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Adam Bohannon

Collective Action in Action: Prosocial Behavior in and out of the Laboratory - 0 views

www.anthrosource.net.er.lib.ksu.edu/...j.1548-1433.2008.00024.x

altruism anthropology bolivia cooperation economics experimental tsimane

shared by Adam Bohannon on 28 Aug 08 - No Cached
  • Adam Bohannon on 28 Aug 08
     
    Experiments have become a popular method to study altruism and cooperation in laboratory and, more recently, in field settings. However, few studies have examined whether behavior in experiments tells us anything about behavior in the "real world." To investigate the external validity of several common experimental economics games, we compare game behavior with prosocial behavior among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. We find that food-sharing patterns, social visitation, beer production and consumption, labor participation, and contributions to a feast are not robustly correlated with levels of giving in the economics games. Payoff structure and socioecological context may be more important in predicting prosocial behavior in a wide variety of domains than stable personality traits. We argue that future experimental methods should be tailored to specific research questions, show reduced anonymity, and incorporate repeat measures under a variety of conditions to inform and redirect ethnographic study and build scientific theory.
Mike Wesch

The Law of Accelerating Returns - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/...art0134.html

k kurzweil singularity

shared by Mike Wesch on 08 May 08 - Cached
  • Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Is there not a point where humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up with it? With regard to unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would a thousand scientists, each a thousand times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating a thousand times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? One year would be like a millennium. What would they come up with?
  • Downloading the Human Brain
  • This, then, is the Singularity. The Singularity is technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Needless to say, the Singularity will transform all aspects of our lives, social, sexual, and economic,
  • Some prominent dates from this analysis include the following: We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10^16 cps) for $1,000 around the year 2023. We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10^16 cps) for one cent around the year 2037. We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10^26 cps) for $1,000 around the year 2049. We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10^26 cps) for one cent around the year 2059.
  • Well, for one thing, they would come up with technology to become even more intelligent (because their intelligence is no longer of fixed capacity).
  • A Thought Experiment
  • By 2030, going to a web site will mean entering a full immersion virtual reality environment.
  • Brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots will ultimately expand our memories a trillion fold, and otherwise vastly improve all of our sensory, pattern recognition, and cognitive abilities.
  • And in the same way that biological self-replication gone awry (i.e., cancer) results in biological destruction, a defect in the mechanism curtailing nanobot self-replication would endanger all physical entities, biological or otherwise.
  • A related question is "is death desirable?"
  • Plan to Stick Around
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