fall 2001.

[7] Rozycki, E. (3/13/11) "Does Public Education Support American Democracy?"

[8] Rozycki, Edward G. (2010b) "The Indeterminacy of Consensus: masking ambiguity and vagueness in decision"

[9] Clabaugh, G. & Rozycki, E. (1999b)"Slogans in Education"

[10] Rozycki, E. (3/31/12) "Assessing the Likelihood of Implementing Change"

[11] Rozycki, E. (1979) "Values, Rationality and Pluralism" Philosophy of Education 79, 195-204. Available online as "Pluralism and Rationality: the limits of tolerance"

[12] Rozycki, E. (2008) "Democracy vs Efficiency in Public Schooling"

[13] Rozycki, E. (2010a) "Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education: school organization as instrument and expression"

[14] Rozycki, E. (1994) "Rationales for Intervention: From Test to Treatment to Policy: a forensic theory of warrants & rebuttals".

[15] Rozycki, E. (3/31/12) "Are Humans Rational? What's at Stake?">)

[15a] Kotter & Schlesinger offer interesting approaches to changing resistors to facilitators. See footnote [10].

[16] See Cameron, C. How Captives Changed the World. Scientific American, December 2017. pp. 78 - 83.

[17] Broudy, H. Truth and Credibility: the citizen's dilemma (New York: Longman, 1981) p. 23.

[19] Rozycki, E. (6/15/16) "Gun Fun or Safe Citizens? Must We Make Trade-Offs?"

[20] Coser,L (1956) The Functions of Social Conflict New York: Free Press. For discussion with some application of his theory, see http://www.newfoundations.com/EGR/FunConflict.html

[21] Lindblom, Charles E. "The Science of 'Muddling Through,"' Public Administration Review 19 (Spring 1959): 79-88.

[21a] Susskind, L & Cruikshank, J, Breaking the Impasse, 1987, p. 63-64. Sloganizing increases ambiguity, and with it, the likelihood of agreement. (However, ambiguity increases the risk of false consensus. -- EGR)

[22] Khanna,H R Making of India's Constitution. Eastern Book Co, Lucknow, 1981. ISBN 978-81-7012-108-4. Cited in Wikipedia, "The Emergency (India)."

Understanding "Talking Lions" and Other "Black Boxes"

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. -- Wittgenstein[1] Artificial intelligence is everywhere. But before scientists trust it, they first need to understand how machines learn. -- D Castelvecchi, Can We Open the Black Box of AI? [2] "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon." -- Elon Musk (2014) Reported in CNN Tech , Oct 28th.
	Faust with Homunculus

Black Boxes Abound. Less so, our understandings of them. The "black boxes" are not only lions, or AI devices, but also humans, and even more. If we generalize, keeping in consideration our perceptual limitations, any source of emissions that appear to us to be more than random, from any object or even an "empty" focus of attention, is, initially, a black box.

Many commentators have remarked that Wittgenstein makes an incautious jump from speaking to understanding in the quote cited above. I will generalize their concerns: how do we know that a (what appears to us to be) non-random emission of, say, sound, is speech? Or, if the transmission is not sonic to humans, language? Animals can learn to mimic human emissions. Even non-English recordings, played backwards, can sound like English speech.

To many a monolingual English speaker, the following phrases sound like pieces of English nursery rhymes colored with a non-English accent:

1. French - Un petit d'un petit s'étonnent aux Halles (Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.)
2. German - Oh wer, oh wer ist Mai Lido doch Gong? (Oh where, oh where is my little dog gone?)
3. Spanish (Caribbean) -- Grima! Sí, comí. Te excusé que rifa. (Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat.) [3]

Black Boxes are "Understandings." How does Wittgenstein even judge what the lion is doing? What assumptions is he making? Even if the lion's emissions sound like an English sentence, what is relevant in the context? What is the lion doing? Suppose, for example, our friend, Harry, is standing before a lion's cage in which a cave has been constructed as a den. The lion, staring at Harry, emits the sound sequence, /2aym+ gowing+3 hówm1/ [4]

It sounds like the lion just said, "I'm going home." But did it "say" that? Suppose the lion then lies down and rolls over on its back. It starts to snore. Are we still inclined to think that the lion talked? (If so, did he talk to Harry? Did the lion inform Harry it was "going home?" And, thus, was the lion telling a lie?) Can Harry believe his eyes and ears? Has he jumped to conclusions? (See Artificial Intelligence Weirdness. Need categorizing relate to visual cues?)

