Group items tagged

Humans are incredibly cooperative, but why do people cooperate and how is cooperation maintained? A new research study by UCLA anthropology professor Robert Boyd and his colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico suggests cooperation in large groups is maintained by punishment.

Group members cooperate because they do not want to hurt their friends by not participating in group efforts, and also because they may want help in the future.

in a larger group, like a tribe, those mechanisms for maintaining cooperation are lost. All group members experience the benefits of the large group, even those members who stop cooperating and become "free-riders."

The way the media has reported on the issue falls into three groups: That the Cold War is back, That, given that the Cold War is over, the point of such outmoded intelligence operations is questionable, And that the Russian spy ring was spending its time aimlessly nosing around in think tanks and open meetings in an archaic and incompetent effort.

I've had the huge pleasure of giving a talk at TED Global in Oxford, about the lessons games can teach us about engagement and about learning itself. The full video will be online in due course; until then, here's a summary of a few central points.

How to explain this surprising if well-concealed comity? Some is due to the inevitable transformation that every party goes through when it moves from the opposition to the White House. Being in power tends to breed responsibility, just as being out of power breeds irresponsibility. Many Republicans during the Clinton years turned toward quasi-isolationism and opposed Clinton's policies -- even his hawkish policies -- simply because they hated Clinton. Many Democrats  showed great solidarity with Bush after September 11, 2001 -- a bipartisan moment that Bush helped squander. But they soon came to oppose almost everything Bush did, even policies traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, such as democracy promotion and nation-building, and even when, as in the case of the surge in Iraq, the most likely beneficiary of success would be a Democratic president.

The irony is that in some ways Obama has been fighting the war on terror at least as vigorously as his predecessor. He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He greatly increased drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan. Indeed, the Obama administration carried out more drone strikes in its first year than the Bush administration carried out in the previous five years combined, producing a record number of enemy casualties. Although the Obama administration may be more generous in providing legal defense to captured terrorists than the Bush administration, it also makes a greater effort to assassinate them, thus obviating the need for trials. 

The most absurd of the "un-Bush" policies of this administration has been its deliberate turn away from helping democrats against autocracies abroad.

That might seem like boilerplate language and nothing to get exorcised about, but as Massie notes, the British position on the Falklands is that there's really nothing to discuss. Britain wants and has the islands. The people who are living on the islands have no desire to be under Argentine rule. End of discussion. By encouraging the two countries to "sit down," Clinton was arguably legitimating the Argentine claim.

Hello Matt,Unfortunately, the United States has to take a position on this issue, and for two reasons, the latter being more important than the former:(1) American policy has always been to edge European influence out of the Americas, a la the Monroe Doctrine.(2) Many South American countries associate the United States with the United Kingdom; partly because of this and partly because they have their own grievances with Washington, they have started moves to form a new regional grouping which excludes America. This is not good for the United States.

As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.

Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, “We don’t really have any methodology as of yet” to process born-digital material. “We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks, and we’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines,” she added.

This is all well and good, but what happens when the situation changes?  Say you suddenly have a widely applicable technology that is halving in price and doubling in power every 18 months and continues to do so for decades.  There will be ramifications to this that the existing institutions will not be prepared to take full advantage of.

Walk with me through the following thought experiment: you have a society that faces the same situation for five hundred years.  There are no disruptions through war or political uprising, technology does not improve, and the environment remains, for the most part, the same.

We are still living in the very early days of the coupling of the microchip revolution with the internet revolution.