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David McGavock

The Evolution of Cooperation* - 1 views

  • To find a good strategy to use in such situations, I invited experts in game theory to submit programs for a computer Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament – much like a computer chess tournament.
  • the winner was the simplest of all candidates sub- mitted. This was a strategy of simple reciprocity which cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move. Using an American colloquial phrase, this strategy was named Tit for Tat.
  • face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can recognize and adapt to your pattern of action.
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    • David McGavock
       
      These conditions are core.
  • What made this mutual restraint possible was the static nature of trench warfare, where the same small units faced each other for extended periods of time. The soldiers of these opposing small units actually violated orders from their own high commands in order to achieve tacit cooperation with each other
  • data from these tournaments reveals four properties which tend to make a strategy successful: avoidance of unnecessary con- flict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the
  • the individuals involved do not have to be rational: The evolutionary process allows successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. Nor do they have to exchange messages or commit- ments: They do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: The use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not needed: Successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: Cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing
  • An indefinite number of interactions, therefore, is a condition under which cooperation can emerge
    • David McGavock
       
      This condition is especially important in the case of egoists. Relationship over time.
  • So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: The strategy cooperates on the first move, and discriminates between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not
    • David McGavock
       
      The check for reciprocation is a bit of evidence that the other side knows the value of the move of cooperation; that they won't be abandoned.
  • Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other
  • It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled-for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay.
    • David McGavock
       
      Immediate feedback appears to be important in many domains.
  • The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship.
  • Waiting for probes to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble.
    • David McGavock
       
      I have found that testing limits is a factor in working with children and adults. We are alert to the boundaries.
  • For this reason, the only arms control agreements which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate
  • Therefore, the advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: Don’t be envious, don’t be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don’t be too clever.
  • We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation
    • David McGavock
       
      Herein lies another key... that we have a cooperative (win-win) attitude and understanding of the "game". We see our survival as tied with not exclusive of the fate of the "other".
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    We are used to thinkingabout competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such asfootball or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range ofsituations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutualdefection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but ineliciting their cooperation
David McGavock

Mission for week two: Evolution of cooperation questions (ACTION REQUESTED) | Social Me... - 0 views

  • Pavel's
  • a lot of smart people across the region also begin to identify themselves with one of the sides, inevitably getting involved in arguments they don't want to be part of, raising hostility towards each other. 
  • ake control over our pre-wired responses.
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  • awareness (such as meditation)
  • help people learn how to identify and de-identify with various groups, by allowing them to experience the variety of social contexts.
  • Roland's
  • not only be critical thinking but systems thinking
  • help people become more self-dependent.
  • experiences are organized for children from the early age
  • raise the level of critical thinking
  • Education is liberating.
  • The notion of indirect reciprocity could be important here: doing things for those groups without expecting to get a return, but setting an example
  • reject the notion of tribes or of people being permanently and essentially bad and extremist, and to be welcoming and kind
  • Bodil's
  • I can work with other communities which are open, tolerant and welcoming.
  • Better distribution of resources.
  • reputation and trust
  • know how to build trust and create cooperation, we should know something about breaking bad patterns
  • knowledge about social dilemmas
  • “growth mindset”
  • David's
  • separating fiction from fact,
  • interaction in order to reveal the "true" characteristics of inform
  • physical security, enough to eat, a place to sleep, freedom from threat.
  • John's
  • little can be done at the level of the individual, other than being aware that our appreciation of ideas, and our tendency to engage in counterproductive behavior may be due to forces other than the ideas themselves.
  • becoming aware of our own weaknesses with regard to absorbing new information
  • it is possible to gather individuals into a super organism that is less vulnerable to being victimized by false or misleading information,
  • we need access to information and skill in critical thinking
  • Hermano's
  • My political answer is internationalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalism_(politics).
  • High level of material, political, physical, psychological etc personal independance
  • My cultural answer is to displace the ubiquitous narrative of competition by this narrative of cooperative
  • traces of trustworthiness online,
  • tactical tool is the internet.
  • empowers the common man to act at multiple levels, assuming responsibility for all the nested groups to which he would belong.
  • Inger's
  •  Fighting discrimination
  • stereotypes
  • negative stereotypes
  • experience the feeling of discrimination in order to fight it.
  • Discrimination starts with stereotypes that turn into prejudice, and the individual becomes a member of a group that is dehmanised and stripped of human qualities.
  • Elena's
  • Meditation skills
  • life satisfaction
  • transferring an ultimate level of governance and common legislation to structures above nation states
  • Practices of integration of spirit-mind-body
  • value of own life and personal voe not to destroy self
  • Calisa's
  • only possible escape route is to get a glimpse of life on the outside, to see that there are different ways to live one's life, to understand that there are choices.
  • only through the glimpse can the child even begin to contemplate the notion of breaking the "pre-wiring"
  • glimpse does not guarantee escape
  •  shine your light brightly:
  • If there are children in your life, invest in them
  • Sahil's
  • Stay informed about the big, complex world-shaping issues
  • Use technology to express yourself beyond your home and workplace
  • same forces producing the 'dark' forms of social cooperation mentioned above - compliance, conformance, solidarity - are perhaps the same forces behind 'good' cooperation.
  • continually trying to re-imagine our 'imagined communities'
  • the more connected we are, the more we'll be forced to recognize others' interests as our own.
  • might include: cultural traits and norms based on morality (i.e. religion), integration of market economies, promoting greater free-flow of people/ideas, promoting denser urban centers, open access to information, monogamy??, anti-nepotism norms, cooperative higher institutions (with ability to manage laws/reputations/punishment).
  • Luis'
  •  We are “pre-wired” to cooperate within our tribe
  • impact of group identity
  • “manifold and profound”
  • make group identity salient
  • redefining the boundaries of the group to include more people is the best opportunity for change
  • Once you include everyone in the group, you find ways to encourage interactions among both sub-groups,
  • narcos manage to stay loyal and cooperate within their cartel when competing against other cartels with equally loyal members.
  • discourage cooperation inside the cartel groups
  • Assurance game, because one narco will only fight if the other fights, and will defect if the other defects
  • The key issue in the Assurance Game is whether we can trust each other.
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    Answers from all co-learners
Charles van der Haegen