The basic problem is how we distinguish illusions, visual, as well as audial or other, from realities. Even AI's have this problem.(See Autonomous Car Collides with Bus: an illusion of abstractions?)

And What Are Understandings? Understandings, when articulated in language, are narratives (or, if highly structured, a program) of collection or connection. We may judge them incorrect, false, or incomplete but they are still understandings -- we might say, "misunderstandings."

People may not be at all articulate as to what they understand so we may have to observe how they proceed from their present conditions toward those outcomes that we judge them to be pursuing. If we observe persistent failure to achieve a goal we might reasonably judge that their understanding of how to achieve that goal is deficient.

There is a large number of likely misunderstandings that persist in any population because they need not or cannot often be put to any test whose outcomes enjoy broad consensus as to their pertinence. (So what if kids believe in the Tooth Fairy!) These questionable understandings are often characterized as (empirically) "non-disconfirmable" beliefs. Examples are:

a. The mind is co-extensive with the body, or:
b. The mind is not coextensive with the body.
c. The universe is a hologram; or
d. The universe is not a hologram.

It would appear that any rationales, or chain of rationales, that contain misunderstandings would thereby be severely weakened. (Many pundits who presume to speak for Science share such misunderstandings with those who presume to speak for Religion. See Pseudo-Science: the reasonable constraints of Empiricism.)

The Fractal(?) Generation of Rationales. Understanding in general is the ability to produce chains of behavior or their narratives which link a confronted situation of interest to a goal to be achieved. But, understandings alone are often narrow and give may give no indication of the interests or abilities of the persons who understand and may be expected to act. Thus, understandings may be just part of what we're looking for.

Rationales can be elaborated from understandings. Rationales often bring up systemic concerns about, say, indicator validity (Cue), actor interests (Concern), and actor abilities (Control) which underly attempts at interventions based on narrower technical understandings.

Understandings can be chained together to produce rationales for action, and rationales themselves chained to produce broader understandings. Thus we may go from merely speculative understanding of how to cross a river, to a rationale for expanding commerce across that river, to an understanding of how political influence can be brought about reiteratively by using market rather than, say, armed forces. Understandings developed this way can be connected together, in chains or trees, etc., to articulate, say, foreign economic development policies. (See The Fractalization of Social Enterprise)


Why Can We Understand Human Black Boxes but find It harder to Understand AI Black Boxes?
It is because many people working in AI feel restricted to technical issues of understanding the how's of economically pertinant AI functioning. Despite the the persistent anthropomorphizing of AI output -- and despite the suspicions that the ultimate goal of AI research is to create some kind of homunculus -- issues of rationale, especially in the contexts of human development and learning are discounted as off target. [5]

Autonomous AI stimulates the same kind of misgivings that one might feel about extra-terrestrials. We are not sure we can predict, much less control what they might do with us. It is a non-sequitur to believe that high computational ability equates to altruism. (See METI. Here We Are! Come Eat Us! Our Children Are Especially Tasty!)

We have built-in, so to speak, Cue-identifying abilities inherited through evolution, both physical, mental and social, that are sensitive to the norms of the environments of our development. We are Concerned to share a world with motile, sometimes dangerous, beings that we can hear, feel, smell, taste as well as see. And we know from personal experience what fear, hunger, danger, hate and social attraction are. [6]

We measure the autonomy we are willing to extend to our ancient non-human friends and enemies because we can guess well what drives them, and how to accommodate them to our society. And, not the least important, we can, with more or less success, Control and defend ourselves against them.

