Category: Social-Technical
-
wisdom perception across 12 countries
Wisdom is the hallmark of social judgment, but how people across cultures recognize wisdom remains unclear—distinct philosophical traditions suggest different views of wisdom’s cardinal features. This article in Nature Communications explores perception of wise minds across 16 socio-economically and culturally diverse convenience samples from 12 countries. Participants assessed wisdom exemplars, non-exemplars, and themselves on 19…
-
It’s the Biology, Stupid!
“It’s the biology, stupid! Proxy failures in economic decision making” is a commentary by Pier Luigi Sacco (available here), on a work by Yohan J. John et.al.: “Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: Proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems” (also available on ResearchGate) Where the “Dead rats, … peacock tails”…
-
Slow productivity — here’s why you should adopt it…
The full title is “Slow productivity worked for Marie Curie — here’s why you should adopt it, too“, and yes, it is referring to the book from Cal Newport, I already mentioned a while ago. “… figure out how you can leverage the autonomy you have and how you organize your labour to get away…
-
the lost art of accomplishment without burnout
The book “Slow Productivity The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” by Cal Newport. An excerpt is available on the author’s website: “When I first encountered the story of John McPhee’s long days looking up at the leaves in his backyard — a scene from a time long past, when those who made a living…
-
“you have to be sincere”
3 Ideas for Communicating Across the Political Divide by Isaac Saul (TED) Does the simple message “1,000 illegal aliens were arrested by US Border Patrol after crossing the southern border on Monday.”give the same message as “1,000 undocumented immigrants turned themselves in to US Border Patrol after crossing the southern border on Monday.” First, we…
-
Lead with purpose, govern in partnership
Also by Professor Mazzucato from the IIPP: “MISSION CRITICAL 01 Statecraft for the 21st century“ This research draws on expert interviews and builds out from the seminal work of author Professor Mariana Mazzucato at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). She has established clear criteria for missions (Mazzucato, 2019) and made the case for mission-oriented government (Mazzucato,…
-
Countries must decide what missions can help direct their economies.
Industrial strategy is experiencing a renaissance. Getting the details right matter. Mission-oriented industrial strategy needs to be more than words if we want to avoid missions becoming part of the problem, not the solution. This report (Mission-oriented industrial strategy: global insights) is based on research conducted over the past several years, led by Professor Mazzucato and…
-
Tim ‘S Jongers legt armoede uit aan mensen met geld
“Armoede uitgelegd aan mensen met geld” van Tim ‘S Jongers is een meer dan waardevol boek om te lezen. In een land geregeerd door welvarende, hoger opgeleide mensen wordt op een beperkte en soms zelfs schadelijke manier naar armoede gekeken. Mensen met geld snappen niet wat armoede is – en toch gaan zij over de…
-
Facts Don’t – Stories Do
I want to share the great article on LSE by Anna Toomey on “Facts Don’t Change Minds – Social Networks, Group Dialogue, and Stories Do”, based upon the author’s article Why facts don’t change minds: Insights from cognitive science for the improved communication of conservation research, published in Biological Conservation. It is counterintuitive (and not a…
-
When liars are considered honest
When honesty relies on sincerity rather than accuracy People in liberal democracies value honesty in their politicians and prioritize honesty over ‘delivering the goods’. How can serial liars be considered honest? This conundrum can be approached from a variety of angles. Here we apply the lens of recent theoretical work that has identified distinct subjective…
-
Getting Things Right
The article “Getting Things Right; Diagnose and Design in The Evolution of Community Provisioning Systems” tackle the great questions behind the observation of “Why do some governments, organisations and community leaders seem to get it wrong in confronting a crisis?” Why do others succeed? Is there something to be learned from how the different responses…
-
What fails and when?
“What fails and when? A process view of innovation failure” presents: Research on innovation failure has proliferated lately but with little theoretical attention given to the diversity of the concept. Using process theorizing, the article presents a model and propositions to understand how a firm’s anticipation and value toward failure depends on the type of…
-
An Informational Approach to Emergence
Claudio Gnoli gives an updated view on emergence in “Foundations of Science“ Emergence can be described as a relationship between entities at different levels of organization, that looks especially puzzling at the transitions between the major levels of matter, life, cognition and culture. Indeed, each major level is dependent on the lower one not just…
-
Participatory Action Research
Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to research that prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives. PAR involves the participation and leadership of those people experiencing issues, who take action to produce emancipatory social change, through conducting systematic research…
-
policymakers: enable individuals
Social, environmental, political and economic challenges — such as pandemics and epidemics, environmental degradation and community violence — require taking stock of how to promote behaviours that benefit individuals and society at large. Multidisciplinary meta-analyses of the individual and social-structural determinants of behaviour (for example, beliefs and norms, respectively) and the efficacy of behavioural change…
-
How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future – Who is next ?
A stunning speech from Scott Galloway on TED, tackling the issues of western (US) society. However, the talk is about US, the issues are not just limited to the US, and can easily be found back in the modern western world. As such, this talk might be inspiring. In a scorching talk, marketing professor and…
-
Collective behavior from surprise minimization
This paper introduces a model of collective behavior, proposing that individual members within a group, such as a school of fish or a flock of birds, act to minimize surprise. This active inference approach naturally generates well-known collective phenomena such as cohesion and directed movement without explicit behavioral rules. This model reveals intricate relationships between…
-
Laughter – a signal
Laughter may be the tool that nature gave to mankind to help it survive while traveling along the evolutionary path, claims Carlo V. Bellieni in “Laughter: A signal of ceased alarm toward a perceived incongruity between life and stiffness“ This feature of human behavior that precedes language development (infants as young as three months old are…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
Surtil : 