Author: walterstiers

• Perceived time & heartbeat

  This blog entry about the Current Biology article “Perceived time expands and contracts within each heartbeat” relates perfectly to my previous blog on “cardiac activity: its role in perception and action“ Perception of passing time can be distorted. Emotional experiences, particularly arousal, can contract or expand experienced duration via their interactions with attentional and sensory…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-20

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology

  #emergence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Cardiac activity: its role in perception and action

  Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary with environmentaldemands, accelerating or decelerating depending on circumstances. Simultaneously, cardiac cycle affects a host of higher-order processes, where systolic baroreceptor activation largely impairs processing. However, a unified functional perspective on the role of cardiac signal in perception and action has been lacking. — Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-17

  Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #TheInformationLens

• Human innovation depends on our collective brains

  A recent study investigates hunters’ causal understandings of bow design and mechanics among the Hadza, one of the last remaining foraging populations. The results suggest that sophisticated technology can evolve without complete causal understanding. Human innovation depends not on our individual brainpower but on our collective brains, on networks of diverse minds sharing information, lucky…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-17

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• With AI, we can’t

  “Humans lie and manipulate each other’s emotions all the time, but at least we can reasonably guess at someone’s motivations, agenda and methods. With AI, we can’t.” Ethicist Carissa Véliz argues that chatbots that use emojis are emotionally manipulative: without appropriate safeguards, the technology could undermine people’s autonomy.  A 2021 study found that people consistently…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-15

  #sense-making, AI, Decision Intelligence, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #sense-making, #TheInformationLens

• How Occam’s razor guides human decision-making

  A rather complex but very interesting article was published @PennLibraries and (somewhat more recent) @bioRXiv But for those who want to understand by a lecture, I can recommend the Simons Faoundation lecture from Joshua Gold (also available on Youtube: How Occam’s Razor Guides Human and Machine Decision-Making) Occam’s razor is the principle stating that, all…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-03

  #Wicked, AI, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• A map is not the territory it represents, but…

  I quote one of the key ideas of my activities, as stated bij Korzybski: A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness Korzybski, “Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics.“ This post is created to…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-03

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Science, Social-Technical

  #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• 4 kinds of creativity

  HBR just published a nice article on 4 kinds of creativity.In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types:  – integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; – splitting, or seeing how…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-03

  Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 ◦C ambitions

  This article in Cleaner Production Letters studies the implications of a continued growth in the number of millionaires for emissions, and its impact on the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (about 400 Gt CO2). Much evidence suggests that the wealthiest individuals contribute disproportionally to climate change. Findings suggest that…

  walterstiers

  2023-03-03

  #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Policy, Science, Social-Technical

  #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Ten tips for facilitating emergent processes

  I just discovered a nice medium article/blog entry from Sonja Blignaut on working towards emergent solutions for wicked situations. I just summarise, but details are in the article. Facilitating emergent group processes requires a different kind of facilitation. When you’re not working towards a predetermined outcome, following a pre-designed agenda, the following principles are helpful…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-27

  #Cynefin, #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• “A New Evolutionary Law”

  Revisiting Leigh Van Valen’s “A New Evolutionary Law” (1973) by Ricard Solé, (Biological Theory (2022) 17:120–125) Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass Leigh Van Valen was an American evolutionary biologist who made major contributions to evolutionary theory. He is…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-25

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science

  #Ecosystem, #emergence, #Entanglement, #TheInformationLens

• Ecosystems – Mutualism – Synthetic biology

  Synthetic Mutualism and the Intervention Dilemma describes how ecosystems are complex networks of interacting individuals co-evolving with their environment. As such, changes to an interaction can influence the whole ecosystem. However, to predict the outcome of these changes, considerable understanding of processes driving the system is required. Synthetic biology provides powerful tools to aid this…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-25

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Science

  #Ecosystem, #Mutualism, #TheInformationLens

• The Niche theory : Compete, Facilitate & Mutualisme

  From competition to facilitation and mutualism: a general theory of the niche by Koffel, Daufresne and Klausmeier explores the niche theory. Niche Theory is a central framework in ecology based on the recognition that most interactions between organisms are indirect, mediated by the biotic and abiotic dynamical environment these organisms live in. Despite its potential…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-25

