Qualia (now in Locus)

Cory Doctorow
6 min readMay 4, 2021

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…

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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