To pursue the issues of understanding and rationale, see Intervention. Helping, interfering or just being useless?

Cordially, EGR

(P.S. Check out this interesting interview with Gary Marcus called Making AI More Human.)

NOTES
[1] L Wittgenstein 1958b. Philosophical Investigations. ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R.Rhees. tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell. page 223. See comments by Simon van Rysewyk at Wittgenstein Light

[2] D Castelvecchi Can We Open the Black Box of AI? Nature magazine, October 5, 2016

[3] Sources for pseudo-English concoctions: French - Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames, The d'Antin Manuscript. Penguin,1980; German - J Hulme Mörder, Guss Reims. The Gustave Leberwurst Manuscript, Clarkson N Potter, 1981; Spanish -- My confabulation, EGR

[4] IPA, digits indicate tone levels. Cf. H A Gleason, An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955)

[5] See EG Rozycki Behavior in Measurability and Educational Concerns 

[6] See D Gross, Why Artificial Intelligence Needs Some Emotional Intelligence

All Definition Ultimately Rests on Stipulation, i.e. Communal Agreement.

edited 052020

Fools bite one another but wise men agree together.-- Proverb
Agree, for the Law is costly.-- Proverb
The limits of your language are the limits of your world. -- L. Wittgenstein [1]

Stipulative vs Reportive? A distinction has long been noted between what we call “truth” and what we designate as “knowledge.” And so, many venerable thinkers have speculated, we can imagine that as our knowledge expands, so will it – “in the limit” as mathematicians say – eventually comprise truth. (Given that the universe doesn’t collapse into a black hole, or explode into some multidimensional supernova or something equally distracting.)

One common distinction among definitions as been that some are stipulative, i.e. generally restricted to narrow uses in restricted circumstances. Stipulative definitions purportedly stand in contrast to “reportive or “semantic” or “real” definitions, i.e. ones that get at the truth of things. (See Types of Definition)

So it is that a confusion arises between authoritative (for some purposes) sources and “truth-tellers,” founts of veracity, as it were. Dictionaries, technical manuals, and the like, become Holy Books. Why then do they (and Holy Books, too) “suffer” revision? (See "What Does That Word Really Mean?" -- The Misleading Dictionary Ritual)

Stipulative Legal Use vs Other Usage Let’s look at the notion of stipulation as it is used in legal contexts:

An agreement between attorneys that concerns business before a court and is designed to simplify or shorten litigation and save costs. During the course of a civil lawsuit, criminal proceeding, or any other type of litigation, the opposing attorneys may come to an agreement about certain facts and issues. Such an agreement is called a stipulation. -- West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. S.v. "stipulation." (My italics to emphasize variables to be used in following paragraphs.)

Now, let’s see how we might transform such a definition of stipulation into a kind of framework for generalization distinguishing semantically necessary structural constants from variables that allow for generalization into wider contexts.

By substituting for the specific legal terms we derive

An agreement between (interested parties) that concerns (action) (in a given venue) and is designed to simplify or shorten (procedures) and save costs. During the course of (an undertaking) the (representatives of different perspectives) may come to an agreement about certain facts and issues. Such an agreement is called a stipulation.

There are six variables: interested parties, action, in a given venue, procedures, undertaking, representatives of different perspectives.

If we substitute other terms for the variables, which may designate either individuals or sets of variables, e.g. groups, professions, activity-types, etc, that themselves may be “unpacked,” we can generate broader, more inclusive, clearly stipulated definitions.

For example, substituting, in order: oncologists, use of chemotherapy, in children, patient discomfort, in hospital stays, attending physicians,
we get

An agreement between Oncologists that concerns use of chemotherapy in children and is designed to simplify or shorten patient discomfort and save costs. During the course of in hospital stays, the attending physicians may come to an agreement about certain facts and issues. Such an agreement is called a stipulation.

