Category: Social-Technical
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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7 principles of acts of knowing, and how we build resilient knowledge ecosystems.
Dave Snowden‘s 7 principles of acts of knowing (or knowledge management) are as evergreen and impactful as when they were first shared in one of the early Cynefin articles – Complex Acts of Knowing.
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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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