Todd Davies | Stanford University (original) (raw)
Papers by Todd Davies
arXiv (Cornell University), Feb 13, 2013
arXiv (Cornell University), Oct 18, 2019
Digital government, Jan 31, 2020
Social Science Research Network, 2021
The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit ... more The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā-which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as "maleficence" and ahiṃsā as "beneficence." These two more mind-referring English words-associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past-capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi's core principles, better than "violence" and "nonviolence" do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word "violence" have expanded dramatically. The expanded scope of "violence" reflects greater consciousness of the various forms that serious harm can take, but also makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as "nonviolent." New translations could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi's psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.
In this paper I will be considering some arguments made by Lawrence Kohlberg in two papers (Kohlb... more In this paper I will be considering some arguments made by Lawrence Kohlberg in two papers (Kohlberg, 1971 "[A)"i Kohlberg, 1976 n[B)n) concerning the existence of an invariant developmental progression ("invariant sequence"-Kohlberg's term, [B) p. 42) in moral reasoning, methods for validating its existence, and its support for an objectivist ethics. A good deal of the debate surrounding Kohlberg's position has focused on his claim that if one can establish empirically that moral reasoning in humans always (for "non-philosopher subjects" [A) develops along one progression or pattern, then the principles that are held in the last stage (which not all subjects must attain) must be the most moral. If Kohlberg is right about this, then there are serious consequences for the philosophical enterprise of ethics, namely that if such an invariant sequence can be verified experimentally then the preference ordering it induces on moral conceptions is uniq...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
STAT4351-Probability STAT 4351 Probability (3 semester credit hours) Sample spaces, probability o... more STAT4351-Probability STAT 4351 Probability (3 semester credit hours) Sample spaces, probability of events, Kolmogorov's axioms, independence and dependence, Bayesian methodology. Discrete and continuous random variables. Probability distributions, mass functions and densities of univariate and multivariate random variables. Expected values, variances, moment generating functions, covariances and related issues. Probability inequalities. Special probability distributions and special probability densities. Functions of random variables, distribution function techniques, transformation techniques for one and several variables, moment-generating techniques. The law of large numbers, the central limit theorem and classical sampling distributions. Proofs of all main results. Practical examples illustrating the theory. The course can be used as a preparation for the first (Probability) actuarial exam. Prerequisite: MATH 2451. (3-0) Y
The nature-nurture debate is surely among the oldest in behavioral science. The last decade in pa... more The nature-nurture debate is surely among the oldest in behavioral science. The last decade in particular has been a period of intense investigation aimed at apportioning the responsibility for behavior among hereditary and environmental components. Very recently the results of eight years of twin research at the University of Minnesota have made headline news, even though these results have, for the most part, not yet appeared in the journals. The thrust of the reports on this study, and other similar ones on twins and adoptees that have appeared in the last ten yea.rs, is that the personality similarities that have been observed to hold between identical twins who have been reared apart (and between adoptees and their biological parents) establish with certainty that much of complex human behavior is determined genetically. What exactly it means to say that "heredity has a greater influence on one's personality and behavior than either one's upbringing or the most cru...
Goel et al. (2016) examined diffusion data from Twitter to conclude that online petitions are sha... more Goel et al. (2016) examined diffusion data from Twitter to conclude that online petitions are shared more virally than other types of content. Their definition of structural virality, which measures the extent to which diffusion follows a broadcast model or is spread person to person (virally), depends on knowing the topology of the diffusion cascade. But often the diffusion structure cannot be observed directly. We examined time-stamped signature data from the Obama White House's We the People petition platform. We developed measures based on temporal dynamics that, we argue, can be used to infer diffusion structure as well as the more intrinsic notion of virality sometimes known as infectiousness. These measures indicate that successful petitions are likely to be higher in both intrinsic and structural virality than unsuccessful petitions are. We also investigate threshold effects on petition signing that challenge simple contagion models, and report simulations for a theoreti...
We describe and motivate three goals for the screen display of asynchronous text deliberation per... more We describe and motivate three goals for the screen display of asynchronous text deliberation pertaining to a document: (1) visibility of relationships between comments and the text they reference, between different comments, and between group members and the document and discussion, and (2) distinguishability of boundaries between contextually related and unrelated text and comments and between individual authors of documents and comments. Interfaces for document-centered discussion generally fail to fulfill one or both of these goals as well as they could. We describe the design of the new version of Deme, a Web-based platform for online deliberation, and argue that it achieves the two goals better than other recent designs.
