Category: Life Ideas

• Humans rationally balance abstract world models

  This work adds to a growing body of research showing that the brain arbitrates between approximate decision strategies. The current study extends these ideas from simple habits into usage of more sophisticated approximate predictive models, and demonstrates that individuals dynamically adapt these in response to the predictability of their environment. How do people model the…

  walterstiers

  2025-02-10

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

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

• As For Protocols

  Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are systems of language that regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. The first publication to critically examine protocols across a wide range of disciplines, As…

  walterstiers

  2025-02-07

  Life Ideas, Policy, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Explanation in Biology

  The most recent publication from the series “Philisophy of Biology” is “Explanation in Biology“, available for free download at the site. The book introduces and elaborates scientific explanations in biology and the life sciences. Explanations are viewed as a “primary” objective of science – theyoffer deep understanding and knowledge of the world, as opposed to…

  walterstiers

  2025-01-22

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, biology, food, health, immunology

• Penguin Update 12/2024

  The Leif Penguinson article I wrote a while ago refers to an article in Nature, which got updated 12/2023 and also 12/2024. Of course, you always can have your regular “Can you spot the penguin?” when you follow the Nature Briefings

  walterstiers

  2024-12-27

  #Sensemaking, Creative Thinking, Innovation Games, Life Ideas

  #TheInformationLens

• Beyond the AHA!

  “Going beyond the AHA! moment: insight discovery for transdisciplinary research and learning“ The concept of ‘insight discovery’ is developed as a key competence for transdisciplinary research and learning in this paper. To address complex societal and environmental problems facing the world today, a particular expertise that can identify new connections between diverse knowledge fields is…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-25

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, education, psychology

• Team science expertise & reflective-reflexive design method

  “A framework for developing team science expertise using a reflective-reflexive design method (R2DM)“ Effective integration and implementation of knowledge in research are dependent on team science expertise grounded in collaboration principles and techniques that advance individual and group scientific agendas. The Science of Team Science provides evidence-based research and best practices that strive to develop…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-25

  Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, business, coaching, education, leadership, personal-development

• Thinking more or thinking differently?

  “Thinking more or thinking differently? Using drift-diffusion modeling to illuminate why accuracy prompts decrease misinformation sharing“ Recent experiments have found that prompting people to think about accuracy reduces misinformation sharing intentions. The process by which this effect operates, however, remains unclear. Do accuracy prompts cause people to “stop and think,” increasing deliberation? Or do they…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-14

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, misinformation, news, social-media, technology

• The power of parsimony

  “Walking the talk on multi-level interventions: The power of parsimony“ There is strong consensus regarding the need for multi-level interventions (MLIs) to address today’s complex health problems. The greatest public health burdens globally (e.g., chronic and infectious diseases) derive from a mix of causal and contributing factors and are inherently complex, operating interdependently and reflexively…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-06

  Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, philosophy, Science

• The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind

  “The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind“:Karl Friston’s free-energy principle casts agents as self-evidencing through active inference. This implies that decision-making, planning and information-seeking are, in a generic sense, ‘wishful’. We take an interdisciplinary perspective on this perplexing aspect of the free-energy principle and unpack the epistemological implications of wishful thinking under the free-energy principle.…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-05

  #sense-making, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, affirmations, manifestation, mindset, philosophy

• Cognitive Biases in Fact-Checking and Their Countermeasures

  “Cognitive Biases in Fact-Checking and Their Countermeasures: A Review“ Types of user tasks that may involve cognitive biases: Task Description Causal Attribution Tasks involving an assessment of causality. Decision Tasks involving the selection of one over several alternative options. Estimation Tasks where people are asked to assess the value of a quantity. Hypothesis Assessment Tasks…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-05

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked, bias, cognitive-bias, cognitive-biases, decision-making, psychology

• A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds

  We’re being spoiled by MIT Press Open Access. Not just did we just receive access to the great title “From Sensing to Sentience” , but also “A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness” became available for download. A panoramic view of the evolution of life on our planet, from…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-04

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, brain, consciousness, evolution, philosophy, Science

• From Sensing to Sentience: How Feeling Emerges from the Brain

  Open access book, download available @ MIT Press A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain. Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain. Emergent…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-04

