Author: walterstiers

• Equality is essential for sustainability.

  In following, I resume 3 recent articles on this most valuable topic, related to the survival of our environment, societies and species. Why the world cannot afford the rich Equality is essential for sustainability. The science is clear — people in more equal societies are more trusting and more likely to protect the environment than…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-15

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Decision Intelligence, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Policy, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, bill-gates, climate-change, economics, economy

• the problem of algorithmic recommendations

  I just want to point out an MIT Technology Review article on three new books warn against turning into the person the algorithm thinks you are “A machine-learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks: ‘What’ll you have?’ The algorithm says: ‘What’s everyone else having?’” Chet Haase (Google) Software engineer Chet Haase’s joke sums…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-12

  #sense-making, AI, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Policy, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, data-science, machine-learning, technology

• Every category is a simplification

  I like to refer to a great book and MIT Press Reader article from Gregory Murphy on the Psychology of Categories, an in-depth analysis of how humanity’s compulsion to categorize affects every aspect of our lived experience. “Every category is a simplification to some degree; it throws away information about the thing.” The minute we…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-11

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, categories

• Bad Therapy

  I just copied the review of this book – Bad Therapy by @AbigailShrier This is one of the most eye-opening books I’ve ever read. It’s a must read for any parent, any teacher, and should be required reading for any school administrator as well.The book dives into trying to figure out why kids are having…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-11

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Design Thinking, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, anxiety, children, depression, mental-health, parenting

• Humanity needs a fundamental shift—“a very different civilisation”

  I choose to quote some sentences of the BMJ opinion article Osler’s valediction: how might physicians contribute to the effort to postpone human extinction?This article is written to physicians, but extrapolation to other professions is left to the reader. Historically, physicians have focused on individual patients. The time has come to expand the scope of…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-10

  #sense-making, #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical, Sustainability, Uncategorized

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, empathy, environment, health, healthcare, humanity

• 7 principles of acts of knowing, and how we build resilient knowledge ecosystems.

  Dave Snowden‘s 7 principles of acts of knowing (or knowledge management) are as evergreen and impactful as when they were first shared in one of the early Cynefin articles – Complex Acts of Knowing.

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

  #Cynefin, #sense-making, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Bayesianism and Wishful Thinking are Compatible

  On the face of it, wishful thinking seems incompatible with the Bayesian brain hypothesis. This is why defenses of Bayesianism have taken an eliminative stance toward wishful thinking, showing that many apparent instances of wishful thinking are not wishful after all. This strategy has succeeded in defeating many challenges to the Bayesian brain hypothesis, with…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

  #Sensemaking, AI, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, bayes-theorem, bayesian-inference, machine-learning, philosophy, statistics

• The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness

  Thomas Metzinger’s latest book from MIT Press is focused on the experience of “pure awareness” as an investigation of the most basic fundamental nature of consciousness This specific experience, is the most important thing I have ever experienced in my life, as a personal attestation It is available for free here or also as pdf…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, awareness, consciousness, god, meditation, spirituality

• We weten hoe het moet – duurzaamheid …

  Annette Kehnel, professor Middeleeuwse geschiedenis verbonden aan de Universiteit Mannheim, schreef enkele jaren geleden het inspirerende boek “We weten hoe het moet een kleine geschiedenis van de duurzaamheid van de middeleeuwen tot nu“. (of origineel: “Wir konnten auch anders: Eine kurze Geschichte der Nachhaltigkeit” (rezensiert von Dietrich Lohrmann, Aachen)Een fragment uit het boek is ter…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-19

  #stakeholder economy, Life Ideas, Social-Technical, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, blog, blogs, identiteit, nederlands, recensie

• The past as a stochastic process

  The concept of history unfolding stochastically is not new; in the context of the history of life on Earth, Stephen J. Gould famously asked what would happen if we could “replay the tape”, which implicitly supposes that an underlying stochastic process generated that tape. Similarly, stochastic process modeling of environmental dynamics has been used to…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-09

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, AI, artificial-intelligence, data-science, machine-learning, technology

• Simplifying social learning

  Social learning is complex, but people often seem to navigate social environments with ease. This ability creates a puzzle for traditional accounts of reinforcement learning (RL) that assume people negotiate a tradeoff between easy-but-simple behavior (model-free learning) and complex-but-difficult behavior (e.g., model-based learning). This publication offers a theoretical framework for resolving this puzzle: although social…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-08

  #Sensemaking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, education, learning, mental-health, philosophy, psychology

• Bayesian model: prior–cost

  Sohna and Jazayeri discuss in “Validating model-based Bayesian integration using prior–cost metamers” the two competing views on how humans make decisions under uncertainty. Bayesian decision theory (BDT) posits that humans optimize their behavior by establishing and integrating internal models of past sensory experiences (priors) and decision outcomes (cost functions). An alternative hypothesis posits that decisions…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Representation of priors and decisions

  The PLOS article by Marshall, Ruesseler, Hunt, O’Reilly “representation of priors and decisions in the human parietal cortex” discusses how both humans and animals actively sample the environment using their sensory organs, far from being passive recipients of sensory information. In rodents, active sampling processes include whisking and sniffing; in primates, the most important and…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, articles, memory, philosophy, Science

• Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making

  Natural decisions involve two seemingly separable processes: inferring the relevant task (task-belief) and performing the believed-relevant task. The assumed separability has led to the traditional practice of studying task-switching and perceptual decision-making individually. In this study, “Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making”, Xue, Kramer and Cohen used a novel paradigm to manipulate and…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #sense-making, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, aging, health, psychology, self-awareness

• AI Resources – A Worry

  ChatGPT is the first non-human addition to the list of people who shaped science… But also we have a worry related to this fact, as told in the (Dec.19,2023) Quote of the day “What worries me is we don’t have the resources to make sure that academic AI continues to be a centre of gravity.…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-10

  AI, Complexity, Information Technology, Policy, Science, Uncategorized

  #HumanAI

• It Takes Two To Think

  The title refers to the recent article by Yanai & Lercher. (Itai Yanai is a Professor at the NYU School of Medicine. Martin Lercher is Professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf at both the Institute for Computer Science and the Department of Biology. ) At the heart of science is a creative ‘night science‘ process,…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-09

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• Governing the economics of the common good

  To meet today’s grand challenges, economics requires an understanding of how common objectives may be collaboratively set and met. Tied to the assumption that the state can, at best, fix market failures and is always at risk of “capture”, economic theory has been unable to offer such a framework. To move beyond such limiting assumptions,…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-08

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Life Ideas, Social-Technical, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #ProblemSolvingMind, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens

• Models .. Right or Wrong:

  Often attributed to John Maynard Keynes, but the rooted elsewhere: “It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.” Carveth Read, “Logic: Deductive and Inductive” 4th edition -1920, p.351 You all have probably heard the story about Malcolm Forbes, who once got lost floating for miles in one of his famous balloons and finally…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-07

  #Sensemaking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Policy, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• Expert Predictions Fail …

  “When expert predictions fail“ examines the opportunities and challenges of expert judgment in the social sciences, scrutinizing the way social scientists make predictions. While social scientists show above-chance accuracy in predicting laboratory-based phenomena, they often struggle to predict real-world societal changes. Most causal models used in social sciences are oversimplified, confuse levels of analysis to which…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-05

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Penguin Update 12/2023

  The Leif Penguinson article I wrote a while ago refers to an article in Nature, which got updated. Of course, you always can have your regular “Can you spot the penguin?” when you follow the Nature Briefings

  walterstiers

  2023-12-30

  Biology of Information

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds

  For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation.The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals. Social interaction underpins who we are, how we think, and how we…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-21

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• The Quark & the Jaguar

  In 1994, SFI co-founder Murray Gell-Mann published his only book, The Quark & the Jaguar.  Now available in electronic formats through the SFI Press, the book examines the laws of physics and the complexity of the natural world through Gell-Mann’s uniquely personal and unifying vision.  “The world of the quark has everything to do / with…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-21

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Science

  #TheInformationLens

• An New Law Needed?

  On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems - by Michael L. Wong, et al. (2023) Systems of many interacting agents display an increase in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior when numerous configurations of the system are subject to selective pressure. The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-18

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• Reactive declined, Proactive selective. How human aggression evolved.

  The feature review in TICS “Evolutionary and neuroendocrine foundations of human aggression” by Amar Sarkar, and Richard Wrangham describes a human behavioural paradox: they are peaceful in many circumstances, but they are also violent and kill conspecifics at high rates. The review describes a social evolutionary theory to resolve this paradox. The theory interprets human…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-12

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

  #Wicked