BoardGameGeek | Gaming Unplugged Since 2000 - 0 views

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    Co-learner Gregor McNish poqsted on the MindAmp 3 discussion board about Cooperation theory and social dilemmas the following comment: Board games As mentioned in the live session, I find some interesting examples of exploring these tensions in modern boardgames. A strong element of the fun for me in playing these games is exploring the system presented by each game. In the context of our enquiry, I think that games can be a good (and safe) way of practically exploring the decision spaces of different cooperative structures. There are pure cooperative games, where the gamers are working together against the game. "Pandemic" is an example; gamers are trying to save the world from disease. Each person has a special power, the fun comes from working out as a group how to use everyone's powers to group advantage on each turn. Probably more interesting for our purposes are games whose principal mechanic is "negotiation". Negotiating deals, or forming temporary alliances is an important part of play. It's important in these games to have a sense of the relative benefit people are gaining from deals; it's fine to be gaining less than your trading partner, if you end up gaining more across all your trades, etc. There's lots of scope for metagaming -- you help me this time because I helped you last time, or will next time, etc. Whether or not deals are binding depends on the game, which leads to interesting tensions. Some games even allow group wins. "Dune" is a good example of this. "Intrige" is a very pure example, but apparently has been the cause of friendship break ups. "Diplomacy" would be a classic example. One I've always wanted to try is "Republic of Rome"; players are Senators, who must cooperate to defend Rome from the barbarian hordes, but who are otherwise trying to improve their own position relative to each other. Another interesting example people may have come across is "Werewolf" (also called "Mafia"). In a group (usually 9-15 or so), a couple of p
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    A great contribution of Gregor McNish in MindAmp 3 as a comment to section Cooperation theory & social dilemmas
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    Werewolf is a terrific game, especially because of the wild performance aspects. Coop games: I recommend Pandemic.
David McGavock

Shame and honour drive cooperation - 0 views

  • Shame is a traditional deterrent from asocial behaviour and is employed when offenders are singled out for public scorn.
  • Modern democratic societies have moved away from including the public in the punishment, although in some cases (e.g. drunk driving licence plates) the state still sanctions shame [1].
  • shame as well as honour could become more prevalent as digital technology
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  • We designed this public goods experiment to isolate the effects of being shamed or honoured, with no monetary consequences to either experience, and test whether the expectation of negative or positive reputational information enforces social behaviour.
    • David McGavock
       