Coordination is a key problem for addressing goal-action gaps in many human endeavors. We define ... more Coordination is a key problem for addressing goal-action gaps in many human endeavors. We define interpersonal coordination as a type of communicative action characterized by low interpersonal belief and goal conflict. Such situations are particularly well described as having collectively "intelligent", "common good" solutions, viz., ones that almost everyone would agree constitute social improvements. Coordination is useful across the spectrum of interpersonal communication -- from isolated individuals to organizational teams. Much attention has been paid to coordination in teams and organizations. In this paper we focus on the looser interpersonal structures we call active support networks (ASNs), and on technology that meets their needs. We describe two needfinding investigations focused on social support, which examined (a) four application areas for improving coordination in ASNs: (i) academic coaching, (ii) vocational training, (iii) early learning interven...
This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative c... more This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the spatiotemporal distance separating participants, the communication medium, and the deliberative process to be followed. After a brief overview of criteria for evaluating different design options, empirical findings are organized around design choices. Research has evolved away from treating technology for online deliberation dichotomously (either present or not) toward nuanced findings that differentiate between technological features, ways of using them, and cultural settings. The effectiveness of online deliberation depends on how well the communicative environment is matched to the deliberative task. Tradeoffs, e.g. between rich and lean media and between anonymous and identifiable participation, suggest different designs depending on the purpose and par...
Gandhi’s Wisdom, 2022
The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit ... more The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā-which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as "maleficence" and ahiṃsā as "beneficence." These two more mind-referring English words-associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past-capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi's core principles, better than "violence" and "nonviolence" do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word "violence" have expanded dramatically. This makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as "nonviolent." New terminology could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi's psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.
New Media & Society, 2016
's Mind Change grew out of controversial statements she made as a member of the UK House of Lords... more 's Mind Change grew out of controversial statements she made as a member of the UK House of Lords. In a 2009 debate about websites, Greenfield recounts, "I decided to offer a perspective through the prism of neuroscience... the human brain adapts to the environment and the environment is changing in an unprecedented way, so the brain may also be changing in an unprecedented way" (p. xiii). "Mind change" is Greenefield's umbrella term for digital technologies' effects, in a parallel to climate change. Greenfield's summary of the research is this: "social networking sites could worsen communication skills and reduce interpersonal empathy; personal identities might be constructed externally and refined to perfection with the approbation of an audience as priority, an approach more suggestive of performance art than of robust personal growth; obsessive gaming could lead to greater recklessness, a shorter attention span, and an increasingly aggressive disposition; heavy reliance on search engines and a preference for [Web] surfing rather than researching could result in agile mental processing at the expense of deep knowledge and understanding" (p. 265). To address these worries, she recommends that we all (1) deliberate about and decide "what kind of society we want, and what kind of individual traits we This is a preprint of Todd Davies' review of Susan Greenfield's book Mind Change: How Digital
Artificial Intelligence Research …, 1987
Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. Thi... more Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. This paper analyzes users' rights into ten broad principles, as a basis for assessing what users regard as important and for comparing different multi-issue Internet policy proposals. Stability of the principles is demonstrated in an experimental survey, which also shows that freedoms of users to participate in the design and coding of platforms appear to be viewed as inessential relative to other rights. An analysis of users' rights frameworks that have emerged over the past twenty years similarly shows that such proposals tend to leave out freedoms related to software platforms, as opposed to user data or public networks. Evaluating policy frameworks in a comparative analysis based on prior principles may help people to see what is missing and what is important as the future of the Internet continues to be debated.
In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechan... more In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called "commonsense metaphysics". This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating.
Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. This paper an... more Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. This paper analyzes users' rights into ten broad principles, as a basis for assessing what users regard as important and for comparing different multi-issue Internet policy proposals. Stability of the principles is demonstrated in an experimental survey, which also shows that freedoms of users to participate in the design and coding of platforms appear to be viewed as inessential relative to other rights. An analysis of users' rights frameworks that have emerged over the past twenty years similarly shows that such proposals tend to leave out freedoms related to software platforms, as opposed to user data or public networks. Evaluating policy frameworks in a comparative analysis based on prior principles may help people to see what is missing and what is important as the future of the Internet continues to be debated.
arXiv (Cornell University), Feb 13, 2013
arXiv (Cornell University), Oct 18, 2019
Digital government, Jan 31, 2020
Social Science Research Network, 2021
The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit ... more The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā-which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as "maleficence" and ahiṃsā as "beneficence." These two more mind-referring English words-associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past-capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi's core principles, better than "violence" and "nonviolence" do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word "violence" have expanded dramatically. The expanded scope of "violence" reflects greater consciousness of the various forms that serious harm can take, but also makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as "nonviolent." New translations could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi's psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.
