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Jul

2011

Data Leads to Powerful Wisdom - GovLoop - Social Network for Government

In our amazingly fast digital world, the collection of data has become very powerful. The power in numbers to help a client operate more efficiently, to help a lawmaker make a critical vote that will impact her constituents in countless ways, or even how an individual buys a car or house – all of these decisions are shaped by data gathered, analyzed, and acted upon. I like to think of it as data provides wisdom to make more powerful decisions.

The power in data comes from the analysis itself. It just cannot be a set of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. What do they mean? Where are they from? What do they mean in relationship to one another? What trends do you see? What trends don’t you see? How does your data compare to some baseline? These are all types of questions that must be asked by those that want to use data to further their business, government, and/or personal decision making skills. The really cool thing about data analysis is that it is an incredibly creative and exciting process.

www.govloop.com/...data-leads-to-powerful-wisdom

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Data Information Decision

Jul

2011

On Experts and Global Warming - NYTimes.com

Experts have always posed a problem for democracies. Plato scorned democracy, rating it the worst form of government short of tyranny, largely because it gave power to the ignorant many rather than to knowledgeable experts (philosophers, as he saw it). But, if, as we insist, the people must ultimately decide, the question remains: How can we, non-experts, take account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public policy?

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...on-experts-and-global-warming

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Expertise Knowledge Democracy Decision Sense

we need to reflect on the logic of appeals to the authority of experts. First of all, such appeals require a decision about who the experts on a given topic are. Until there is agreement about this, expert opinion can have no persuasive role in our discussions.
Another requirement is that there be a consensus among the experts about points relevant to our discussion. Precisely because we are not experts, we are in no position to adjudicate disputes among those who are.
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- Finally, given a consensus on a claim among recognized experts, we non-experts have no basis for rejecting the truth of the claim.
- Consider, for example, current discussions about climate change, specifically about whether there is long-term global warming caused primarily by human activities (anthropogenic global warming or A.G.W.). All creditable parties to this debate recognize a group of experts designated as “climate scientists,” whom they cite in either support or opposition to their claims about global warming.
- The only questions are about the conclusions this project supports about global warming.
- There is, moreover, no denying that there is a strong consensus among climate scientists on the existence of A.G.W. — in their view, human activities are warming the planet. There are climate scientists who doubt or deny this claim, but even they show a clear sense of opposing a view that is dominant in their discipline.
- Non-expert opponents of A.G.W. usually base their case on various criticisms that a small minority of climate scientists have raised against the consensus view. But non-experts are in no position to argue against the consensus of expert opinion. As long as they accept the expert authority of the discipline of climate science, they have no basis for supporting the minority position.
- It follows that a non-expert who wants to reject A.G.W. can do so only by arguing that climate science lacks the scientific status needed be taken seriously in our debates about public policy. There may well be areas of inquiry (e.g., various sub-disciplines of the social sciences) open to this sort of critique. But there does not seem to be a promising case against the scientific authority of climate science. As noted, opponents of the consensus on global warming themselves argue from results of the discipline, and there is no reason to think that they would have had any problem accepting a consensus of climate scientists against global warming, had this emerged.
- Some non-expert opponents of global warming have made much of a number of e-mails written and circulated among a handful of climate scientists that they see as evidence of bias toward global warming. But unless this group is willing to argue from this small (and questionable) sample to the general unreliability of climate science as a discipline, they have no alternative but to accept the consensus view of climate scientists that these e-mails do not undermine the core result of global warming.
- I am not arguing the absolute authority of scientific conclusions in democratic debates. It is not a matter of replacing Plato’s philosopher-kings with scientist-kings in our polis. We the people still need to decide (perhaps through our elected representatives) which groups we accept as having cognitive authority in our policy deliberations. Nor am I denying that there may be a logical gap between established scientific results and specific policy decisions. The fact that there is significant global warming due to human activity does not of itself imply any particular response to this fact.
- once we have accepted the authority of a particular scientific discipline, we cannot consistently reject its conclusions. To adapt Schopenhauer’s famous remark about causality, science is not a taxi-cab that we can get in and out of whenever we like. Once we board the train of climate science, there is no alternative to taking it wherever it may go.
- The general argument of this article is flawed for the following reason; even when there is a body of recognized experts, the consensus opinion of those experts can be wrong. In the 1940's and 1950's the consensus of medical experts was that lobotomies were a valuable medical procedure (so much so that a Nobel in medicine was awarded for the discovery of therapeutic uses of lobotomy in 1949).
  
  It is not that there were no medical experts in the 1940's and 1950's; but rather that the consensus of the experts was wrong. It is never the case in ANY scientific discipline that the consensus opinion of the experts will be correct 100% of the time. Sometimes the consensus opinion will be deeply flawed, and the consensus will be forced to change over time.

Jul

2011

Decision-Making Capacity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In many Western jurisdictions, the law presumes that adult persons, and sometimes children that meet certain criteria, are capable of making their own health care decisions; for example, consenting to a particular medical treatment, or consenting to participate in a research trial. But what exactly does it mean to say that a subject has or lacks the requisite capacity to decide? This last question has to do with what is commonly called “decisional capacity,” a central concept in health care law and ethics, and increasingly an independent topic of philosophical inquiry.

Decisional capacity can be defined as the ability of health care subjects to make their own health care decisions.

plato.stanford.edu/...decision-capacity

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Decision-Making Capacity Decision Mind Law Health Care Agency