Commentary on: Scott Jacobs' "Manipulation as breach of arguer responsibility in 'Welcome to Obamaville'"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With his analysis of Rick Santorum’s political campaign ad Welcome to Obamaville, Scott Jacobs provides an important reflection on the ethical dimensions of election campaigning in the United States and the way some politicians treat their electorate. Far from being the kind of open, honest, and argument-based deliberation on which the idea of democracy is based, we see in this ad—as Scott Jacobs shows in detail—a piece of manipulative demagogy that works, even though on a much higher level of technical and psychological sophistication, with the same tricks that have been used by Leni Riefenstahl and Veit Harlan who directed Jud Suss, probably the most antiSemitic and demagogic movie produced in Nazi-Germany. Being born and raised in Germany, I use these stark comparisons deliberately. There is something at stake here. If the Santorum ad is not only a rare outlier that can be explained, as Jacobs suggests at one point, by pure desperation of a campaign that soon after dropped out of the race, then we should be worried— very worried—about the ramifications of this sort of communication for the political culture in the United States. What exactly is the problem here? Why is the Santorum ad worrisome? Jacobs is absolutely right when he points out that individual autonomy is a central value in democratic societies, and that ethical principles, and responsibilities that can be derived from these principles, are crucial for the possibility of democracy. “People have a responsibility,” he writes in his conclusion, “to see to that those who deserve treatment as rational agents are so treated.” However, even though I completely agree with Jacobs’s overall assessment of the ad and its significance for a reflection on political culture and its ethical foundations, I think there are a few weaknesses in his argument. I would like to point out two elements that I do not find convincing. My intention with this critique is to strengthen his position.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.031 | 0.030 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".