Tag: philosophy

• The power of mathematical models for better policy decisions

  “Harnessing the power of mathematical models for better policy decisions” sets out four practical recommendations to help policymakers across a wide range of policy areas effectively capitalise on, and sidestep pitfalls of, using mathematical models for decision-making. Decision-makers are often keen to “follow the science” in highly-charged contexts such as climate policy, pandemic response, economic…

  walterstiers

  2025-04-15

  #Sensemaking, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Innovation Games, Practical Wisdom, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, education, philosophy, technology

• Power of the Invisible

  “The Power of the Invisible: The Quantessence of Reality” from Sander Bais There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery. Enrico Fermi Quantum Physics is the solid basis of most of our understanding of…

  walterstiers

  2025-04-03

  Complexity, Creative Thinking, Information Technology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, philosophy, physics, quantum-mechanics, quantum-physics, Science

• Greatness Cannot Be Planned

  Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated — and nearly everything in-between — our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned—The Myth of…

  walterstiers

  2025-04-02

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, consciousness, history, philosophy, Science, spirituality

• Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge?

  Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models. Yet recent years have seen a number of successes in employing highly complex models for scientific inquiry (e.g., for 3D…

  walterstiers

  2025-01-28

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, AI, data-science, machine-learning, philosophy, Science

• The power of parsimony

  “Walking the talk on multi-level interventions: The power of parsimony“ There is strong consensus regarding the need for multi-level interventions (MLIs) to address today’s complex health problems. The greatest public health burdens globally (e.g., chronic and infectious diseases) derive from a mix of causal and contributing factors and are inherently complex, operating interdependently and reflexively…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-06

  Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, philosophy, Science

• The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind

  “The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind“:Karl Friston’s free-energy principle casts agents as self-evidencing through active inference. This implies that decision-making, planning and information-seeking are, in a generic sense, ‘wishful’. We take an interdisciplinary perspective on this perplexing aspect of the free-energy principle and unpack the epistemological implications of wishful thinking under the free-energy principle.…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-05

  #sense-making, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, affirmations, manifestation, mindset, philosophy

• A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds

  We’re being spoiled by MIT Press Open Access. Not just did we just receive access to the great title “From Sensing to Sentience” , but also “A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness” became available for download. A panoramic view of the evolution of life on our planet, from…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-04

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, brain, consciousness, evolution, philosophy, Science

• Energy cost of computation: stochastic thermodynamics?

  “Is stochastic thermodynamics the key to understanding the energy costs of computation?” The relationship between the thermodynamic and computational properties of physical systems has been a major theoretical interest since at least the 19th century. It has also become of increasing practical importance over the last half-century as the energetic cost of digital devices has…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-04

  Complexity, Information Technology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, AI, entropy, philosophy, physics, Science

• The illusion of information adequacy

  “The illusion of information adequacy““The science behind why people think they’re right when they’re actually wrong“ You don’t know what you don’t know.  –Socrates How individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-17

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, empathy, mental-health, philosophy, psychology, realism

• Narrative as active inference

  “Narrative as active inference: an integrative account of cognitive and social functions in adaptation“:While the ubiquity and importance of narratives for human adaptation is widely recognized, there is no integrative framework for understanding the roles of narrative in human adaptation. Research has identified several cognitive and social functions of narratives that are conducive to well-being…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  Active Inference, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, education, marketing, philosophy, storytelling, writing

• Nature heals

  “Nature heals: An informational entropy account of self-organization and change in field psychotherapy“Highlights This paper reviews biophysical models of psychotherapeutic change based on synergetics and the free energy principle. These models suggest that introducing sensory surprise into the patient-therapist system can lead to self-organization and the formation of new attractor states, disrupting entrenched patterns of…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, consciousness, mental-health, philosophy, psychology, spirituality

• KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION hindered by KNOWLEDGE ENTROPY DECAY during language model pretraining

  This paper describes how a model’s tendency to broadly integrate its parametric knowledge evolves throughout pretraining, and how this behavior affects overall performance, particularly in terms of knowledge acquisition and forgetting. The concept of knowledge entropy is introduced, which quantifies the range of memory sources the model engages with; high knowledge entropy indicates that the…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  AI, Information Technology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, AI, entropy, philosophy, physics, Science

• Insight –> selection of ideas

  “Insight and the selection of ideas” describes the mechanisms underlying Eureka heuristic, explained within an active inference framework.  Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity’s most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-30

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked, bayesian-inference, decision-making, heuristics, philosophy, psychology

• Facts Don’t – Stories Do

  I want to share the great article on LSE by Anna Toomey on “Facts Don’t Change Minds – Social Networks, Group Dialogue, and Stories Do”, based upon the author’s article Why facts don’t change minds: Insights from cognitive science for the improved communication of conservation research, published in Biological Conservation. It is counterintuitive (and not a…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-08

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Information Technology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, education, philosophy, Science, Sustainability

• 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…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

  #Sensemaking, AI, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, bayes-theorem, bayesian-inference, machine-learning, philosophy, statistics

• 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…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-08

  #Sensemaking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, education, learning, mental-health, philosophy, psychology

• Representation of priors and decisions

  The PLOS article by Marshall, Ruesseler, Hunt, O’Reilly “representation of priors and decisions in the human parietal cortex” discusses how both humans and animals actively sample the environment using their sensory organs, far from being passive recipients of sensory information. In rodents, active sampling processes include whisking and sniffing; in primates, the most important and…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, articles, memory, philosophy, Science