      Point of the study
  • If players know that only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, will they cooperate more as a group?
  • In games that offer players anonymity, uncooperative behaviour is more prevalent [7] while the opposite is true of games in which players know that each of their decisions will be linked to their real identities [8–10]
  • We hypothesized that the threat of shame or the prospect of honour would lead to increased public contributions.
  • expected that shame might be more effective than honour
  • n contrast to our expectations, we found no significant differences in group contributions over the first 10 rounds between the shame and honour treatments.
  • confirming that, even when only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, players cooperate more as a group
  • Our results show that a promise to single out free-riding individuals for public scrutiny can lead to greater cooperation from the whole group, as can singling out the most generous individuals.
  • Group cooperation in the shame treatment significantly declined following round 10 (paired t-test between 10th and 12th round, t = 3.67, p = 0.005), corroborating our finding that the threat of being singled out as a free rider had been driving cooperation.
  • Cues of being watched enhance cooperation [11] and when humans lived in small groups, it was easy to observe individual behaviour.
  • language, replaced direct observation
  • the absence of shaming by the state does not preclude the absence of shame altogether in society, especially as social media increases the frequency, speed and inclusiveness of communication.
  • The Internet increasingly creates a global town square where controls are harder to implement and enforce, gossip travels fast, and where shame as well as honour therefore might experience resurgence.
  • Transparency also enhances cooperation [8–10] but can be costly to provide and its use can be limited. Transparency requires time evaluating and determining a satisfactory performance.
  • difficult in our current era, where human attention, not information, is a scarce resource [15].
    • David McGavock
       
      Interesting distinction; that attention is in shorter supply than information.
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    Full description of study by Jennifer Jacquet
David McGavock

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION | Edge.org - 0 views

  • how culture drove human evolution
  • cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.
  • but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.
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  • or a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status
  • Chimps, other primates, have dominant status.
  • social status
  • second kind of status. We call this status prestige.
  • from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area,
  • From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige
  • give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back
  • you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future
  • some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started?
  • may have started early
  • another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago.
  • here's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
  • Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago
  • 400,000 years ago
  • there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees
  • In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of Australopithecus.
  • we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model
  • for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model.
  • trying out different technique
  • take advantage of the variation
  • the question is, how did we become such long distance runners?
  • only humans have it
  • humans who don't know how to track animals, can't run them down
  • idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
  • Most recently I've been also thinking about the evolution of societal complexity.
  • when societies begin to get big and complex
  • large-scale cooperation
  • What are the causal processes that bring these things about?
  • There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spore knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques
  • I've worked in a couple of different areas on this, and one is religion.
  • there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony
  • they've been shaped in ways that galvanize cooperation in larger groups
  • In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral.
  • but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing.
  • if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks,
  • more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
  • ritual plays a role in this
  • rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith
  • elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods
  • high-moralizing gods will often require rituals of this kind
  • Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission;
  • People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite
  • We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.
  • There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market. Markets require a great deal of trust
  • In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
  • We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language
  • , it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.
  • what we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.
  • you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.
  • One possible exception to that is bird song.
  • One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.
  • looking at a case study in Tasmania.
  • You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn
  • You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member
  • study by Rob Boyd and Michelle Kline
  • larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other,
  • more in contact, you have fancier tools, and that seems to hold up.
  • rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies
  • As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.
  • An important thing to remember is that there's always an incentive to hide your information.
  • Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group.
  • a norm of information sharing is a really good norm to have
  • I've done a lot of work on marriage systems with the evolution of monogamy.
  • Eighty-five percent of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife
  • pushes us towards polygyny
  • But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place?
  • European Marriage Pattern,
  • Athens legislates the first rules about monogamous marriage
  • people are ready to moralize it,
  • it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition. We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks
  • If I talk about normative monogamy as being successful, I mean that it spread,
  • especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny
  • to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course
  • Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution. 
  • Culture is part of our biology.
  • We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains.
  • Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven,
  • A good example of this is the placebos. Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance. Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs.
  • One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project.
  • at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.
  • behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent
  • The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.
  • I was thinking that the Machiguenga would be a good test of this
  • I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject?
  • they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.
  • over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games
  • we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.
  • able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration.
  • there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers.
  • measured market integration much more carefully
  • subsequent project
  • large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion.
  • did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.
  • Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game.
  • This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers
  • one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game
  • three measures of fairness
  • size of the community predicts willingness to punish
  • suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment.
  • It could be some kind of reputational mechanism
  • There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.
  • In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.
  • This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative.
  • but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances
  • these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers
  • large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.
  • if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your family.
  • A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin
  • In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.
  • Lately we've been focused on the effects of religion
  • adherence to a world religion matters
  • People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger
  • Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.
  • political scientists call it the rule of law
  • those rules apply independently of the identities
  • If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.
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    [JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.
David McGavock

