[alicebot-aiethics] Computers vs. human grading school essays...

[Noel Bush]

Yes, very interesting, and a good subject for this mailing list.

Here is an example of software being used as a tool for "social
reproduction". As Farhad points out:

'What makes a standardized test like the GMAT unique, though, is that a
"good-faith effort" will produce a formulaic essay, according to
test-preparation experts. In other words, if you want to do well on the
GMAT, think -- and write -- like a machine.'

And indeed, as he goes on to say, this formulaic writing is precisely what
the people and institutions grading these essays are looking for. I find
this quote from Foltz to be typically sinister (typical of the profession, I
mean):

' "So they write an essay, submit it (to the computer) and get feedback
immediately. If they want to revise it after that, they can do that, and
submit it again. In the end, they can take the grade that the computer gives
them, and if they're unhappy with that they can give it to me and have me
grade it by hand."

' "And in the four years, no student has ever taken me up on that offer." '

This kind of attitude on the part of educators is loathsome to me. An
educator, who's supposed to be teaching you how to think, is instead
teaching you to focus on grade-making. The formula for getting the grade is
clearly stated. The person only needs to behave in a very explicitly robotic
way. The educator uses his human "fallibility" as a threat -- "You don't
want *me* to grade this, do you? I might have had a bad hair day."

But in fact, bad hair days are important. The fact that ten or a hundred or
a thousand people may read something you write, and each may have different
reactions and responses, is important. The fact that one person in a
particularly bad mood may respond acerbically and "unfairly", and someone in
a good mood may miss most of your content entirely and just say "oh yeah",
etc. -- that's all a part of what is essential to the sustenance of
intellectual life, to preventing the real-life reduction of all discourse to
a closed-loop exchange of empty signs.

See, you can interpret the results of ALICE in a very pessimistic way. The
fact that, in ALICE, language is virtually static -- I mean the fact that
the same response to a particular input seems to satisfy a big percentage of
people -- can be understood to be a very depressing commentary on the
contemporary use of human language. Because it's quite true that people do
interact robotically, not just in a standardized test essay context, but in
common social interaction. The notion that language can be invented, that
language is material for "composition", seems to be lost.

Rich said:

' Being better able to express oneself in one's own language or another
means increasingly perfecting the illusion of consciousness, and better
playing the expected role on the social stage. The better the illusion, the
more secure and more accepted you feel. But behind the curtain, there is
nothing. There is no magical "consciousness engine" or anything beyond the
set of categories one has acquired for that language.'

...with which I agree, to a point. It is certainly true that adeptness with
language is generally rewarded: get a good job, talk your way into/out of
anything, win friends and influence people, etc. And presumably society
reifies "consciousness" as this kind of adeptness.

But with the entry of this adeptness departs what I would call
consciousness, or at least the kind of consciousness I desire. "Talent" and
"skill" are instruments of control -- the means by which we become agents of
social reproduction. A "virtuoso" cellist can generate a Dvorak concerto
with great "technical command", and infuse it with a simulacrum of
"emotion", "expressiveness", and so on. But this person is no more
"expressing" himself than I am writing to you from the warm sunny beaches of
Antarctica. In this case this person, no matter how "expressive" they may
seem to be, is very much "painting within the lines", so to speak, producing
for the benefit of you and the continuation of a particular culture the
simulacrum of expressiveness.

And indeed it's this simulacrum that the engine of social reproduction
craves, and the absence of which it abhors. "Good business writing" is so
wraithlike in its total absence of expressiveness that one would think most
people producing "good business writing" are doing it with a wink and a wry
ironic smile, same for the readers...but think again, because we slip over
that horizon of "irony" all the time, into a condition where we come to
*desire* the uniform reproduction (including the uniform reproduction of
"personal expression"), and go ballistic about the intrusion of
non-well-formed entries into our discourse.

This is not to say that there is not such a thing as "bad writing", "bad
music", etc. Certainly the world is full of it. But what makes such behavior
"bad" is that, in the first place, it is striving for fitness to a model but
the writer/composer lacks the faculty to achieve this fitness -- however
this is not to say that the writer/composer lacks any faculties, only that a
robot-like mechanism of consensus evaluation *opposes* the exercise of the
faculties that said person does have, at least in this context.

The "solution", if one may call it that, is usually to offer people
"compartments" in which to live. You may be a "bad writer", but you can be a
"good programmer". You may be a "bad singer", but you can be a "good
manager". This is the "career counselor" philosophy of life: find your place
in the world.

I'll have none of it, thank you very much. Shunting people off into various
"niches", like so many instances of various classes of worker ants, only
perpetuates the wicked mythology that "expression" is a performative act,
that "community" is an institution -- in short, that the best way to be a
person in this world is to get out of the way of as many people as you can.
The children shall not speak at the table, the neophytes shall not venture
to theorize about matters in which they are not qualified, the "dummies"
shall not fail to acknowledge their dummyhood (even to the point of buying
books gleefully labeled "For Dummies" in order that they may be in on the
"joke").

Of course, the children *should* speak at the table. And of course, the
children need to *learn* how to speak. But "how to speak" does not *need* to
be "how to form permutations of the same things others say". "How to speak"
might be more like an evolving *process*:

1) How to notice what is going on.
2) How to consider an "entry" into what is going on.
3) How to exploit the range of expressive capabilities on hand to make an
entry.
4) How to avoid dropping a bomb in the middle of a group of people.
5) How to notice the effect of an entry.
6) How to find different "slices" of the continuum of response that express
what is going on and for whom in various (contradictory?) ways.
7) How to "strategize" effectively in participating while maintaining some
autonomy (or not), maintaining autonomy while participating closely (or
not).

So a person writing a "sloppy" email may or may not be someone "expressing"
something -- actually what makes that issue clearer is what follows, not
some literal pinpoint aspects of the act itself. In fact the community is a
big determinant, and it is critical to notice whether a community is
reactionary in response to "sloppy" discourse, is indifferent,
or...sensitive. Sensitive (not sentimental) to the continuous re-inflection
of the discourse space, sensitive in an active way by attempting to scoot
'round the "rough edges" (the failings in fitting a model of discourse) to
tease out the real (perhaps raw) issues that are being addressed in some
entry. So a sloppy writer can be "rewarded" by a community in various ways:
by praise or humilation (for succeeding or failing in fitting a model), or
by close attention that helps draw the writer into the discourse, in a
balance (always shifting) between autonomy and participation -- a balance
that admits the possibility of a tectonic shift in the nature, medium, tone,
agenda of the discourse as much as it promotes (not enforces) the "status
quo" of the same.

The school essay model promotes none of this, and as embodied in the
wonderful program described in this article, actively seeks the cancellation
of all possibility of movement. This is the hypostatization of humanness; or
rather, this is the preservation of a general mechanism of social
reproduction and control that is different only in elaboration from the
social control of ants.

Now, let's get back to our working places.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: alicebot-aiethics-admin@list.alicebot.org
> [mailto:alicebot-aiethics-admin@list.alicebot.org]On Behalf Of Jon Baer
> Sent: Friday, 24 August 2001 9:18
> To: alicebot-aiethics@list.alicebot.org
> Subject: [alicebot-aiethics] Computers vs. human grading school essays...
>
>
> Interesting...
>
> http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45806,00.html
>
> <snip>
> Back to School
>                            Software That Can Flunk You
>                            You might bristle at the notion that a
> computer is grading essays in school. But before
>                            you do, ponder this: Are humans really more
> reliable? By Farhad Manjoo.
> </snip>
>
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