Literacy of Cooperation

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.

Why Plans Fail or It's Your Own Darned Fault I breezed through Jim Benson's short and informative Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias, Decision Making, and Your Business.  As you can see from the subtitle, it isn't about blaming someone else for why plans fail.  It's about helping us see how our own thinking gets us in this mess. I have seen many discussions of cognitive biases in popular writing (Gladwell, the Heaths, etc), but those books tend to be much more discursive.  I like that Benson has decided to keep the discussion closely limited to cognitive biases connected to planning and managing knowledge work.  And that he is drawing from his own experience and that of his client engagements.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics -- exploring the irrational ways we make decisions about risk. 

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 book by Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman which summarizes research that he conducted over decades, often in collaboration with Amos Tversky.[1][2] It covers all three phases of his career: his early days working on cognitive bias, his work on prospect theory, and his later work on happiness.

Associations often say that all staffers are responsible for great customer service, but what about sales? No? Too late-the revolution within the "new sales economy" is already hitting associations, says bestselling author Dan Pink. The question is, what will we do about it?

rec. by Jack Vinson

"@WardCunningham suggests the feedback loop is faster with a publish-and-review strategy, rather than a review-and-publish strategy."

scientists discovered that the young plants recognize their siblings - other plants grown from the seeds of the same momma plant - using chemical cues given off during root growth. 

 how mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of trees, facilitating the sharing of resources.  new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree's roots from another.

Symbiosis, the "living together of differently named organisms" is far more important in the evolution of life and the functioning of organisms and ecologies than the competition-centric views of Darwin's early defenders asserted, and may be the key driving force in the evolution of life on earth.

Inquiry education (sometimes known as the inquiry method) is a student-centered method of education focused on asking questions. Students are encouraged to ask questions which are meaningful to them, and which do not necessarily have easy answers; teachers are encouraged to avoid giving answers when this is possible, and in any case to avoid giving direct answers in favor of asking more questions. The method was advocated by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

In ecology, commensalism is a class of relationship between two organisms where one organism benefits without affecting the other. It compares with mutualism, in which both organisms benefit, and parasitism, when one benefits while the other is harmed.