Elizabeth Stewart

Gamification offers us many benefits, but not without important trade-offs. Nguyen (2021) argues that gamification can alter the nature of the gamified activity in ways that may undermine the game-user’s original aims. Another trade-off is the risk of “value capture”: the exchange of rich, subtle, and personalized values for simplified, often quantified, values that often fail to reflect individuals’ unique circumstances (Nguyen, 2024). How can we harness the benefits of gamification while resisting value capture? In this article, I argue that the virtue of perspective, as outlined by Vallor (2016) is particularly apt for resisting value capture in a gamified world. In doing so, I extend Vallor’s account of perspective through exploring the ways in which it fits into the Aristotelian framework of a mean between excess and defect. I then show how the agent who possesses the virtue of perspective not only resists value capture in gamified contexts, but can use gamification to foster practical wisdom.

Crowd-sourced fact-checking provides social media platforms with a promising method of managing misinformation at scale. However, the success of fact-checking programs like X's Community Notes requires the participation of a critical mass of note-writers who have the time and epistemic resources necessary to write and rate high-quality notes. As X's Community Notes program was first established in English-speaking countries, much academic research has focused on English-language notes or notes writ large. Relatively little research has investigated how different linguistic communities utilise Community Notes. Thus, it is unclear whether Community Notes or similar crowd-sourced fact-checking initiatives represent a viable alternative to social media platforms' partnerships with professional fact-checking organisations across linguistic contexts. This research identifies how different linguistic communities participate in volunteer fact-checking efforts on X's Community Notes program and addresses volunteers' reliance on professional fact-checking resources differs across languages. We find that while the Community Notes program has had strong uptake in some linguistic communities, the program has failed to catch on in others. Additionally, we confirm findings that notes that cite professional fact-checkers are considered more helpful, but show that reliance on professional fact-checking overall remains minimal.

Gamification offers us many benefits, but not without important trade-offs. C. Thi Nguyen (2021) argues that gamification can alter the nature of the gamified activity in ways that may undermine the game-user’s original aims. Another trade-off is the risk of “value capture”: the exchange of rich, subtle, and personalized values for simplified, often quantified, values that often fail to reflect individuals’ unique circumstances (Nguyen, 2024). How can we harness the benefits of gamification while resisting value capture? In this article, I argue that the virtue of perspective, as outlined by Shannon Vallor (2016) is particularly apt for resisting value capture in a gamified world. In doing so, I extend Vallor’s account of perspective through exploring the ways in which it fits into the Aristotelian framework of a mean between excess and defect. I then show how the agent who possesses the virtue of perspective not only resists value capture in gamified contexts, but can use gamification to foster practical wisdom.

The lack of public trust in science poses a challenge for the kind of coordination required to resolve pressing social and environmental issues. The reasons for this lack of trust are many, but I argue that one such reason includes disagreement regarding the proper role of science in our shared lives. When people are asked to “trust the science”, it is often unclear what that amounts to. People are rightfully wary of handing scientists a blank signed check when they don’t understand how it will be cashed. In this paper, I propose a framework for trust-building negotiations aimed at identifying and resolving disagreements regarding the scope of science. I use this framework to understand current distrust in vaccine science.

When trust is broken, how should we determine who is at fault? Previous discus- sions of broken trust typically attribute the fault to trusters who place trust foolishly or trustees who act in an untrustworthy manner. These discussions take for granted the ability of the truster and trustee to communicate and understand the boundaries of what is being entrusted, that is, the domain of trust. However, the boundaries of entrusted domains are not always clear to either party which can result in broken trust despite the best efforts of both truster and trustee. In this paper, I argue that deter- mining who to blame when trust is broken is a messy affair in which disagreements over fault regularly arise. I introduce three features of trust domains that take center stage in negotiations regarding who is at fault when trust is broken: scope, rigidity and ordering.

The spread of fake news online has far reaching implications for the lives of people offline. There is increasing pressure for content sharing platforms to intervene and mitigate the spread of fake news, but intervention spawns accusations of biased censorship. The tension between fair moderation and censorship highlights two related problems that arise in flagging online content as fake or legitimate: firstly, what kind of content counts as a problem such that it should be flagged, and secondly, is it practically and theoretically possible to gather and label instances of such content in an unbiased manner? In this paper, I argue that answering either question involves making value judgements that can generate user distrust toward fact checking efforts.