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Designing certainty. Conflict between deliberation and AI epistemic authority Zygmunt Bauman in his essay Making and Unmaking of Strangers (1995) claims that the new element in the postmodern world is not the emergence of the uncertainty. Its novelty lies in its relocation from a temporary discomfort to a permanent condition. Almost three decades later, this diagnosis is optimistic in at least one certain respect. Indeed, socially relevant algorithmic decision-making processes add a new dimension to the uncertainty of war, colonialism, economic and technological expansion, and to climate change. According to Bauman, the essentially uncontrollable and undecidable future is already doomed, even in the absence of this new kind of governance used to predict or prescribe human actions or to make decisions automatically. The overwhelming sense of uncertainty characteristic of the way of life stigmatized by Bauman now includes a kind of technological determinism that claims to know us better than we know ourselves. In this article, I would like to propose a reflection on deliberation mechanisms that considers the changed information ecology resulting from the introduction of automated systems. I will focus on the transformations that the decision-making process undergoes when it becomes an automated decision-making process. I will show how the deliberation mechanisms implemented by automated decision-making systems draw on a different epistemology of the deliberative process and that this epistemology does not take into account the features of the epistemology of deliberation required in a civic context.

Philosophen so verschieden wie Jürgen Habermas und David Estlund haben argumentiert, dass der Begriff der „menschlichen Natur“ nicht zum Gegenstand einer modernen Wissenschaft werden könne. Geert Keil ging sogar noch weiter, und argumentierte, dass Berufungen auf die Natur des Menschen einen dezidierten antinaturalistischen Charakter annehmen können. Der Begriff der „menschlichen Natur“ scheint in verschiedenen Kreisen in Verruf geraten und eine bemerkenswerte Anzahl von Anklagen wurde gegen ihn erhoben. Als Empfehlung daraus lässt sich ableiten, diesen Begriff ganz und gar abzulehnen. Umgekehrt bedienen sich politische Diskurse und Techno-anthropologie des Begriffs. Einige dieser unterschiedlichen Einschätzungen der „menschlichen Natur“ mögen durchaus berechtigt, andere dagegen unberechtigt sein. Dieses Buch charakterisiert im Detail zwei unterschiedliche Vorstellungen dieses Begriffes - einen essentialistischen und einen normativen - und gibt gute Gründe für einen Begriff der „menschlichen Natur“, der mit unserer Auffassung der praktischen Vernunft vereinbar ist.

Portmanteau tests and information criteria are widely used for checking the hypothesis of independence in time series. More recently, data-driven versions were proposed, where the tests are calibrated based on the largest estimated autocorrelation. It seems natural to introduce a double test statistic (M, Q) where Q is the portmanteau and M is the largest squared autocorrelation. Both statistics have been investigated at length in the past decades. We computed under reasonable assumptions the bivariate probability distribution of this double statistic, conditional, in addition, to the lag at which the largest autocorrelation is found. Tests of the null hypothesis ofindependence based on rejection regions in the plane (M, Q) are proposed, and some methods to select the rejection region in order to maximize power when the alternative hypothesis is unknown are suggested. A simulation study and a thorough comparison with some popular tests have been performed to show the advantages of our proposal. Notice that this latter includes some well-known univariate tests, so we could expect not only an optimal choice but also additional information which may turn useful for a better understanding of the time series for both model building and forecasting.

Quality of democratic arrangements does matter. This kind of conceptual breakthrough has been made through painfully engagement with the nonphilosophical area of inquiry arisen by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has dramatically emphasized that health is a highly political domain. No surprise then that it made possible to challenge common thought about democratic procedures in political theory that considers procedure-independent standards suspicious. Therefore it is fair to state that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the quality of democratic outcomes back on center stage in the debate in political theory, which has been dominated by fair proceduralism’s claim not to refer to any procedure-independent standards of good political decisions. Procedural values have traditionally been seen as a defining element of fair deliberation and essential for democracy. They have been extolled in social choice theory that claims that democracy does not exhibit any particular disposition to lead to good or just political arrangements. They are the focus of attention in Jürgen Habermas’ procedural rationality, though philosophers are now more skeptical about the divorce between procedures and substantive standards. Overall, issues surrounding the topic of ensuring citizens’ health make the topic politically central and philosophically interesting for epistemic theories and impartial proceduralism theories of democracy alike. The aim of this paper is to justify the legitimacy and authority of public health policies on the basis of arguments that do not simply are a matter of their being democratic. In the first part, I want to display and criticize the idea that proceduralism’s not getting one’s hands dirty with the substance of decisions and remaining neutrally adherent only to procedures is untenable in the present case. Having criticized democratic theories that want to restrict themselves to purely procedural values, in the second part I will focus on the idea of knowledge and make explicit its characters of being practical and shared. Eventually, it will help to have one example. M-Health will show that many valuable insights would be incompatible with the restrictions of the proceduralism. Philosophical consideration of health will combine epistemic issues with political ones triggered by technology and sharpened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many nonstationary time series exhibit changes in the trend and seasonality structure, that may be modeled by splitting the time axis into different regimes. We propose multi-regime models where, inside each regime, the trend is linear and seasonality is explained by a Periodic Autoregressivemodel. In addition, for achieving parsimony, we allow season grouping, i.e. seasons may consist of one, two, or more consecutive observations. Identification is obtained by means of a Genetic Algorithm that minimizes an identification criterion.