Qualia (now in Locus)

My latest Locus Magazine column is “Qualia,” and it argues that every attempt to make an empirical, quantitative cost-benefit analysis involves making subjective qualitative judgments about what to do with all the nonquantifiable elements of the problem.

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Think of contact tracing. When an epidemiologist does contact tracing, they establish personal trust with infected people and use that relationship to unpick the web of social and microbial ties that bind them to their community.

But we don’t know how to automate that person-to-person process, so we do what quants have done since time immemorial: we decide that the qualitative elements of the exercise can be safely incinerated, so we can do math on the quantitative residue that’s left behind.

We can automate measurements of signal strength and contact duration. We can do math on those measurements.

What we can’t do is tell whether you had “contact” with someone in the next sealed automobile in slow traffic — or whether you were breathing into each others’ faces.

The decision to discard the subjective is subjective.

When the University of Illinois hired physicists to design its re-opening model, they promised no more than 100 cases in the semester and made unkind remarks about how easy epidemiology was compared to physics.

Within weeks, the campus shut down amid a 780-person outbreak. The physicists’ subjective judgment that their model didn’t need to factor in student eyeball-licking parties meant that the model could not predict the reality.

The problems in quants’ claims of empiricism aren’t just that they get it wrong — it’s that they get it wrong, and then claim that it’s impossible for anyone to do better.

This is — in Patrick Ball’s term — “empirical facewash.” Predictive policing apps don’t predict where crime will be, but they DO predict where police will look for criminals.

Subjectively discarding the distinction between “arrests” and “crime” makes bias seem objective.

40 years ago, the University of Chicago’s Economics Department incubated a radical experiment in false empiricism: the “Law and…