If we substitute: Nixon and Brezhnev, activating military forces, around the world, tensions, in times of confrontation, diplomatic services; we get

An agreement between Nixon and Brezhnev that concerns activating military force around the world and is designed to simplify or shorten tensions and save costs. During the course of in times of confrontation, the diplomatic services may come to an agreement about certain facts and issues. Such an agreement is called a stipulation.

(An important note: Just because all knowledge may rest on stipulation, does not mean that any stipulation whatsoever is knowledge. Many may be falsehoods, if not just nonsense.)

Why Does Universal Stipulativity Matter? So what if all definition ultimately rests on stipulation?

The simplest response is quite plausible. Definitions are, so to speak, the building blocks of communally accessible knowledge. Stipulations are human decisions. They are often -- if not always -- constrained by non-epistemological considerations, the primary ones being monetary, time and opportunity costs. For example, dictionaries are finite, even such volumes as the Oxford English Dictionaries. One cannot define every word demanding that all terms in definiens be defined along with those of the definienda. People have to agree when enough is enough just to get the work published. (See The Fractalization of Social Enterprise)

We normally rely on our inculcated linguistic and cultural norms of communication and affiliation to provide often pre-conscious stipulations which limit the pursuit into infinity of ever more recondite items of possible knowledge.

To pursue these issues, see Searching for “Reality"? Stipulate A Turtle!
Cordially
--- EGR

FOOTNOTE

[1] This adage is often translated as "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." In any case, the semantic structure of the German verb, bedeuten, is substantially different from that of be , (is or are). This is at best the weakest of translational connotation of identity between forms of bedeuten and forms of be.

Consider this clip from the online English-German dictionary, dict.cc at https://www.dict.cc/?s=bedeuten

Three Human Dimensions of Conceptualization

The limits of your language are the limits of your world. -- Wittgenstein
Dimensions of Conceptual Definition: emotive, descriptive and communal. There are three often overlooked dimensions of importance to be considered when attempting to define a concept used by humans. They are

A: The Emotive-Evaluative Dimension. This focusses on expression of feeling or evaluation, or lack of such. e.g. creepy, cute, three pounds, light, 6 feet. These terms range from expressive to dispassionate with either positive (celebratory) or negative (deprecatory) connotation.(For more on celebratory/deprecatory comparisons, see Philosophy, Race and Language

B. The Descriptive-Uncertainty Dimension. This focusses on the extent to which judgment is based on presumption as opposed to demonstration, e.g. honest. happy, graduate, felon, equilateral, topology. These terms range from defeasible (also characterized as presumptive, ascriptive or concessive) to summative (invoking the logical sufficiency of necessary conditions).

C. The Personal-Communal. This dimension focuses on the breadth of community invoked (not necessarily actual) by the judgment. e.g. cute, annoying, criminal. These terms range from idiosyncratic to social.

It is important to note that these dimensions are not merely embellishments on the distinction in common parlance between “subjective” and “objective.” Daston and Galison in their book, Objectivity, present much evidence that this distinction has been historically problematic, particularly in the sciences. (For more on “objectivity,” see comments and references at Can Criminal or Immoral Behavior Be Dealt With Objectively?)

Unexamined, a vague concept of objectivity probably best serves the interests of those engaged in the academic, professional or commercial competition for status or markets. For more on such considerations, see Tony Becher(2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Discipline.)

Note well that a disagreement among humans on how to describe something need not require a difference in sensory perceptions among them. A group of people could disagree, and often do, on whether a tarantula is creepy or cute, even though they all agree that it is black and hairy.

Those who find it creepy might disagree with those who think it cute on the conditions under which the tarantula would be also dangerous. Very individual fears (or indifferences) may not be shared among members of the same community. This is common experience.

Descriptive uncertainty, on the other hand, is often overlooked or assumed to indicate a (possibly mistaken) perceptual difference underlying a disagreement. What is ignored is the judgment of uncertainty that may be quite independent of agreed-on perceived characteristics.

