A few years ago, the European Commission commissioned and published an influential report, reviewing what adult education policy-makers could learn from research – chiefly research funded by the Commission itself under successive Framework research programmes (now rebranded ‘Horizon’) (Federighi, 2013). The report covered a range of areas, including the aims of continuing vocational education and training and adult education, how adult education could contribute to reducing the number of low-skilled people, workplace learning, and training for innovation. Its final section addressed the governance of ‘markets and systems of adult and continuing vocational [sic] and training’: perhaps its major point here was the ‘strongly fragmented nature’ of what it called ‘the adult and continuing education market’ (p. 61). One of its arguments was that, from a public policy perspective, we should think of adult education as a market (or a series of markets): ‘relationships of exchange of goods, services and capitals between different economic subjects (companies, families, the state) operating on local, national and global levels’. Policy-makers should intervene on ‘the existing circuit of production/distribution/exchange/ consumption of services’, and not limit themselves ‘to interventions which affect only those who operate within sectors directly or indirectly dominated by public financing’ (p. 67). However, although it argued public policy intervention in these markets was essential, it also saw them as difficult for a number of reasons. The most prominent was sheer complexity – the great ‘variety of problems and . . . number of actors’ – but it placed the strongest emphasis on problems of evidence. Policymaking ‘relies on good-quality data’ for a range of purposes: to ‘support the decision-making process; inform the choice of the problems to be tackled; elaborate policy options; carry out impact analysis; compare possible options; and structure monitoring and evaluation’ (p. 77). Few would dissent from this: accurate information is an essential base for policy debate. At the same time, there was something just a bit too simple about the claims the report built on this need for evidence. A common theme of critical research in recent years has been that while accurate information is necessary for good policy, it by no means guarantees it. Importantly, of course, this is because policy (some might say, by definition) is the outcome of politics: assertions to the contrary (such as the European Commission’s 1995 claim to have witnessed ‘the demise of the major ideological disputes on the objectives of education’ (European Commission, 1995, p. 23)) do not really stand the test of time. People do not all agree about what they want policies to achieve. So even when policies ‘work’, we may differ on what we want them to work for. The intractable embeddedness of disagreement is not, of course, an easy position for civil service bureaucracies to adopt – any more, for instance, than it has been easy for employers to accept a deep difference of interest between their enterprise and those they employ (cf Fox, 1974). The rise of neoliberal ideology, and the eclipse of political and social alternatives to globalised markets and capitalism, has brought recurrent efforts to shape and regularise opinion. In adult education, we – and other authors in this journal and elsewhere – have long since noted a desire in elite policy circles to achieve, build or assert consensus over purpose. This has been necessary because, before anything else, people, businesses and countries have been seen as having to compete in global markets. Thus

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数据、人工智能和决策：傲慢、炒作和希望

几年前，欧盟委员会委托并发布了一份有影响力的报告，审查成人教育政策制定者可以从研究中学到什么——主要是由委员会本身在连续的框架研究计划（现在更名为“地平线”）下资助的研究（Federighi，2013 ）。该报告涵盖了一系列领域，包括继续职业教育和培训以及成人教育的目标、成人教育如何有助于减少低技能人员的数量、工作场所学习和创新培训。它的最后一部分讨论了“成人和继续职业[原文如此]和培训的市场和系统”的治理：也许它的主要观点是它所谓的“成人和继续教育市场”的“高度分散的性质”（第 19 页）。 61)。它的论点之一是，从公共政策的角度来看，我们应该将成人教育视为一个市场（或一系列市场）：“不同经济主体（公司、家庭、国家）之间的商品、服务和资本交换关系和全球水平”。政策制定者应该干预“现有的服务生产/分配/交换/消费循环”，而不是“干预只影响那些直接或间接由公共融资主导的部门内运作的人”（第 67 页） . 然而，尽管它认为对这些市场的公共政策干预是必不可少的，但由于多种原因，它也认为它们很困难。最突出的是纯粹的复杂性——各种各样的问题和. . . 行动者的数量”——但它最强调证据问题。政策制定“依赖于高质量的数据”有一系列目的：“支持决策过程；告知选择要解决的问题；详细的政策选择；进行影响分析；比较可能的选择；和结构监测和评估”（第 77 页）。很少有人会反对这一点：准确的信息是政策辩论的重要基础。与此同时，报告建立在这种对证据的需求之上的主张有些过于简单。近年来批判性研究的一个共同主题是，虽然准确的信息对于良好的政策来说是必要的，但绝不是保证这一点。重要的是，当然，这是因为政策（有些人可能会说，根据定义）是政治的结果：相反的断言（例如欧盟委员会 1995 年声称目睹了“关于教育目标的主要意识形态争端的消亡”（欧盟委员会，1995 年，第 23 页））并不能真正经得起时间的考验。人们并不都同意他们希望政策实现的目标。因此，即使政策“奏效”，我们也可能在希望它们为之效力的问题上有所不同。固执的分歧当然不是公务员官僚机构容易接受的立场——例如，雇主更容易接受他们的企业和他们所雇用的人之间存在深刻的利益差异（参见福克斯，1974）。新自由主义意识形态的兴起，以及全球化市场和资本主义的政治和社会替代品的黯然失色，带来了塑造和规范意见的反复努力。在成人教育领域，我们——以及本杂志和其他地方的其他作者——早就注意到精英政策圈子渴望实现、建立或主张对目的的共识。这是必要的，因为最重要的是，人们、企业和国家被视为必须在全球市场上竞争。因此