Cooperative Learning Center - 0 views

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    "What is Cooperative Learning? Cooperative Learning is a relationship in a group of students that requires positive interdependence (a sense of sink or swim together), individual accountability (each of us has to contribute and learn), interpersonal skills (communication, trust, leadership, decision making, and conflict resolution), face-to-face promotive interaction, and processing (reflecting on how well the team is functioning and how to function even better)."
David McGavock

In a cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating - page 1 - 0 views

  • In a hard-knuckled, free-market economy built on competition, the most successful Internet companies put a high stake in another value: cooperation.
  • Friendly competition is the explanation often given for the unique success of Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Google, Twitter and Facebook.
  • Across the Internet industry, the most successful organizations compete by cooperating.
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  • Search giant Google dedicates a team of engineers to help users "move their data in and out of Google products," as the company puts it, free of charge and in a format that can be easily uploaded to competitors' Web sites.
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    In a hard-knuckled, free-market economy built on competition, the most successful Internet companies put a high stake in another value: cooperation.
Charles van der Haegen

Marco Verweij Trust and social capital in Cutural Theory ( and social media) - 0 views

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    I have already introduced Cultural Theory in the SMC MindAmp. I called it Theory of Sodcio-Culural Viability. Here's an indication of its reach: Why do well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail? How can effective and efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems be found? By making sure no voices are excluded. Contrary to the ideas on which current social thinking is based, new research has lead to new theory explaining social systems, showing how deliberative quality is key to sustainable policy-making and implementation. It shows that endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four mutually opposed organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking. They always seem clumsy compared to any of the 4 voices' elegant solutions. Yet being broadly acceptable to all they are sustainable and implementable A new way to look at pluralism in organizations, institutions, policy-making, democracy, technology, geo-politics and many other social fields is offered to us by multidisciplinary research and practice by leading political scientists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, sociologists, geographers, engineers, policy-makers, and other leaders in society. Trust and Social capital are key ingredients for learning and for social media to strive. Here's what the author says: In this article, I trace the contributions that the cultural theory developed by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, Aaron Wildavsky and others can make to the debate on social capital. First, I sketch the various revisions of Putnam's social capital-thesis that have been proposed since the publication of Making Democracy Work. I note that these revisions are illuminating in and of th
Charles van der Haegen

TVO.ORG | Video | The Agenda - Tim Wu: Information Empires - 0 views

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    transcript of my blog Tim Wu author of Master Swtch, interviewed http://ow.ly/5G0ry . No doubt a must read book, and if you doubt, view this video. The one thing that bothers me in Tim Wu's speech is his deep belief that the two things that will NOT change are economics and human nature … Food for thought, questions for deep dialogue and inquiry. I belief we can come up with solutions to these two "invariables", who seem more "metaphores" or "myths" than inescapable fatalities. Should these deep beliefs remain however , inconsciously hidden in our minds, they might prevent us to look at things from other, more hopefull underlying beliefs systems. New ways of looking at things bring with them other possibilities for the future of the World. Let's hope we can achieve a stage of mental capacity so that we allow a World to emerge without Wars all-over, without undignified living conditions for the majority of Humans, without unequality all-over even in so called advanced economies, without destruction of nature. Let's aim instead on Freedom and Self-Determination for all, a belief in Homan endowment and possibility, a change in mental capacity, a return to conditions for our Systems Intelligenge to express itself. This might allow us all to raise our consciousness and to cooperate collectively to solving the intractable problems our ongoing mental models have created.
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    I believe this interview says a lot about what might happen if the proponents of open and free social media and internet loose their battle. It also shows that this battle is broader, is it inescapable that human nature and economic paradigms are invariable? Are we doomed to see unchanged economic pursuits (meaning money and concentration of wealth) combine with unchanged human nature (incessant and exclusive pursuit of more wealth and power). I believe not, this is the whole point of new paradigms for cooperation combined with the effects of Mind Amplification and social media
David McGavock

Values, Vision, Mission & Strategy - Mind & Life Institute - 0 views

  • To guide us in our Mission, Vision and Strategy, the Mind & Life Institute has adopted a set of core values: Love, Mindfulness and Compassion Trust and Integrity Teamwork and Collaboration Impeccability and Continuous Improvement Open Communication and Transparency
  • Vision The Mind & Life Institute sees the potential of a world that fully understands the critical importance of training the mind in ways that reduce individual and societal suffering and promote individual and planetary peace, health, well-being and cooperation. Moreover, we envision a world where everyone has access to age-appropriate and culturally appropriate mental and emotional fitness practices.
  • we implement a practical, results-oriented Mission and Strategy based on scientific research to understand how we, as humans, can train our minds
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  • promote and support rigorous, multi-disciplinary scientific investigation of the mind
  • dissemination of practices that cultivate the mental qualities of attention, emotional balance, kindness, compassion, confidence and happiness
  • rooted in an integrated way of knowing that combines the first and second person direct experience of contemplative practice with a modern scientific third person inquiry.
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    "The Mind & Life Institute is a non-profit organization that seeks to understand the human mind and the benefits of contemplative practices through an integrated mode of knowing that combines first person knowledge from the world's contemplative traditions with methods and findings from contemporary scientific inquiry. Ultimately, our goal is to relieve human suffering and advance well-being."
David McGavock