For some problematic examples consider the uncertainty involved in deciding that:

1. John, a convicted embezzler just released from prison, can be treated as an honest man;

2. John having memorized X number (3 or 3000?) of Spanish phrases can speak Spanish;

3. John, having acquired some number of certificates and diplomas, is educated; and

4. John, playing above average basketball in his first season, is a star player.

Each of these claims, 1 through 4, is far more vulnerable to rejection (defeasible), and would require far more consensus on evidence than the following:

5. John is six feet tall;

6. John has low blood pressure.

7. John throws the ball well.

8. John speaks some Spanish.

Why? Recognized standards of practice or broad familiarity reduces uncertainty in judgment. But uncertainty in judgment, even if supported by some measure of mathematical uncertainty, is a psychological state evidenced by our (un)willingness to pursue action. Its connection to the "real world" is at best a "psychological" one. (See Cause and Effect: essential belief, misapprehension, moral hazard?)

Isn’t this just obvious, just old hat? Apparently not. In the frantic pursuit of the imagined treasures of creating robotic homunculi, defeasible concepts of mental capacity are reduced to a fool’s gold list of sensory inputs hoped to produce sufficient conditions for characteristics of human intelligence. The three dimensions discussed above are ignored as “unscientific,” e.g. too “sociological” or “philosophical” or “legalistic,” by researchers whose conceptual hammers have been tempered in the hard sciences.

So, for example, traditional myths about teaching and learning abound among some researchers in artificial intelligence – also among researchers in other fields, e.g. psychology, organizational studies, and education. (See Five Essays: Causation in Teaching & Learning )

So, we are advised, if we want to protect humans from killer robots – or robots who just don’t give a damn about humans -- we need only “teach them human values,” or “teach them right from wrong.” (For more on this see United Nations tackles the 'fight' against killer robots; teaching them right from wrong may be the first step.— )

The 3 Dimensions as Indicators of Human Capacities.

With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. — Elon Musk (2015 MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium)

I suspect the demon is soon to be, if not already, loosed. There are too many highly intelligent and skilled people working in AI today who, but for a misorientation away from promising sources for modeling the human mind, would have come up with something by this time. (The present situation recalls the German attempt during WWII to develop an atomic bomb: they almost got it but for having gone down an unfruitful byway.)

Some promising sources, if one wants to create an artificial homunculus, are to be found in evolutionary biology, linguistic investigations and social, especially organizational theory. ( (See, for example, Joan Bybee (2010) Language, Usage and Cognition).

The three dimensions examined above lead fairly directly to those human – and not only just human – capacities supporting the intelligence with which our evolutionary history has endowed us. But that is grist for a later discussion.




For more relating to these issues, see Trait vs. Behavior: the sometimes non-science of learning

Cordially, EGR

Can Education Be Made A Science?

edited 5/21/20

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. -- Albert Einstein

Let's specify more precisely what the question of the title, Can Education Be Made A Science?, is intended to mean. It should be understood to ask, Can technology and methods be developed which will give us (human beings) control over the production of outcomes designated by educational goal statements?

We can analyze this question by breaking it into several related questions:

a. Can we cause people (the average person?) to learn? That is
b. Can we cause people to be either moral, skilled, or well-behaved?
c. Can we cause them to be this way whether or not they want to be this way? i.e. against their will.
d. Better yet, can we cause them to want to be this way? (Advertising seem to manage to do this surprisingly well -- check your teenager's clothing,)

The short answer to all of these questions is: it all depends. What might surprise you is what it depends on.
The first big, very big thing an education science would depend on is

1. our conceiving of educational goals whose outcomes would be the effects of solely our actions.

For example, suppose a religious community chose as a goal of education, Being accepted by God into Heaven. If they also believed that it is by an omnipotent God's grace alone that people achieve such acceptance, then, logically they must relinquish the hope of a science of education, since to think that humans have the power to compel God to accept them is incompatible with this belief.

Two other conditions, no small things, either, are:

2. that there be a workable consensus on goal outcomes (and the steps toward them); and
3. that the outcomes be unambiguously defined. (This crucial step is too technical to discuss in a blog. See the article and linked articles given in the reference on the bottom.)

Many an educational reform proposal has died for failing to meet conditions 2 or 3. Just consider the widely encountered goal statement, Prepare the student for the 21st Century. Who knows what is being specified here? And how many people agree on it? Would it have come to be a political issue in the U.S. if much of any consensus existed? (See What does Consensus mean, anyway?)
Recalling Einstein's quote above we might wonder about another issue. How much reliable experimentation would we have to conduct to determine both ends and means of our sought-after "scientific" education? After much fanfare most so-called "Best Practices" research has yielded minuscule results despite grand expenditures! (For a set of pertinent blogs, see Best Practices Search Results.)

If we are desperate to answer yes to the question as to whether education could be made a science, we might wish that the words science and education slip from their traditional moorings and come to be applicable in ways that satisfy us. (Which "us?" Which "ways?")

Advertising campaigns might do the trick. Celebrities might be pressed into service to convince people that educators are primarily scientific technicians, rather than the kind of magician they are often made out to be in the sitcoms. (See Technician, or Magician: Can You Tell the Difference?) Free promotional samples of technology would no doubt be welcomed by cash-strapped school districts whose political governors are almost always happy to concede on the minor matter of language: science? education? Whatever!

I am reminded of the principal in a high school in Philadelphia (circa 1990) who, when directed that all students were to take a course in Algebra -- even as staff ratings were to depend on student success -- did the following. He arranged for the lowest accomplishing students to be given an arithmetic-review course, which was called "Algebra-X." This "reform" was promoted throughout the systems high-schools. And so the superintendent could publicly claim that all students in Philadelphia high schools were studying algebra. (See Reform by Redefinition.)

For references and to examine these issues further, see Can There Be a Science of Education?

Cordially -- EGR

Institutional Realities vs. "De-Biased" Realities

The limits of your language are the limits of your world. -- Wittgenstein

What is a language? A dialect with an army. -- Old joke among linguists.

Bias is an instrument of institutions to control depictions of reality.
(See Institutionalization) Bias is pervasive. We can’t escape it completely. Even our nervous system biases our perceptions at fundamental levels.

Source: https://goo.gl/images/9xnvjl

Bias is also relative. But this need not be a constant concern. We should only worry about bias when it favors or disfavors those who are making decisions for us. This is why we look to find “disinterested,” “objective,” “unprejudiced” judgments to support our decisions.

Of course, people who are unprejudiced in one situation may be highly biased in another. It is we, ourselves, who need to discriminate when this is so. That is the problem.

Every organization that persists through changes of leadership or mission becomes an “institution.” As an institution it imposes ways of perceiving and thinking on its participants. The benefits of membership, you will be told, outweigh the costs of the conformity expected of you. You may have to subordinate your own judgment to that of the traditions, practices, etc., i.e., residues of former and present leaderships. You will have to learn which “elephants in the room” are to be ignored. Institutions seldom invite the examination, much less the mention, of “de-biased realities.”

An important point: what we imagine to be our "natural" languages are highly institutionally reconstructed means of communication. As we grow out of the sole influence of family and neighborhood, especially as we go through schooling, our languages become refashioned to meet the demands of the institutions we go through. We subordinate our dialects to our institutional languages for the promise of support and protection.

Scientists, even, sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their professional pursuits purge their working language of institutional biases, that their speech is a neutral medium of communication. This can stifle research by restricting both theory and practice within the boundaries of passing academic or corporate philosophical preferences. (See for example, The Functional Analysis of Human Behavior.)

Just as radical forms of Behaviorism and Empiricism of the last century impeded progress in psychology and economics, (see The Mathematics of Behaviorism: an informal examination), so it is that naive "natural language" notions of conceptualization and abstraction undermine progress in applicational development in AI. To examine this further, see More Related Issues

Cordially
--- EGR