Felix Stalder via nettime-l on Sun, 3 Aug 2025 19:58:41 +0200 (CEST)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> Computational Culture issue ten. Special Issue: Situated Bayes 

Hi David.
sorry for the late reply. As politics, resisting techno-fascism is, of course, undeniably necessary. So, I'm, of course, all in favor of fighting against, say, Palantir contracts in Europe or the use of AI models to assess social welfare recipients, or grading students and teachers. And contributing to showing how contemporary politics is embedded in and implemented through particular technologies and procedures makes a lot of sense.
My argument was more theoretical. What is the position we put forward, usually implicitly, when we call for resistance to AI? Quite often, it is that of the enlightened, sovereign individual: the authentic writer, the competent coder, the singular illustrator, and so on. Often, it's expressed more mundanely, as in "human-written email vs AI slop", but the underlying notion is the same.
This reminds me of the discussion about online privacy and the control over personal data. Pragmatically, I favor privacy protection; it's one of the few tools we have to push for social values in tech. At the same time, the underlying idea of the sovereign individual who owns his or her data and has therefor a right to determine how it's being used (like with other items of property) is deeply problematic. Both for historical reasons (who counts as an individual capable of holding property?) and also for pragmatic reasons. Most data is a) transactional, i.e., not easily assigned to an individual owner, and b) necessary for the infrastructure to function, i.e., withholding it means non-participation, a very unappealing concept of sovereignty.
So, protecting privacy, or, resisting AI, feels like using a knife in a gunfight. I prefer knife to no-knife, but it's not a winning approach under the condition of widespread use of guns.
So, how can we avoid the problem of tactics (protecting privacy, resisting fascist AI) impeding strategy (liberating society under contemporary conditions)?
In the Bayesian approach, there might be a different subjectivity embedded, one that provides not one authoritative answer but a range of possibilities based on contingent assumptions and positions. Furthermore, it's actually better than conventional statistics at dealing with incomplete information and changing circumstances, which is much of the contemporary world characterized by complexity and instability. But also, and this is the contention in this special issue and my reaction to it, it might provide for an epistemology that is more appropriate for a more-than-human world that is not based on sovereignty but on relationality.
Will using ChatGPT help us get there? Probably not. Will appeals to original authorship help us? Probably even less. 

Felix






On 7/29/25 21:28, D. Schmudde via nettime-l wrote:


Felix,

I wrestled with your opening paragraph quite a bit:
The use of Bayesian statistics might create an opening towards very different political ends than those which is is currently used for and that exploring this opening might be a more productive than simply "resisting (AI)".
Maybe it's because I've been writing on *resisting AI* (https:// schmud.de/posts/2025-07-15-engineering-end-of-work.html) - but I'm not quite seeing the connection between the political outcomes of resistance and embracing the tool with a Bayesian mindset.
I think it has something to do with the production of knowledge, but the foundation of this knowledge is still "conservative" in the sense that Joseph Weizenbaum described (https://web.archive.org/web/20211002104454/ http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html). 

Can you help me understand your optimism of this approach?

/David

nettime-l-request@lists.nettime.org writes:


Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
    nettime-l@lists.nettime.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
    https://lists.servus.at/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
    nettime-l-request@lists.nettime.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
    nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."


Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Computational Culture issue ten. Special Issue:    Situated
      Bayes (Felix Stalder)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2025 14:53:02 +0200
From: Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>
To: Matthew Fuller via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Computational Culture issue ten. Special Issue:
    Situated Bayes
Message-ID: <ac692293-659b-4b30-a098-92f1288bad3d@openflows.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Hi Matthew,

Congratulations! A great issue, a really timely and urgent extension of
the line of thinking that I encountered first in Joque's book. The use
of Bayesian statistics might create an opening towards very different
political ends than those which is is currently used for and that
exploring this opening might be a more productive than simply "resisting
(AI)". We talked a bit about that over dinner recently.

In much of the philosophy/epistemology concerning Bayesian statistics
the issue of the "prior" is absolutely central, and your intention to
turn of it from a problem for objectivity into the foundation for
situatedness is absolutely correct.

What is usually less discussed, perhaps because the issue not unique to
Bayesianism, is the question of the threshold. When is the likelihood of
an hypothesis being true strong enough to act as if it were true?

In ML, they try, as you write, minimize the situatedness by using
"noninformative priors" despite the extra compute this requires, but
they can at least to be non-subjective. In many ways, the prior is
subjective only in a context where computation is scare. In a context
where computation is treated as abundant, it's meaningless, a random
starting point in a very long line of iterations. It's not subjective,
but brute force ;)

But the situatedness creeps back in through the threshold. What degree
of error is acceptable, which  is always also a question of who has to
cover the costs of these errors. In this way, Bayesianism create a new
type of externality.

I think this question of threshold, while not unique, is particularly
urgent in Bayesian systems because they are less about generating
knowledge (in a conventional scientific way, there the threshold is a
stable p-value) than about enabling agency, on the spot, under a
subjective risk/rewards ratio. In certain systems, say placement of
advertisement, a 20% likelihood might be sufficient, in others, say,
systems in HR departments, one would hope of a much higher threshold.
The point being, the threshold is entirely subjective.

The consideration of the subjective/situated/political nature of
threshold might open up less towards the issues you are concerned here,
but more towards social justice question (how to distribute
risks/rewards), but as a source of subjectivity it's a bit underrated.

Anyway, great issue!


all the best. Felix




On 7/25/25 09:28, Matthew Fuller via nettime-l wrote:

Computational Culture, a journal of software studies
Issue Ten, July 2025
Special Issue: Situated Bayes
Edited by Juni Schindler, Goda Klumbyt? and Matthew Fuller
Special Issue Introduction
Juni Schindler, Goda Klumbyt?, Matthew Fuller, [Situated Bayes ? Feminist and pluriversal perspectives on Bayesian knowledge](http:// computationalculture.net/situated-bayes/) 


--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| |||||||||| https://tldr.nettime.org/@festal |
| for secure communication, please use signal |



------------------------------

Subject: Digest Footer



--
w: http://schmud.de
e: d@schmud.de
t: @dschmudde


--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| |||||||||| https://tldr.nettime.org/@festal |
| for secure communication, please use signal |

--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org