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, consciousness, sentience

• Communicate Unflattening

  I already mentioned in a previous blog entry the “Krebs Cycle of Creativity“, a map that describes the perpetuation of creative energy, analogous to the Krebs Cycle proper. In this analogy of the Krebs Cycle, the four modalities of human creativity— Science, Engineering, Design and Art— replace the Krebs Cycle’s carbon compounds. Each of the modalities…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-21

  #Sensemaking, Creative Thinking, Design Thinking, Life Ideas

  #TheInformationLens

• The illusion of information adequacy

  “The illusion of information adequacy““The science behind why people think they’re right when they’re actually wrong“ You don’t know what you don’t know.  –Socrates How individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-17

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, empathy, mental-health, philosophy, psychology, realism

• Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases

  “Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases“ The authors argue that many different biases, such as the bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, and outcome bias, can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, bias, cognitive-bias, cognitive-biases, confirmation-bias, psychology

• Nature heals

  “Nature heals: An informational entropy account of self-organization and change in field psychotherapy“Highlights This paper reviews biophysical models of psychotherapeutic change based on synergetics and the free energy principle. These models suggest that introducing sensory surprise into the patient-therapist system can lead to self-organization and the formation of new attractor states, disrupting entrenched patterns of…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, consciousness, mental-health, philosophy, psychology, spirituality

• Learning by thinking

  Learning by thinking in natural and artificial minds:Canonical cases of learning involve novel observations external to the mind, but learning can also occur through mental processes such as explaining to oneself, mental simulation, analogical comparison, and reasoning. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) reveal that such learning is not restricted to human minds: artificial minds…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-27

  Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, education, learning, teaching

• Movement Matters

  An Open Access book from MIT press, Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning (available for download). Experts translate the latest findings on embodied cognition from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science to inform teaching and learning pedagogy. Embodied cognition represents a radical shift in conceptualizing cognitive processes, in which cognition develops through mind-body…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-26

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Walking

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, cognitive-science, education, fitness, mental-health, psychology

• regulation of motivated behavior

  in “A unified theoretical framework underlying the regulation of motivated behavior“, Yu-Been Kim, Young Hee Lee, Shee-June Park and Hyung Jin Choi explain that multiple psychological components have evolved in order to orchestrate behaviors for survival. Despite several theories regarding behavior regulation, these theories do not clearly distinguish distinct components and do not explain the…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-26

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, health, machine-learning, technology

• Better stories <equals> better solutions

  Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories is a great article from Arnaud Chevallier, Albrecht Enders, and Jean-Louis Barsoux on MIT SMR. One of the biggest obstacles to effective decision-making is failure to define the problem well. Invoking the power of narrative and a simple story structure can help ensure that teams are…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-26

  #sense-making, #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, business, gaming, writing

• How Collaboration Breaks Down

  Simon DeDeo and many other authors describe in this chapter how humans may be “super-cooperators,” but no collaboration lasts forever. This chapter summarizes the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between political, social, economic, and cognitive scientists into the question of collaboration collapse. It locates the breakdown of collaboration downstream from the failure to align on…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-25

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, business, collaboration, innovation, leadership, politics

• Resilience may have downsides…

  Traditionally, resilience has been viewed as a general positive adaptation to stressors. However, the hallmark of resilience – returning to the previous state following a perturbation – may also have severe downsides, which are often overlooked. Specifically, it may be unrealistic to return to the previous state or resilience may cause a person to become…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-23

  Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, mental-health, resilience, wellness

• practical wisdom in complex system management

  Leonie Hallo et al. published the research “Investigating practical wisdom in complex system management: What is it and how do we get more?“ Systems are now extremely complex with the continuous involvement of multiple stakeholders and rapidly advancing technology, and a new way of viewing high-performance system management and decision-making is needed.This paper considers the…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-11

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, leadership, personal-development

• Complex Systems Research in Psychology

  Han L. J. van der Maas published August 31, 2024 this SFI book “Complex Systems Research in Psychology“, available as PDF for free. Prologue This book is intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes using the tools of complex-systems research. The book has three primary objectives. The first is to provide…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-06

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens