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deconstructing |
Here are some excerpts of our work and thinking. They illustrate the diverse range of perspectives and questions needed to mitigate social risk. We invite your feedback and comment.
| Engineering the subjective | One definition of contemporary engineering is: the application of the physical and social sciences to the needs of humanity and the development of technology. To engineer the subjective is to attempt to design social reality. |
| Semiotic Signatures | TBD |
| Risk in context | Context plays a fundamental role in our perception of reality. In language, context provides the basis for what words mean and how we learn to socialize. Context also introduces the unavoidable risk of deception. |
| Gresham's Law 2.1 | Gresham's law is a monitary principle that bad money drives out good money. Word prediction cum generative text with AI algorithms may create the linguistic equivalent to the principle, bad context drives out good content. |
| Predictive processing as déjà vu |
Predictive processing represents a consilience of many concepts in neuroscience, philosophy and AI. As a generative model it learns the causes of training data, how to generate effect from cause. That the cause, in semiotic terms is learned meaning, implies the associated algorithms are accessing otherwise hidden belief systems. |
| Semiotic uncertainty principle | Analogous to quantum mechanics, where the transition from possible-to-actual takes place during observation; in semiotics the transition from uncertainty-to-certainty involves choice; without commitment to belief, uncertainty endures. |
| The other social risk | Environment-Social-Governance ESG is all about sustainability- who cares wins in commerce and culture. Social risk in ESG focuses on practices that may have untoward effects on people and the environment. Many ESG-social risks are managed as if they were objective. But there is another kind of social risk, the subjective risk of groups forming and doing real things, such as ruining brand reputation, only because of commonly held individual beliefs. |
| Why counterfactual risk analysis works | A counterfactual, some fact that differs from consensus, may yet materialize into a real event by the action of a believer. By focusing on the underlying belief system, a single counterfactual can expose a manifold process of risks that may yet materialize in future contexts. |
We appreciate feedback. To learn more about our approach or and how it may be of use, email us.