Kolloquium: Judgment, Algorithms, and the Ubiquity of Campbell’s Law

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2018 colloquium:

Lisa Herzog, Hochschule für Politik München an der Technischen Universität München, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Fellow 2017–18

Judgment, Algorithms, and the Ubiquity of Campbell’s Law

In more and more contexts, from online shopping to parole decisions, human decision-making based on expert knowledge is replaced by algorithmic systems. While promising to deliver efficient and objective decisions, such systems raise a number of ethical challenges. In this talk, Lisa Herzog focuses on the problem of insufficient or unsuitable feedback loops, which are particularly likely to arise in contexts in which the affected parties are politically, socially or economically marginalized. Moreover, decisions based on social indicators often get distorted, along the lines of Campbell’s law. We thus risk ending up with a widening gap between the knowledge that can be grasped by algorithmic systems and the knowledge that matters for the social processes at hand.

Lisa Herzog is Professor of Political Philosophy and Theory at the Hochschule für Politik / Technische Universität München and currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her work explores the intersection of political philosophy and economics, currently focussing on questions of knowledge and responsibility in complex societies. Her latest book Reclaiming the System. Moral Responsibility, Divided Labour, and the Role of Organizations in Society will be published by Oxford University Press in October 2018