Category: #Wicked
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Exploration and Exploitation & Coping Strategy
“Transition Dynamics Between Exploration and Exploitation Predicts Individual Differences in Coping Strategy” Adaptive decision-making requires balancing exploitation of known rewarding options with exploration of uncertain alternatives, a dilemma also known as the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. While this framework has been widely studied in reinforcement learning research, its relevance to coping, defined as the cognitive and behavioral…
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Vertalen – Transmigratie
DE KUNST VAN HET VERTALEN In de wondere wereld van de verbale transmigratie kunnen we drie kwaden onderscheiden. De eerste en minste van de drie bestaat uit aperte fouten, te wijten aan onwetendheid of foute kennis. Dit is slechts menselijke zwakte en derhalve pardonnabel. De volgende stap naar de Hel wordt gezet door de vertaler…
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Switching, fast and slow
“Switching, fast and slow: Deciphering the dynamics of memory search, its brain connectivity patterns, and its role in creativity “ Creative ideas emerge from the process of searching and combining concepts in memory, involving both associative and controlled mechanisms. How these processes unfold during memory search and relate to creativity remains unclear. We explored the neurocognitive…
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Why collective behavioursself-organize to criticality
“Why collective behaviours self-organize to criticality: a primer on information-theoretic and thermodynamic utility measures” Collective behaviours are frequently observed to self‑organize to criticality. Existing proposals to explain these phenomena are fragmented across disciplines and only partially answer the question. This primer compares the underlying, intrinsic, utilities that may explain the self‑organization of collective behaviours near…
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The ‘made-up mind’.
“The ‘made-up mind’. Deriving new hypotheses on delusions from general psychological models of belief maintenance” Highlights Contemporary definitions of delusions highlight their resistance to conflicting evidence as the core feature, but there has been little progress in understanding why even explicit confrontation with contradicting evidence seldom leads to belief revision. This review aims to generate…
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Nature on the balance sheet …
“Putting nature on the balance sheet: how to account for the ecological costs of our actions” Economists should consider forests and wetlands as well as factories and farms. A book review of “On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us“, Partha Dasgupta (2025) On Natural Capital recaps the roaring economic advances of the past 75…
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Fast, slow, & metacognitive
“Fast, slow, and metacognitive thinking in AI” Inspired by the ”thinking fast and slow” cognitive theory of human decision making, we propose a multi-agent cognitive architecture (SOFAI) that is based on ”fast”/”slow” solvers and a metacognitive module. We then present experimental results on the behavior of an instance of this architecture for AI systems that…
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From Soundwaves to Brainwaves: “Music”
“From Soundwaves to Brainwaves: The Transformative Power of Music” The human brain physically embodies rhythmic sound in a remarkablesymphony that has the power to heal. People resonate to music. They respond positively in ways that suggest that the rhythms of the brain and body, like neurons, breathing, or cardiac rhythms, are engaged when you listen…
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Climate Change, A Geoscience Perspective
Climate Change, A Geoscience Perspective This open access book on climate change assesses past climatic change from a geoscience perspective and directly and effectively addresses common misconceptions on climate and climate change. A geoscience perspective on the multiple causes, rates, and consequences of climate change is essential context to assess modern climate change and our…
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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…
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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…
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Functional Trade-offs in Cognition
“Basic Functional Trade-offs in Cognition: An Integrative Framework” by Marco Del Giudice and Bernard J. Crespi, 2018. Trade-offs between advantageous but conflicting properties (e.g., speed vs. accuracy) are ubiquitous in cognition, but the relevant literature is conceptually fragmented, scattered across disciplines, and has not been organized in a coherent framework. This paper takes an initial step toward a general…
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nature was much more inventive
Space scientist Edward Stone served as project scientist for NASA’s Voyager missions for 50 years, as well as playing a major role in many other missions, acting as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and running his own lab at Caltech. Stone has died, aged 88. Here are some remarkable quotes from “Celebrating Voyager’s 40…
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On principles of emergent organization
Adam Rupe, James P. Crutchfield published “On principles of emergent organization“: After more than a century of concerted effort, physics still lacks basic principles of spontaneous self-organization. To appreciate why, we first state the problem, outline historical approaches, and survey the present state of the physics of self-organization. This frames the particular challenges arising from mathematical intractability and…
