Browsing by Author "Rousseau, Jade"

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    Fairness in Information Access: Emphasizing the Network
    (2023) Rousseau, Jade; Friedler, Sorelle
    Social networks - systems of interconnected people - are fundamental to our being in the world; and one’s belonging and positionality within networks greatly determines one’s exposure to resources and to harms. Information, understood in a broad sense, is vehiculated through(out) social networks; and machine learning algorithms are increasingly involved in determining access to information. The use of machine learning algorithm for information spread has been shown to reproduce, perpetuate, and exacerbate existing inequalities. Efforts have thus been made to create ‘fairnessaware’ machine learning algorithms. But these algorithms have tended to focus on individuals and demographics, at the expense of looking at the network itself. I argue that because the very structure of a network encodes sensitive attributes such as demographics, and because network belonging and positionality can themselves be sources of harm as well as privilege, the network should be thought of as an agent. I focus on the need for ’fair’ machine learning algorithms to take into account the ways in which harm does not operate merely at the individual level, but always at the network level by developing an experimental framework around collateral consequences - second-order effects that I model by positing a wellbeing for each individual in a social network.
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    Leaps in Perception: Towards a Philosophy of Imaginatively-endowed Perceiving
    (2023) Rousseau, Jade; Yurdin, Joel
    Inquiry into our perception soon leads us to a kind of skepticism, whereby we not only doubt that our senses give us access to the objective world, we doubt they give us access to anything at all. This is the problem of perception. At the heart of this problem lies a distance between us and the world. Introducing the concept of perceptive faith, I argue that our fundamental attitude towards the world is thus one of leaping. Using the lens of the leap, I first consider the way perception unfolds within us. I emphasize the importance of theorizing perception as a lived perceiving, and suggest that imagination may be necessary for our perceiving, as that which allows us to bridge the gaps and give life to them. I then consider two analytic theories of perception, drawing out their phenomenological sensibility, and suggest that if intentionalism begins to tie the world to us, enactivism embeds us firmly in the world. The distance between the world and us thus seems to be bridged when we realize perception is an embodied and imaginatively-endowed perceiving. I contend that such premises were ignored because of a pervasive optocentrism in Western philosophy, an overvaluation of sight and a devaluation of the other senses (especially of touch) which led certain problems, questions, and conclusions to appear at the expense of others. I conclude that a philosophy of perception that emphasized the imaginary texture of the world would allow us to unproblematically encompass both our being towards and away from the world.