As Above, So Below: The Worldview of Lynn Margulis | Reality Sandwich - 2 views

  • This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena -- the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational "loops" that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.
  • Bacteria were here first and are with us still, comprising a major part of the biosphere.  They are unseen with the naked eye, they lack nuclei (for this reason, they are called prokaryotes -- "pro" = before,  "karyon" = nucleus). Their forms were legion and their metabolisms were (and continue to be) strange.
  • What is known is that the spirochete didn't digest the thermoplasmid and the thermoplasmid did not digest the spirochete.  As Margulis was fond of saying, "1 + 1 = 1."  There was a union of the two, resulting in an entirely new being.  They were inseparable, literally.  The thermoplasmid had a rotor now, and the spirochete had a "head".
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  • Margulis, inspired by the work of little-known biologists, revealed and proved these mergers for us.  At first, her worked was rejected and scoffed at.  It did not fit the still-dominant neo-Darwinian paradigm that tells us all evolutionary novelty comes from natural selection acting on genes and the gradual accumulation of random genetic mutation.  But eventually these symbioses were accepted because they could not be ignored
  • our physical selves are universes composed of the movemenst, biological agreements, and interactions of these beings.
  • "Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves..." Margulis once stated, with her colleague Ricardo Guerrero.
  • Indeed, symbiogenesis has been observed in the lab.  An amoeba population, accidentally infected with bacteria was observed over long periods of time, and soon enough, the infecting bacteria could not be removed from the infected amoeba without killing the organism. 
  • Gaia is the work of the relational loops of push and pull between bacteria, other organisms, and the environment
  • But Lovelock came up with an understandable and accesible metaphor in the form of a computer program called Daisyworld.  Daisyworld is not the "proof" of Gaia: Lovelock and his colleague Andrew Watson devised the program to see if living and environmental factors could theoretically interact without intention. 
  • After she found James Lovelock, they worked on making those processes known.  Their collaboration resulted in Gaia Theory, which was a disciplinary symbiosis -- the theoretical expression of Margulis's interdisciplinary life.
  • Gaia processes are real and observable (and sometimes referred to as "biogeochemistry", a term more acceptable to mainstream science).  Furthermore, the five kingdoms (bacteria, protoctists, fungi, plants, animals) of life are all touched by symbiosis
  • "Gaia," Margulis's former student Greg Hinkle said, "is just symbiosis as seen from space."
  • All animals have symbiotic partners in their guts.  Remove these symbionts and the animals die.
  • Many neo-Darwinist concerns circled nervously around words like "Gaia" and "cooperation" (which Margulis did not like to use).  They were, perhaps rightly, concerned that these terms were ripe for religious appropriation.  But Margulis herself was outspoken against such mishandling of her research. 
    • David McGavock
       
      Cooperation - not God - meets Gaia
  • Along with the many detailed examples of bacterial mergers at varying levels of cellular complexity, the world revealed by Acquiring Genomes is also a world of mating between distinct phyla
  • What is definite is that the merging of beings is key, and symbiogenesis offers a clearly observable alternative to the consistent but woefully incomplete neo-Darwinian paradigm.
  • David Bohm, who said
  • "Science is the search for truth...whether we like it or not."
  • Microcosmos show us a bacterial view of the world.  Bacteria exchange their genes laterally.  This means they don't pass their genomic information only when they reproduce (though this can happen), but also  through their simple existence.
  • it's much more complex than that -- there is something "in it" for every symbiont,
  • "Gaia is not merely an organism."  The Earth is beyond stale conception.  It is more magnificent and active than we can imagine.  Gaia is object and process.
  • this complexity is impossible to incorporate in a linear and reductive understanding.
    • David McGavock
       