In this paper I will be considering some arguments made by Lawrence Kohlberg in two papers (Kohlb... more In this paper I will be considering some arguments made by Lawrence Kohlberg in two papers (Kohlberg, 1971 "[A)"i Kohlberg, 1976 n[B)n) concerning the existence of an invariant developmental progression ("invariant sequence"-Kohlberg's term, [B) p. 42) in moral reasoning, methods for validating its existence, and its support for an objectivist ethics. A good deal of the debate surrounding Kohlberg's position has focused on his claim that if one can establish empirically that moral reasoning in humans always (for "non-philosopher subjects" [A) develops along one progression or pattern, then the principles that are held in the last stage (which not all subjects must attain) must be the most moral. If Kohlberg is right about this, then there are serious consequences for the philosophical enterprise of ethics, namely that if such an invariant sequence can be verified experimentally then the preference ordering it induces on moral conceptions is uniq...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
STAT4351-Probability STAT 4351 Probability (3 semester credit hours) Sample spaces, probability o... more STAT4351-Probability STAT 4351 Probability (3 semester credit hours) Sample spaces, probability of events, Kolmogorov's axioms, independence and dependence, Bayesian methodology. Discrete and continuous random variables. Probability distributions, mass functions and densities of univariate and multivariate random variables. Expected values, variances, moment generating functions, covariances and related issues. Probability inequalities. Special probability distributions and special probability densities. Functions of random variables, distribution function techniques, transformation techniques for one and several variables, moment-generating techniques. The law of large numbers, the central limit theorem and classical sampling distributions. Proofs of all main results. Practical examples illustrating the theory. The course can be used as a preparation for the first (Probability) actuarial exam. Prerequisite: MATH 2451. (3-0) Y
The nature-nurture debate is surely among the oldest in behavioral science. The last decade in pa... more The nature-nurture debate is surely among the oldest in behavioral science. The last decade in particular has been a period of intense investigation aimed at apportioning the responsibility for behavior among hereditary and environmental components. Very recently the results of eight years of twin research at the University of Minnesota have made headline news, even though these results have, for the most part, not yet appeared in the journals. The thrust of the reports on this study, and other similar ones on twins and adoptees that have appeared in the last ten yea.rs, is that the personality similarities that have been observed to hold between identical twins who have been reared apart (and between adoptees and their biological parents) establish with certainty that much of complex human behavior is determined genetically. What exactly it means to say that "heredity has a greater influence on one's personality and behavior than either one's upbringing or the most cru...
Goel et al. (2016) examined diffusion data from Twitter to conclude that online petitions are sha... more Goel et al. (2016) examined diffusion data from Twitter to conclude that online petitions are shared more virally than other types of content. Their definition of structural virality, which measures the extent to which diffusion follows a broadcast model or is spread person to person (virally), depends on knowing the topology of the diffusion cascade. But often the diffusion structure cannot be observed directly. We examined time-stamped signature data from the Obama White House's We the People petition platform. We developed measures based on temporal dynamics that, we argue, can be used to infer diffusion structure as well as the more intrinsic notion of virality sometimes known as infectiousness. These measures indicate that successful petitions are likely to be higher in both intrinsic and structural virality than unsuccessful petitions are. We also investigate threshold effects on petition signing that challenge simple contagion models, and report simulations for a theoreti...
We describe and motivate three goals for the screen display of asynchronous text deliberation per... more We describe and motivate three goals for the screen display of asynchronous text deliberation pertaining to a document: (1) visibility of relationships between comments and the text they reference, between different comments, and between group members and the document and discussion, and (2) distinguishability of boundaries between contextually related and unrelated text and comments and between individual authors of documents and comments. Interfaces for document-centered discussion generally fail to fulfill one or both of these goals as well as they could. We describe the design of the new version of Deme, a Web-based platform for online deliberation, and argue that it achieves the two goals better than other recent designs.
