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Canadian site encouraging aiding and abetting cooperation towards desired changes at a community level.

In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding. Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking. Bayesian reasoning offers a way to improve on the native human reasoning style. Reasoning naively, we tend not to seek alternative explanations, and sometimes underrate the influence of prior probabilities in Bayes' theorem. Less Wrong users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything.

Some of the biggest changes sweeping the technology world today are new forms of network and computer-enabled cooperation. It was easy enough to see this pattern in open source software development or Wikipedia, a bit more challenging to see how it powered Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon, but it gets really interesting when you are able to see how new kinds of man-machine symbiosis and networked cooperation are at the heart of projects like the Google self-driving car, the reinvention of retail by Apple and Square, transportation services from RelayRides to Uber, and even in new models for networked government.

Public, private, and nonprofit institutions and organizations often work together in a coalition (an organization of organizations working together for a common purpose) with communities, neighborhoods, and constituencies. In this paper, coalition is the term used for a multiorganizational process that is also called a partnership or a collaborative (state-of-the-art resources on coalition building are available at www.ahecpartners.org).  Usually, coalition strategies for working together are described as networking, coordinating, cooperating, or collaborating, although the use of these terms is often confusing.  This paper suggests definitions of these four strategies used by coalitions to help clarify the most appropriate use of each in particular settings.  Although the examples that follow the definitions are based in health care, the four strategies are utilized in addressing a wide variety of issues.

Innate human propensities for cooperation with strangers, shaped during the Pleistocene in response to rapidly changing environments, could have provided highly adaptive social instincts that more recently coevolved with cultural institutions; although the biological capacity for primate sociality evolved genetically, the authors propose that channeling of tribal instincts via symbol systems has involved a cultural transmission and selection that continues the evolution of cooperative human capacities at a cultural rather than genetic level - and pace.