      This is a question that I often wonder - how different thinkers (using different modes of understanding) come to different conclusions.  What is it that separates the linear (reductive) thinker from the holistic (systemic) thinker?
  • If Gaia is conscious, it possesses a consciousness of a different magnitude, probably of a different order all together.
  • To encompass complex systems with our thinking, we must imagine a model that is less like "cause-effect" more like "being-manifestation."  That is, multiple layers and numerous agents of forces unconsciously conspire together, and their conspiring is so intermingled, that it is simultaneously cause and effect, and thus beyond both. 
  • Dawkins, who claims to be an atheist, relies on a host of selfish angels within us and the possibility for meme-salvation to justify his theory.  He substantiates his magical worldview on a meager past of scientific work.
  • Perhaps as we -- in the newly and deeply connected world of the internet, social profiles, and globalization -- witness the dissolution of the cult of isolated individuality and embark on understanding a clearer and more nuanced view of individuality, so to will we ready ourselves for a clearer view of evolution and life.
    • David McGavock
       
      This is a good question; how does this connected world reframe our conception of ourselves as individuals? Can we, at once, become humbled while we contribute? Can we imagine ourselves as less important while we excel in our pursuits?
  • Now that Margulis has died, it remains our choice to catch up with what she and her life's work have set in motion.  To do so, we must bring together the many fields of knowledge she embodied.  Biologists must talk to physicists, virologists must talk to geologists, cosmologists must talk to microbiologists, and scientists musty talk to non-scientists.  This motion of meeting and exchanging ideas, if we act with it, will evolve our thinking.
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    " Now that Margulis has died, it remains our choice to catch up with what she and her life's work have set in motion.  To do so, we must bring together the many fields of knowledge she embodied.  Biologists must talk to physicists, virologists must talk to geologists, cosmologists must talk to microbiologists, and scientists musty talk to non-scientists.  This motion of meeting and exchanging ideas, if we act with it, will evolve our thinking. "
David McGavock

Brainstorming With Howard Rheingold - WikiBrains blog - 1 views

  • reminding us that the tools we have available to us, for the most part free (given internet access), are fantastic compared to what we had in the early 1990s -a search engine like Google was the stuff of dreams ‘back then.’ The technological progress is happening so fast that many people may not know how to make use of all these great tools that are becoming available.
  • we are humans because we’re social learners
  • He defines the Personal Learning Networks (PLN) as “Not just a network of sources to learn from, but  a network that learns together.”
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  • He  is currently working on a free handbook for peer learners that is in part a collaboration and in part a collection of single-author works, which you can access at peeragogy.org 
David McGavock

Astonishing - Sagarika Bhatta - 0 views

    • David McGavock
       
      As Sagarika Bhatta said in the hangout, this is a response to the effects of climate change rather than a response to decrease CO2 emissions. The traditional practices have an important role to play in the protection of agriculture in Nepal. The traditional practices are a protective factor for sustainability.
  • share urgency
  • expose and publicize
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  • critical mass who understands the urgency
  • exploration, discussion, documentation and promotion of the knowledge
    • David McGavock
       
      Find out what practices have sustained agriculture in the 3 climates within Nepal. Document it and disseminate it to the people and outside public.
  • Global movement
  • esearch and promotion of Knowledge that helps to combat climate change
  • helps in adaptation to climate change
  • indigenous Knowledge
  • plight of citizen
    • David McGavock
       
      This is another story: how do impacts and inappropriate technologies impact the local people.
  • documentation through research
  • community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change
    • David McGavock
       
      CBA - community based adaptation to climate chage
  • possibilities of rain water harvesting and other means of water storage
  • watershed degradation, urbanization, growing population are the major factor for water crisis here
  • making it part of national development policy
  • Nepal is vulnerable to rising global temperatures and has already been dealing with the impact of erratic rainfall, frequent droughts and floods, which have been affecting food security
    • David McGavock
       
      Problem Statement for Nepal.
  • experiment with a bottom-up approach using Local Adaptation Plans of Action, or LAPAs, in 10 districts across the country in 2010
    • David McGavock
       
      what has been tried.
  • ultimately question the status of food security
    • David McGavock
       
      The bottom line problem is that these impacts - problems above will threaten the security of the people of Nepal - food/shelter/quality of life..
  • promote the Indigenous Traditional knowledge (ITK) as Community Based Adaptation techniques that has been practiced by different indigenous community in Nepal in agriculture
    • David McGavock
       
      This is the goal. Promote traditional knowledge in support of the people of Nepal - their agriculture, livelihood and social welfare.
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    This is a good summary of the goals of the work of Sagarika Bhatta in support of Nepali agriculture. It describe the idea of community based adaptation (CBA) to climate change and the Indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK).
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David McGavock

