Category: Social-Technical
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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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