Category: Social-Technical
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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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Design for Well-Being and Sustainability
Design for Well-Being and Sustainability: A Conceptual Framework of the Peer-to-Peer Sharing and Reuse Platform in the Circular Economy investigates how to infuse well-being components into the circular economy. Based on the literature review, it organized and analyzed the extant evidence of related well-being-based research to develop an ecosystem model of a sustainable product–service system…
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What Do I Do …
Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) is a scientist at Tufts University; his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. Today, Michael posted 2 simple flowcharts, worthwhile sharing. “Many thoughtful people get destabilized by deep questions of science & philosophy – what are the implications for how to live life?…
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coffee, nope ….
I used to drink it, long time ago, a little bit… coffee. I’m happy without – and the evidences are being presented more and more. Coffee consumption decreases the connectivity of the posterior Default Mode Network (DMN) at rest. The obvious clear title of a recent paper. A very readable summary is offered by Frontiers…
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How Constraints Create Coherence
This entry is a pointer to the long-expected work of Alicia Juarrero: Context Changes Everything, How Constraints Create Coherence how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation. Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrerochallenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are…
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Some Advise on AI (research)
“Look for somewhere that you think everybody’s doing it wrong.” Geoffrey Hinton Pioneering artificial-intelligence researcher Geoffrey Hinton, who quit his job at Google so he can speak freely about the dangers of the technology, says young researchers should trust their intuition to find alternative ways of doing things. (University of Toronto video | 46 min…
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Affect and Decision Making (computational models)
Decision science evolve towards the use of formalized mathematical and computational models of choice (such as sequential accumulator or driftdiffusion models, DDMs). These may represent a key step forward, butonly if they properly incorporate the conceptual and theoretical richness of the affective sciences. Computational models increasingly inform our understanding of decision processes, but the influence…
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“gone too far”
The history of movement has faced a crisis relationship between two elemental human phenomena: 1. On one hand there is the principle of economy—the human aspiration to reduce physical and mental efforts to a minimum, 2. and on the other hand there is the adaptation principle—the natural dependence of human beings on movement. The principle…
walterstiers
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Interprofessional sense-making
Medical Emergency Departments serve as a main entry point for patients into hospitals, and the team, the core of which is formed by doctors and nurses needs to make sense of and respond to the constant flux of information. This requires sense-making, communication, and collaborative operational decision-making. The study’s main aim was to explore how…
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Small steps
Small steps for mankind: Modeling the emergence of cumulative culture from joint active inference communication discusses a testable deep active inference formulation of social behavior and accompanying simulations of cumulative culture in two steps: First: cast cultural transmission as a bi-directional process of communication that induces a generalized synchrony (operationalized as a particular convergence) between…
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Peter Pan ?
There is controversy around the mechanisms that guided the change in brain shape during the evolution of modern humans. It has long been held that different cortical areas evolved independently from each other to develop their unique functional specializations. Some recent studies suggest that high integration between different cortical areas could facilitate the emergence of…
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Native language & connectome of the brain
Investigation towards the question if the neuroanatomy of the language structural connectome is modulated by the life-long experience of speaking a specific language are presented. The current study compared the brain white matter connections of the language and speech production network in a large cohort of native speakers of two very different languages: an Indo-European…
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With AI, we can’t
“Humans lie and manipulate each other’s emotions all the time, but at least we can reasonably guess at someone’s motivations, agenda and methods. With AI, we can’t.” Ethicist Carissa Véliz argues that chatbots that use emojis are emotionally manipulative: without appropriate safeguards, the technology could undermine people’s autonomy. A 2021 study found that people consistently…
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A map is not the territory it represents, but…
I quote one of the key ideas of my activities, as stated bij Korzybski: A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness Korzybski, “Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics.“ This post is created to…
Surtil : 