A New Culture of Learning | Social Media Classroom - 3 views

  • A New Culture of Learning
  • what strikes me is the second part of the title Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.
  • I love seeing a child's imagination being captivated
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  • I am challenged by many who see social-media as the next project rather than a shift in the paradigm of existence.
  • I believe that dissatisfaction with the factory model of school, along with the growing number, ubiquity, and accessiblity, of tools (for connection, collaboration and creation) will tip the balance toward new models and cultures of learning.
  • I love to see teachers and student figuring out how to use technology together; asking questions, trying stuff, "messing around" as Brown would say.
  • The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
  • Can I just say that it is amazingly prescient and still relevant even a decade later? I'm interested in comparing it to his more recent book in discussion here.
  • Howard reponds with an idea on assignments (and the power of assignments). I found the questions (or in other courses the assignements) to really good at directing my brain. 1.Read the question 2. go to sleep 3. stare at the ceiling for hours 4. brush teeth 5. eurekaThese methods are also used in action learning and action research
  • I'm reading the book "the myth of management" (which is not related to learning), and I found out that finding "faults" is actually a dirty consultant trick, as it expands the window through which you can sell your solution. I hacked that idea and replaced solution with learning.
  •  The role of the instructor in balancing freedom and structure -- setting enough structure so that the unlimited freedom doesn't become vertiginous and overwhelming -- resonates with my experiences with Rheingold U. so far. Assignments seem to help, but they can't be too onerous.
  •  Very nice article comparing Thomas/JSB ideas to John Dewey's:
  •  http://charlestkerchner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DeweyThomas.pdf
  • Ernst - I am particularly interested in Action Research of the "plan, act, observe,reflect" variety where we never really arrive at conclusions but start again in a new cycle of teaching and learning.
  • that idea of teaching people to fail is very important - I notice that this is acceptable very often in business especially in the contexts of 'start-ups' but unacceptable in most schools. Here in Europe, the work of the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg gets a lot of attention - one of his motifs is learning to be wrong.
  • Knowing who to listen to in the 'noise' of all the information overload is important - I'm looking forward to our continuing review of how we all re-imagine that new culture of learning.
  • Can You, and if yes, How,  Change a system from within? This is one of the key issues of our time. Learning, PLN, Community support structures, activism, Social media, cooperation.. are all part of that... so it is realIy at the heart of our SMC Alumni topics. 
  • I would suggest, we should be dialoguing in depth about the question, and how to formulate it, before jumping to solutions...
  • The work of social and developmental psychologist, Carol Dweck can inform our discussion about failure,
  • Her book, Mindset, posits that some students have growth mindsets and some have fixed mindsets.
  • Ernst, I adore your description of problem-solving (especially the enumerated part). Downtime is essential for processing information and I agree, even subtle shifts within group dynamics can cause huge internal vistas to open up.
  • The idea of structuring for failure in itself is a whole new take on creative thinking.
  • Schools reward success.  That's our measurement system, our "leaderboard".  Some winners at school go on to run schools. Schools punish failure deeply, systematically.  Remember dunce caps? So taking failure as a good thing is, at the very least, weird and defamiliarizing!
  • Chapter Two of Thomas and Seely-Brown's book  is so short - just five pages - They conclude with the idea ....the point is to embrace what we don't know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. I wonder do the authors want us to reflect repeatedly on the contents of the chapter given its brevity.
  • is it certain type of people who fail, who are subsequently allowed to start again?
  • book's first chapter
  • Two key elements: network ("a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources", sounds like mobile + Web) and environments ("bounded and structural") (19).
  • what do you make of the examples they present?  What do they suggest about the theory they exemplify?
  • ohn Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of tinkering. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio -- the place where students work together trying to solve each others' problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in open criticism. Find out why this is a model for us all.  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2011/3147776.htm
  • The first chapter is a pretty rosy, and might I say westernized, view of the power of Internet access + play in learning.* It manages to enlighten and engage using a few choice narratives (I imagine we will get to the power of those at some point in the book, too) and sets us up for the rationale to come.
  • * I'm looking for some reaction with regards to that comment
  • based on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) concepts. (An aside, here's a truly wonderful post unpacking of the idea of WEIRD in social science research.)
  • I can only talk for myself but there are contradictions between what I think is best to do with the students I teach and what I actually do. This "living contradiction" is something I consider in my own studies - I noticed a Tweet last night from Howard: Online and blended learning is NOT about automating delivery of knowledge, but about encouraging peer learning, inquiry, discourse.
  • The sentence I liked most from Chapter One reads "One of the metaphors we adopt to describe this process is cultivation. A farmer for example takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of garden or farm. We see a new culture of learning as a similar kind of process - but cultivating minds instead of plants"
  • Everyone - you may have seen the piece below - if not please take 12 minutes to view it - it fits nicely with our current discussion
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    This is the first capture of the conversation from the thread "A New Culture of Learning". We'll see how this goes
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    I read the book almost cover to cover. It led me to think more about pushing what I've been doing closer to pure p2p. One of the co-learners in the latest Mindamp told me about "paragogy." That one is worth bookmarking.
David McGavock

