Category: Decision Intelligence
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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…
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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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,…
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Beware the “lure of models”
Scientists cannot help but use models says Mark Buchanan. Models help to clarify the consequences of theoretical assumptions, or to draw out complex lines of cause and effect … Without simplified conceptual models, scientific communication itself would be largely impossible.Of course, mathematical models also underlie some of the sciences’ most impressive achievements, like e.g. today’s…
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How mathematics invented new realities
Although Euclid’s ideas about geometry in 300 BC were rooted in physical reality, the field became ever more abstract throughout the twentieth century.In her new book, historian Alma Steingart reveals how this push for abstraction was mirrored by, and often triggered, parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. (Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism…
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Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles
Karl Friston joins VERSES as Chief Scientist to Lead New Era in Artificial Intelligence.VERSES published its research paper to arxiv.org to explore the applications and implications of Active Inference on the future of Artificial Intelligence. “Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles” lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence…
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Take your time to consider the possibilities and options
Representations of possible actions pervade human high-level cognition, and shape how we plan, attribute causal responsibility, comprehend language, and make moral judgments.There are too many ‘possible actions’ for us to consider them all. Recent studies offer a strikingly convergent picture of how we call to mind a limited, useful set of possible actions to consider.This…
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Beliefs and Inference
Beliefs are propositions about the true states of the world.Active inference—a process theory based on the free energy principle—describes how an agent forms and updates beliefs.The active inference framework posits that the agent (i) observes the world, (ii) infers the causes of the observations, and (iii) forms beliefs about the external states of the world.…
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Technology readiness levels for machine learning systems
The development and deployment of machine learning systems can be executed easily with modern tools, but the process is typically rushed and means-to-an-end. Lack of diligence can lead to technical debt, scope creep and misaligned objectives, model misuse and failures, and expensive consequences. Engineering systems, on the other hand, follow well-defined processes and testing standards…
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Statistics: Are you Bayesian or Frequentist?
Cats bring success – they are ket part of the internet traffic and enjoyment. So let me show a great pic: The real purpose of the cats-pics (delivered by a dog person) is the great video and article from Cassie Kozyrkov What is the difference between Bayesian and Frequentist statistics? (demonstrated with one single coin…
