Surtil :

Your Name Matters (this is not a joke)

Best student paper award at the 2023 ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO’23) was “30 Million Canvas Records Reveal Widespread Sequential Bias and System-design Induced Surname Initial Disparity in Grading” authored by Jiaxin Pei, Zhihan Wang, and Jun Li. The widespread adoption of learning management systems in educational institutions has…

walterstiers

2024-04-18

#Sensemaking, Complexity, Information Technology, Policy, Science, Social-Technical

#DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, assessment, education

Intelligence: Evolution, Brains and AI – but #6?

I just finished the marvellous book from Max Bennett: “A Brief History of Intelligence“. As mentioned by the praise: “If you are interested in understanding brains or in building human-like general AI, you should read this book.” Dileep George, DeepMind, Co-Founder of Vicarious AI In the book, a wonderful story is given from the evolution…

walterstiers

2024-04-11

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

#DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

42 and 5

Today, 42 years ago, we had the great pleasure of discovering the reality of 5-fold crystals. On the morning of 8 April 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Dan Shechtman’s electron microscope. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated…

walterstiers

2024-04-08

#sense-making, #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Science

#DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

Novel beings, novel goals

Every now and then there is the opportunity to get the a clear overview on the actual state of research on biology, intelligence, the artificial and it’s overlap towards future capabilities. “Novel beings, novel goals: evolution & engineering of the agential material of life | Dr. Mike Levin‘ is available on youtube. Dr. Michael Levin…

walterstiers

2024-03-19

Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Science

#DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

Limitarism – A bliss

Ingrid Robeyns’s Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, a powerful case for limitarianism–the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate. A must-read! (so says Thomas Piketty). Ingrid Robeyns’ Limitarianism is a recent addition in a long line of critiques – such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Branko Milanovic’s Visions of Inequality – of the…

walterstiers

2024-03-15

#Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Life Ideas

#DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens

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…

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