Mind your Metaphors: An Examination of the Inefficacy Argument as a Reason Against Regulating On-line Conduct
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book chapter provides a critical analysis of the inefficacy argument as a rationale against regulating the internet. This line of reasoning is centered on the claim that the internet, as a decentralized communications technology, has the built-in ability to circumvent and thus render irrelevant many of our fundamental normative commitments. The author argues that the regulation question is not merely one of efficacy but is instead one of morality. The author deconstructs the typical metaphors employed in arguments against regulating online conduct and cautions that we are dangerously close to allowing ourselves to believe that the realm of regulation is beyond our control. The author argues that destruction of normative commitments is not the result of new communications technologies, but rather, it is the product of human interference. In conclusion. the author proposes that normative concerns are not subordinate to practical ones. To suggest otherwise is to speak in the language of metaphor and excuse, a language that will ultimately suppress the importance of individual responsibility and moral accountability.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".