Category: #Wicked
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The curse of knowledge
Experts are poorer communicators in their own domain than nonexperts, MIT Sloan’s Miro Kazakoff says, and he offers ways to reverse that curse. “One of the critical challenges of professional communication is to recognize and internalize the variety of ways that people decode things,” “When we see a pattern or recognize something or know something,…
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Where the senses fail us, reason must step in
It is true that the unique human ability to reason is what allows for science, technology, and advanced problem-solving. But there are limitations to reason. Highly deliberative people tend to be less empathetic, are often perceived as less trustworthy and authentic, and can undermine their own influence. Ultimately, the supposed battle between head and heart is overblown.…
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Plan with “value-guided construal”
When people plan, they do so by constructing a simplified mental representation of a problem that is sufficient to solve it—a process that we refer to as value-guided construal. An ideal, cognitively limited decision-maker should construe a task so as to balance complexity and utility. Preregistered predictions of this model explain people’s awareness, ability to…
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The Why, How, and When of Representations for Complex Systems
Complex systems, composed at the most basic level of units and their interactions, describe phenomena in a wide variety of domains, from neuroscience to computer science and economics. The wide variety of applications has resulted in two key challenges: the generation of many domain-specific strategies for complex systems analyses that are seldom revisited, and the…
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Will it ever happen?
Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken – Can machines ever achieve true intelligence? , is a perspective article in entropy by Ricard Solé and Luís F. Seoane, has a great discussion on intelligence. When computers started to become a dominant part of technology around the 1950s, fundamental questions about reliable designs and…
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Metacognition accompanying decision-making
Decision-making is usually accompanied by metacognition, through which a decision maker monitors uncertainty regarding a decision and may then consequently revise the decision. These metacognitive processes can occur prior to or in the absence of feedback. The neural mechanisms of metacognition remain controversial. A novel “decision–redecision” paradigm to investigate the neural metacognitive processes involved in…
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Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds
This post is a pointer to a great article from Michael Levin, just published in Frontiers in Systems Neurosciences All known cognitive agents are collective intelligences, because we are all made of parts; biological agents in particular are not just structurally modular, but made of parts that are themselves agents in important ways. There is…
