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MichaelMacKaySecondEssay 7 - 15 Feb 2025 - Main.MichaelMacKay
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Corrupting the Youth: KOSA and Greek Philosophy | | |
In Aristotle’s Poetics, why is Homer a poet but not Empedocles? Both Greeks’ works are written in hexameter verse, but for Aristotle, poetry does not turn on prosody alone.[1] Rather, Empedocles is a philosopher,[2] and today, that distinction is increasingly relevant, as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) threatens to mistake measurement for meaning. | |
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< | Put differently, rooting out all the “harms” under KOSA by its duty of care is like rounding up all the poets in Poetics by dactyl. Meter is easy to measure, but what can be counted most easily does not necessarily count the most. What survives of Poetics is approximately 8,933 Attic Greek words, resulting in a paperback English edition of 144 pages (7.92 x 5.04″),[3] but quantification confounds inquiry when words themselves contain multitudes.[4] Aristotle cautions that “[w]e should therefore solve the question [of what something means] by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly assumed by a person of intelligence.”[5] Hence, applying statistical models in a top-down manner tends to affix meaning rather than infer what the text means in context, and by that measure, KOSA’s requirement that platforms should monitor patterns of children’s usage and publicly disclose such information treats online expression as univocal—forgetting that “when a word seems to involve some inconsistency of meaning, we should consider how many senses it may bear in the particular passage.”[6] | >
> | Put differently, rooting out all the “harms” by KOSA's duty of care is like rounding up all the poets in Poetics by dactyl. Meter is easy to measure, but what can be counted most easily does not necessarily count the most. What survives of Poetics is approximately 8,933 Attic Greek words, resulting in a paperback English edition of 144 pages (7.92 x 5.04″),[3] but quantification confounds inquiry when words themselves contain multitudes.[4] Aristotle cautions that “[w]e should therefore solve the question [of what something means] by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly assumed by a person of intelligence.”[5] Hence, applying statistical models in a top-down manner tends to affix meaning rather than infer what the text means in context, and by that measure, KOSA’s requirement that platforms should monitor patterns of children’s usage and publicly disclose such information treats online expression as univocal—forgetting that “when a word seems to involve some inconsistency of meaning, we should consider how many senses it may bear in the particular passage.”[6] | | |
One Flaw, Two Bills |
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