Mikhail Volkov: research

Rational Choice and Intellectual Virtues on Social Media

Social media has many epistemologically interesting properties. For instance, it enables undesirable collective phenomena like belief polarisation; it also very probably degrades cognitive faculties like attention span. These two angles are not exhaustive: were social media a benign epistemic environment and agents in it able, it would still be possible that they fail at obtaining epistemic goods. How so? This can happen if the agents are bad as intellectual characters. Say, they stably lack the will to apply their skills. Or they may be very intellectually arrogant: they constantly inflate their knowledge beyond warrant, misleading other agents. In short, they may lack intellectual virtues.

My current work aims to show that on social media, agents desire concrete goods and can be expected to engage in optimal behaviour for their acquisition. Unfortunately, the reward structure of social media is such that a by-product of said optimal behaviour is degradation of intellectual character. Given the incentive structures of online environments, rational choice and intellectual virtue pull in different directions. Arguing that agents online are more often than thought driven by means-end rationality and that it leads them to intellectual misery is the subject of my current research.

Philosophy of Technology

Within philosophy of technology, I am mainly interested in questions linking to social media as an epistemic environment and in political issues stemming from the use of technology and AI in policy decision-making. In connection with the latter, I have published on whether algocracy (i.e. governance by algorithmic decision-makers) is rendered illegitimate by arguments analogous to those against epistocracy. In the paper, I defend a negative answer to that particular question.

(Evolutionary) Game-theoretic Modelling

Orthodox and evolutionary game theories are a big interest of mine. My Master's thesis focused on evolutionary game-theoretic (EGT) explanations of the evolution of morality and whether the criticisms against their explanatory relevance succeed. I argue that these are not fatal and propose a strategy for how EGT models can be set up to better accommodate the challenges, incorporate empirical evidence from palaeoanthropology and, ultimately, yield better explanations of why we have the kind of moral motivations and norms that we do. I am currently working on turning the results of the work into a publication.

Aside from this, I am very interested in whether any (static) rational choice models constitute explanations of human behaviour. For instance, if I say "the agent's behaviour in a given situation is explained by the situation being an instance of Stag Hunt”, am I thereby providing an explanation of the behaviour? Is there a way to interpret components of the framing so that applying it does give us new information about the situation?