The KHIT Blog: "The International Center for Information Ethics?"

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

"The International Center for Information Ethics?"

Gradually trying to start moving on after losing my daughter. The house is now quiet and empty except for Cheryl and I, after a crazy busy week.

Got a new (promptly reciprocated) Twitter Follow:

Given that my grad degree is in "Ethics and Policy Studies" (an interdisciplinary mashup of PolySci, Econ, applied Philosophy, and Jurisprudence, etc), I am innately attracted to this area. I joined. We shall see.

ABOUT US
The International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) is an academic community dedicated to the advancement of the field of information ethics. It offers a platform for an intercultural exchange of ideas and information regarding worldwide teaching and research in the field. ICIE provides an opportunity for community and for collaboration between colleagues practicing and teaching in the field. It provides news regarding ongoing activities by various organizations involved in the shared goals of information ethics…

DIGITAL ETHICS
Digital Ethics concerns itself with human and digital interactions, including decisions made by humans while interacting with the digital, as well as those decisions made by the digital interacting with humans. Digital Ethics includes, in order of appearance into the field, Computer Ethics, Cyberethics, and AIethics. It places a focus on ethical issues pertaining to such things as software reliability and honesty, artificial intelligence, computer crime, digital transparency and e-commerce. The origins of Digital Ethics are found in the adoption of ethical concerns into Computer Science, as influenced by Norbert Wiener's 1948 Cybernetics.

MEDIA ETHICS
Media Ethics concerns itself with ethical practice in journalism and information dissemination, and includes issues as diverse as conflicts of interest, source transparency, fairness, fake news, and information accuracy. It aims to represent the best interests of the public through impartiality and balance, recognizing and addressing bias, and strives to respect individual privacy while demanding corporate and government transperency. Media Ethics makes explicit that journalism and media play a large part in shaping worldviews in society and as such demands a responsibility and personal commitment on the part of the journalist.

LIBRARY ETHICS
Alongside ethical considerations for Computer Science, the field of Information Ethics was first encapsulated under the ethical practices of Libraries and Information Science in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Library Ethics focuses on issues of privacy, censorship, access to information, intellectual freedom and social responsibility. It addresses copyright, fair use, and best practices for collection development. While Library Ethics originates, in the professional sense, in 19th-century librarianship, it finds its origins in a tradition of information ethics that stretches back to ancient Greece.

INTERCULTURAL INFORMATION ETHICS
Intercultural Information Ethics considers perspectives on information dissemination, ICTs and digital culture from the point of view of both globalization and localization. It provides an account of information culture as originating from all cultures, envisaged through comparative philosophies such as Buddhist and western-influenced information ethics traditions to African Ubuntu and Japanese Shinto ethics traditions in ICTs. In its applied sense, Intercultural Information Ethics strives to move beyond the presumed biases of western and greek-influenced ethical foundations for the field of Information Ethics to include globally diverse information ethics traditions. Philosophically, it endeavors to bridge a notable chasm in the field of information ethics, namely the foundational divide between information ecology and hermeneutics.

BIOINFORMATION ETHICS
Bioinformation Ethics explores issues of information pertaining to technologies in the field of biology and medicine. Traditional concerns in Bioethics such as abortion, organ donation, euthanasia, and cloning form the basis of Bioinfomation Ethics, but are supplemented by questions regarding the influence of digital and information & communication technologies. Bioinformation Ethics addresses rights to biological identity, the use of DNA and fingerprints, the dissemination of biomedical information and equal rights to insurance and bank loans based on genetics.

BUSINESS INFORMATION ETHICS
Business Information Ethics is the convergence of two separate fields of applied ethics, those being Information Ethics and Business Ethics. Business Information Ethics addresses informational considerations of the dissemination of goods and services, including information as a commodity, and provides ethical guidance in the analysis of the use of goods and services, including discourse on the impact they have on society. Business Information Ethics also addresses concerns for journal and information management, and includes the subfield of Organisational Information Ethics, as represented by the Centre for Business Information Ethics (CBIE).

“An important aspect of today's understanding of Ethics concerns issues of individual and social responsibility with regard to the impact of our choices in light of the influence of science and technology. While information and communication technologies open doors to new technological and scientific possibilities, they also act as a catalyst to an unprecedented encounter with otherness, ensuring through digital mediums the en masse collision of hitherto closed ethical systems and cultural worldviews."

-- Rafael Capurro

Yeah. It resonates.

apropos, see my prior post "Artificial intelligence and ethics." See also "The old internet of data, the new internet of things and "Big Data," and the evolving internet of YOU."

Stay tuned.
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ERRATA

Also trying to get back on pace with my reading. I'm buried. Just a couple of new ones (I have about a dozen piled up):

I've had a good recurrent go at the massive fraud of Theranos (John Carreyrou's topic in his newly released book). Thus far a compelling "page turner." They've probably already sold movie rights.

More on Michael Pollan and Judea Pearl.

Three others I've recently started:

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BTW, speaking of "AI" and "Ethics," see

How the Enlightenment Ends
Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.

Henry Kissinger, no less.

...If AI learns exponentially faster than humans, we must expect it to accelerate, also exponentially, the trial-and-error process by which human decisions are generally made: to make mistakes faster and of greater magnitude than humans do. It may be impossible to temper those mistakes, as researchers in AI often suggest, by including in a program caveats requiring “ethical” or “reasonable” outcomes. Entire academic disciplines have arisen out of humanity’s inability to agree upon how to define these terms. Should AI therefore become their arbiter?...

Yeah. One of my grad school profs observed one day that "it is often erroneously claimed that the Nazis 'had no ethics.' They most certainly did -- an aggressive ethos of murderous elimination."

UPDATE

A fashionable (overhyped?) area of AI of late is "NLP" (Natural Language Processing). Within that topical area is the subfield "NLU" (Natural Language Understanding). Notwithstanding its obvious extant (if circumscribed) utility -- e.g., "Siri" --, I have concerns. See my prior post "Assuming / Despite / If / Then / Therefore / Else..." Could AI do "argument analysis?"

It seems rather obvious to me that one foundational element of "Information Ethics" is that of the accuracy of information (in particular information comprising "arguments") -- i.e. rationality in pursuit of truths. If you don't have that, all you have is "noise."

I'd be rather skeptical of trying to sanguinely delegate such tasks to "NLU."
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More to come...

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
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"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Wednesday, May 23, 2018

"The International Center for Information Ethics?"

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