Coordination is a key problem for addressing goal-action gaps in many human endeavors. We define ... more Coordination is a key problem for addressing goal-action gaps in many human endeavors. We define interpersonal coordination as a type of communicative action characterized by low interpersonal belief and goal conflict. Such situations are particularly well described as having collectively "intelligent", "common good" solutions, viz., ones that almost everyone would agree constitute social improvements. Coordination is useful across the spectrum of interpersonal communication -- from isolated individuals to organizational teams. Much attention has been paid to coordination in teams and organizations. In this paper we focus on the looser interpersonal structures we call active support networks (ASNs), and on technology that meets their needs. We describe two needfinding investigations focused on social support, which examined (a) four application areas for improving coordination in ASNs: (i) academic coaching, (ii) vocational training, (iii) early learning interven...
This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative c... more This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the spatiotemporal distance separating participants, the communication medium, and the deliberative process to be followed. After a brief overview of criteria for evaluating different design options, empirical findings are organized around design choices. Research has evolved away from treating technology for online deliberation dichotomously (either present or not) toward nuanced findings that differentiate between technological features, ways of using them, and cultural settings. The effectiveness of online deliberation depends on how well the communicative environment is matched to the deliberative task. Tradeoffs, e.g. between rich and lean media and between anonymous and identifiable participation, suggest different designs depending on the purpose and par...
Gandhi’s Wisdom, 2022
The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit ... more The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā-which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as "maleficence" and ahiṃsā as "beneficence." These two more mind-referring English words-associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past-capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi's core principles, better than "violence" and "nonviolence" do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word "violence" have expanded dramatically. This makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as "nonviolent." New terminology could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi's psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.
New Media & Society, 2016
's Mind Change grew out of controversial statements she made as a member of the UK House of Lords... more 's Mind Change grew out of controversial statements she made as a member of the UK House of Lords. In a 2009 debate about websites, Greenfield recounts, "I decided to offer a perspective through the prism of neuroscience... the human brain adapts to the environment and the environment is changing in an unprecedented way, so the brain may also be changing in an unprecedented way" (p. xiii). "Mind change" is Greenefield's umbrella term for digital technologies' effects, in a parallel to climate change. Greenfield's summary of the research is this: "social networking sites could worsen communication skills and reduce interpersonal empathy; personal identities might be constructed externally and refined to perfection with the approbation of an audience as priority, an approach more suggestive of performance art than of robust personal growth; obsessive gaming could lead to greater recklessness, a shorter attention span, and an increasingly aggressive disposition; heavy reliance on search engines and a preference for [Web] surfing rather than researching could result in agile mental processing at the expense of deep knowledge and understanding" (p. 265). To address these worries, she recommends that we all (1) deliberate about and decide "what kind of society we want, and what kind of individual traits we This is a preprint of Todd Davies' review of Susan Greenfield's book Mind Change: How Digital
Artificial Intelligence Research …, 1987
Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. Thi... more Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. This paper analyzes users' rights into ten broad principles, as a basis for assessing what users regard as important and for comparing different multi-issue Internet policy proposals. Stability of the principles is demonstrated in an experimental survey, which also shows that freedoms of users to participate in the design and coding of platforms appear to be viewed as inessential relative to other rights. An analysis of users' rights frameworks that have emerged over the past twenty years similarly shows that such proposals tend to leave out freedoms related to software platforms, as opposed to user data or public networks. Evaluating policy frameworks in a comparative analysis based on prior principles may help people to see what is missing and what is important as the future of the Internet continues to be debated.
In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechan... more In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called "commonsense metaphysics". This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating.
Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. This paper an... more Interest has been revived in the creation of a "bill of rights" for Internet users. This paper analyzes users' rights into ten broad principles, as a basis for assessing what users regard as important and for comparing different multi-issue Internet policy proposals. Stability of the principles is demonstrated in an experimental survey, which also shows that freedoms of users to participate in the design and coding of platforms appear to be viewed as inessential relative to other rights. An analysis of users' rights frameworks that have emerged over the past twenty years similarly shows that such proposals tend to leave out freedoms related to software platforms, as opposed to user data or public networks. Evaluating policy frameworks in a comparative analysis based on prior principles may help people to see what is missing and what is important as the future of the Internet continues to be debated.