Simionas- Blog Post 3

 Towards the end of her paper “Are Algorithms Value-Free?” Gabbrielle Johnson presents the debate on presenting degrees of confidence or probabilities instead of accepting or rejecting hypotheses. Johnson clearly explains why this doesn’t offer a solution but merely “pushes the problem back a level” (pg 17) she offers a further counterargument to that, which she refutes with questioning if scientists can be idealized Bayesian agents. While the discussion of Bayesian agents extends past the topic of the paper, this debate with confidence/probabilities versus accepting/rejecting a hypothesis reminds me of earlier discussions of coercion in decision making. One could refute the argument that proposing degrees of confidence and probability are not the same as the acceptance of a hypothesis by saying that providing a strong degree of confidence or probability is so difficult to refute, that it is no longer a real choice for lets say the judge who is relying on this information to make their decision. Additionally, if this was a practice used repeatedly a judge may be prone to the fallacy that their past decisions involving if they followed the program’s confidence/probability recommendation will affect their current decision to follow its “recommendation”: let's say they deviated from it in their last court case, and now they will not deviate from it because statistically it should not be wrong so many times, and is no longer viewing the events as independent of one another. It would be discouraging to deviate from a computer program which, as Johnson notes, carries the “weight given to scientific judgements as expert testimony in various social and political arenas” (pg 13). In this way, providing a degree of confidence or probability could have so much sway that it could be considered coercive and not allow an individual to make a free decision anymore, and therefore may as well have been a decision in itself. 

On a different note, I am curious how democratic processes are being/will be used in the incorporation of algorithms such as COMPAS or others Johnson described in various public and private realms. While there are various ways of electing or appointing judges, even appointed judges are affected by democratic elections because of the power of the people to elect who will appoint them. Johnson makes note of the arguments that just as a program will bring in bias, so will any appointed judge. However it is worth noting that in all these methods, albeit in some more removed than others, the population can affect the biases that are brought into courts through democratic process. Johnson also notes why computer biases may be “wide-reaching and vast, likely more so than an individual scientist’s judgements” (or when utilized in courts, a judge’s) due to “computational prowess, efficiency, and ubiquity of machine learning programs” (pg 13). So as we usher in the potential of stronger biases in our courts and consider the importance of who is making decisions on what values are being coded or prioritized, will the population have a democratic say in the process? Considering the technical jargon used and specialization of knowledge needed to understand the programming, how will this information be made accessible? What level of information and say in the process does the population have a right to?