Pre-Authorization: A Novel Decision-Making Heuristic That May Promote Autonomy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First paragraphs: While the nature of autonomy has been debated for centuries, recent scholarship has been re-examining our conception(s) of autonomy in light of findings from the behavioral, cognitive, and neural sciences (Felsen and Reiner 2011; Blumenthal-Barby 2016). Blumenthal-Barby’s target article provides us with a timely and helpful framework for thinking about this issue in a systematic way, specifically in relation to the wide range of cognitive biases and heuristics that we employ in our decision making. Building on this, we wish to expand the framework beyond the article’s focus on the threat posed by biases and heuristics by suggesting that it is possible for at least some heuristics to promote autonomy. We hope to demonstrate this point by introducing the conceptual framework for a novel heuristic that we call pre-authorization. Blumenthal-Barby argues that biases and heuristics “pose a serious threat to autonomous decision-making and human agency” and that, consequently, efforts should be made to remove, mitigate, or counter them. While recognizing the autonomy-threatening potential of these ‘fast thinking’ mechanisms, as well as agreeing with the author about the types of cases in which this potential is likely to be actualized, we suggest that it does not capture the full range of interactions that are relevant to a balanced assessment of their impact on autonomy. If, as is widely acknowledged, at least some heuristics are adaptive responses to particular real-world decision-making situations (Gigerenzer 2008), the issue at hand becomes elucidating whether, and under what conditions, the cognitive influence of any particular heuristic is autonomy-threatening, autonomy-preserving, or even autonomy-promoting. Blumenthal-Barby focuses on the first of these categories; and, with respect to the component of absence of controlling or alienating influence, she contends that if the person’s attitude towards the influence is one of feeling controlled or alienated from her decision on account of the workings of a cognitive bias or heuristic, her autonomy is diminished
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".