Category: Social-Technical
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Adult play – favoring collective decision making
Adult play and the evolution of tolerant and cooperative societies Play is generally considered an immature affair. However, adult play is present in several mammal species living in complex social systems. This article considers the hypothesis that adult social play is favored by natural selection in those species characterized by high level of social tolerance…
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Cognitive distortions in recent decades
Cognitive distortions are thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety. Historical traces of in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German show a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions…
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The Escape from Poverty
Breaking the Vicious Cycles Perpetuating Disadvantage The perpetuation of poverty across generations damages lives. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and academic disciplines, along with lived experiences, this book examines why poverty is continued across generations and what needs to be done to eradicate it. This book – available for download – draws on…
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A touch of intellectual humility
Being open to the limitations of their knowledge can help researchers tofoster interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations. Intellectual humility involves “the owning of one’s cognitive limitations, a healthy recognition of one’s intellectual debts to others, and low concern for intellectual domination and certain kinds of social status”. That translates to recognizing the limitations of one’s beliefs…
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a call for transformative, inclusive, and integrative approaches for learning and relearning in the Anthropocene
“The students will have an understanding and empathy that they will hold in their minds and hearts due to the spiritual and cultural teachings they are learning through the land. They will have a new lens.” Joy Joseph-McCullough, Squamish Nation Fuelled by the intersecting challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and profound social, economic,…
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Stikstof – is het echt de landbouw?
Net een erg leuk, inzichtelijk en compact boek gevonden over het Nederlandse Stikstof verhaal, waar ook Vlaanderen nog veel uit kan leren, en misschien zelfs kan handelen. Thomas Oudman heeft recent “Uit de Shit – Een pleidooi voor meer boeren en minder vee” gepubliceerd. Zijn betoog: Het kán: de stikstofcrisis oplossen en boeren perspectief geven.…
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Evolution of cognitive biases
Peter S. Park published a very interesting research on decisions and inference: “The evolution of cognitive biases in human learning”. Some text snippets I like to share: Cognitive biases like underinference, the hard-easy effect, and recurrently non-monotonic confidence are evolutionarily puzzling when viewed as persistent flaws in how people learn from environmental feedback. To explain…
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TAP – The Adjecent Possible
From the astonishing evolutionary advances of the Cambrian explosion to our present-day computing revolution, the trend of dramatic growth after periods of stability can be explained through the theory of the “adjacent possible,” says theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. Tracing the arc of human history through the tools and technologies we’ve invented, he explains the impact…
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Beware of rule 10
I know I fail on the key objective of this great article, but still try to do my best within my possibilities. “Ten simple rules for scientists engaging in science communication” has a great overview of how to communicate, written by Brittney G. Borowiec, a postdoctoral fellow and freelance science writer and editor. There are…
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Conducting unveiled
“Conducting unveiled: Sharing Simon Rattle’s Vision through Revolutionary EyeTracking Glasses” is a wonderfull story, I would like to share. “Split second shifts give the conductor and musicians a chance to anticipate the next move, but on a much larger, integrally collective scale.” This story brings together some together some topics already touched before, like conducting…
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Paul Verhaeghe – Onbehagen
“Onbehagen”, het recente boek van Paul Verhaeghe, is een meesterlijke studie van hoe onze cultuur en samenleving inwerken op ons geestelijk welbevindenOndanks de welvaart op alle vlakken heerst er een groot onbehagen in onze maatschappij. Dit gevoel is van alle tijden en maakt deel uit van ons mens-zijn. Paul Verhaeghe laat in dit boek zien…
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