Surtil :

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

There is hope (emoji) &(biodiversity)

The open access article ” Biodiversity communication in the digital era through the Emoji tree of life” might be a candidate for the (Ig)Noble. At least, it expresses the hope for better communication, and highlights: Emojis enable direct expressions of ideas and emotions in digital communication, also contributing to discussions on biodiversity conservation. Nevertheless, the…

walterstiers

2023-12-11

Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

#TheInformationLens

Generating meaning – AI²: predicting wor(l)ds

I would like to quote some of the great insights and statements from the opinion by G. Pezzulo, T. Parr, P. Cisek, A Clark, and K. Friston published in TICS: “Generating meaning: active inference and the scope and limits of passive AI“. Does ChatGPT ‘understand‘ what it talks about in the way we do, or…

walterstiers

2023-11-27

#sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

#ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

Science and Engineering

The Complexification of Engineering consists in (a) that shift throughout which engineering becomes a science; thus it ceases to be a (mere) praxis or profession; (b) becoming a science, engineering can be considered as one of the sciences of complexity.In reality, the complexification of engineering is the process by which engineering can be studied, achieved,…

walterstiers

2023-11-24

Complexity, Science, Social-Technical

#DecisionIntelligence

Yes, it is an ART; but it leads tot non-decisions

Anthony Judge 2021 blog on “The art of non-decision-making” identifies 14 aspects of the art of non-decision-making based on experiences serving in, and observing, a range of international organisations. 1. Definitional games: This is the process of defining categories in one way in one document or organizational unit, and then defining them in another way…

walterstiers

2023-11-23

#Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Policy, Social-Technical

#DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

Toekomstbeelden om op te bouwen

In tijden waarin er veel verandert is het nodig om de flexibiliteit en hetaanpassingsvermogen van de samenleving en het landschap waarinwe leven te vergroten. Om problemen op te lossen die in recente decennia zijn veroorzaakt kunnen de oplossingen uit die tijd niet langer gebruikt worden, juist omdat ze aan de bron staan van de problemen…

walterstiers

2023-11-23

#Sensemaking, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Policy, Science, Social-Technical

#DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

“don’t hate the players, change the game” – The dark side of competition in AI

Competition. It’s a fundamental part of human nature. […] When it’s done right, it can drive us to incredible feats in sports and innovation, […] healthy competition, because even though individual companies might come and go, in the long run, the game between them creates win-win outcomes where everyone benefits in the end. But sometimes…

walterstiers

2023-11-21

#Sensemaking, AI, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas

#DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #TheInformationLens

Interoception and Active Inference for mental health

Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a momentary mapping of the body’s internal landscape and its relationship to the outside world. Active inference is based on the premise that afferent sensory input to the brain is constantly shaped and modified by…

walterstiers

2023-11-17

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

#ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

Human society is currently undergoing a socio-cultural ETI

An evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) occurs when a previously independent organism becomes a lower level unit within a higher hierarchical level (for example, cells in an organism, ants in a colony). Based on archaeological and historical accounts from the last 12000 years, this article “Human societal development: is it an evolutionary transition in individuality?”…

walterstiers

2023-11-16

#Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science

#DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #StakeholderEconomy