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science

  #Ecosystem, #Mutualism, #TheInformationLens

• Size and Weight

  I already referred to “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”, in which two chapters refer to space & information correctness: This book was meant to be a review of the human stories behind programming, enabling those of us who don’t think much about code to recognize its importance, and those who work with it every…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-23

  #Sensemaking, Information Technology, Science

  #TheInformationLens

• Can Creativity Be Stored? Yes, and It Should Be

  For those of us who are not creative, it is difficult to imagine how creative people work.The explanation for the messy creative person and the uncreative brainstorming session can be found in research by Poornika Ananth and Sarah Harvey published in Administrative Science Quarterly. They had a big study of creative individuals in theatre and architecture, and…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-23

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Design Thinking, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Neuroplasticity enables bio‑cultural feedback

  The scientific reports article “Neuroplasticity enables bio‑cultural feedback in Paleolithic stone‑tool making” elaborates on the idea described in articles like The comparative neuroscience and neuroarchaeological evidence indicate that functional systems supporting stone tool making have undergone substantial change over human evolution, and that these changes may be relevant to a much wider range of distinctively…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-22

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #Analogy, #downcausation, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• The evolution of universal cooperation

  Humans work together in groups to tackle shared problems and contribute to local club goods that benefit other group members. Whereas benefits from club goods remain group bound, groups are often nested in overarching collectives that face shared problems like pandemics or climate change. Such challenges require individuals to cooperate across group boundaries, raising the…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-22

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens

• David Krakauer Lecture on What is Complexity?

  David Krakauer • What is Complexity? is a great and enlightening talk sectioning the concept of complexity and exploring complexity epistemology and emergence. (Also to be found on Sante Fe Institute website: The Complexity Explorer)

  walterstiers

  2023-02-21

  #Wicked, Complexity, Science

  #emergence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Brain-Behavior relationships

  “Improving the study of brain-behavior relationships by revisiting basic assumptions” discusses how scientific communities tacitly agree on assumptions about what exists (called ontological commitments), what questions to ask, and what methods to use. All assumptions are firmly rooted in a philosophy of science that need not be acknowledged or discussed but is practiced nonetheless. In…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-21

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• The Art of Abduction 

  Abductive reasoning typically begins with an incomplete set of observations and proceeds to the likeliest possible explanation for the set. Abductive reasoning yields the kind of daily decision-making that does its best with the information at hand, which often is incomplete. A medical diagnosis is an application of abductive reasoning: given this set of symptoms,…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-21

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• As a human it would be quite easy to spot

  Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI A human player has comprehensively defeated a top-ranked AI system at the board game Go, in a surprise reversal of the 2016 computer victory that was seen as a milestone in the rise of artificial intelligence. Kellin Pelrine beat the machine by taking advantage of…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-19

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, AI, Complexity, Information Technology

  #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”

  When starting my professional career in IT, I got close to the holy grale of the UNIX source code, well known for the most striking comment in IT history. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”. Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code”…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-10

  #Wicked, Information Technology, Science, Social-Technical

• The complexities of knowledge co-production

  Practical wisdom and virtue ethics for knowledge co-production in sustainability describes how since antiquity, philosophers in the Western tradition of virtue ethics have declared practical wisdom to be the central virtue of citizens involved in public and social life. Practical wisdom is of particular importance when values are conflicting, power is unequal and knowledge uncertain.…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-10

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Policy, Science, Sustainability

  #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• “Average is good, extremes are bad”

  Traditionally, studies emphasize differences in neural measures between pathological and healthy groups, assuming a binary distinction between the groups, and a linear relationship between neural measures and symptoms. A continuous relation across the divide of normal and pathological states between neural measures and mental functions shows a relation which can be characterized by a nonlinear…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-10

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

• The Capital Order

  In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.  For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity— rise in interest rates, privatisation, cuts to…

  walterstiers

  2023-02-10

  #stakeholder economy, Life Ideas, Policy

  #EconomicBehavior