The Technium: Amish Hackers - 1 views

  • comes up with a justification of how it fits into the Amish orientation. So he goes to his bishop with this proposal: "I like to try this out." Bishop says to Ivan, "Okay Ivan, do whatever you want with this. But you have to be ready to give it up, if we decide it is not helping you or hurting others." So Ivan acquires the tech and ramps it up, while his neighbors, family, and bishops watch intently. They weigh the benefits and drawbacks. What is it doing to the community?
  • 1) They are selective. They know how to say "no" and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt. 2) They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes. 3) They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world. 4) The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.
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    The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It's well known the strictest of them don't use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological. In fact on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers and surprisingly pro technology.
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    Kevin Kelly describes Amish Hackers and the way the Amish community sifts and selects appropriate technology. Talk about infotention! These people have focus on what a technology can do for them and how it will benefit the greater community.
David McGavock

Connected Learning Research Network - 0 views

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    "Dedicated to researching and reimagining learning for the 21st century This interdisciplinary research network is dedicated to understanding the opportunities and risks for learning afforded by today's changing media ecology, as well as building new learning environments that support effective learning and educational equity. Our work focuses on a model of connected learning -- learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational opportunity. "
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    Mimi studies youth culture and new media.
David McGavock

Reflections on the evolution of language - 1 views

  • Robin Dunbar’s Social Bonding Hypothesis
  • it has human language evolving out of communication concerning social relationships
  • He repeatedly emphasized that their communication was always about relationships.
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  • Language, I argue, evolved to fill the gap because it allows us to use the time we have available for social interaction more efficiently.
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    Reflections on the evolution of human language: Robin Dunbar's Social Bonding Hypothesis
David McGavock

You Media :: About Us - 0 views

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    YOUmedia is an innovative, 21st century teen learning space housed at the Chicago Public Library's downtown Harold Washington Library Center. YOUmedia was created to connect young adults, books, media, mentors, and institutions throughout the city of Chicago in one dynamic space designed to inspire collaboration and creativity. High school age teens engaging with YOUmedia can access thousands of books, over 100 laptop and desktop computers, and a variety of media creation tools and software, all of which allow them to stretch their imaginations and their digital media skills. By working both in teams and individually, teens have an opportunity to engage in projects that promote critical thinking, creativity, and skill-building.
David McGavock

Mastering Google Plus Circles | Social Media Sun - 0 views

  • So first, what the heck is a circle? Well, on Google+, it’s the way you can sort and organize your connections. It’s a bit like Facebook lists but a lot more dynamic. Basically, circles are the groups that you categorize your connections in.
  • “Should I circle people back?”
  • When they circle you, it means they are interested in following your content. You will not see their content unless you circle them back.
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  • circle back only people who post about things you are interested in or that relate to you.
  • you can just remove them.
  • How Do I Know Who Circles Me Back?
  • You can see if a specific person has circled you back by clicking on their profile. It will say “so-and-so has you in circles”You can also go to your main circles tab and click on “people who have added you”The final way is to use your Notifications to see who has added you to circles and who has added you back
  • I have “close” friends and family in a specific circle because I may share different types of content with them than with people I do not know intimately. I also have a circle for “prospects” or potential clients. If they become a client, I move them from “Prospects” to the “Clients” circle. I also create circles for some things not related to my business such as hobbies.
  • Can People See What Circles They Are In?No. They can only see that you have them in circles.
  • Do I Make My Posts Public?Making your posts public will increase the amount of people who will see your stream but be cautious of over sharing. You may overrun someone’s stream and they are likely to remove you for it.
  • you can go back and organize existing circles at any time you wish.
  • You can choose to post content to:PublicYour circlesExtended circlesAnd below those options you will see all of your circles listed by name
  • If you want to tag specific people in the post, you can do so using the +. For example, to tag me on Google+, you would type +LisaMason.
  • curate shared circles with other people.
  • you have the ability to share those groups with other friends
  • There are hundreds of shared circles already assembled for everything from Google employees, to social media , to photographers.
  • Curating circles specific to your niche is a networking strategy
  • finding pre-made circles for your favorite interests is the Shared Circles on G+ page
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    Google+ is actually a very powerful business tool when you know how to use it correctly. It can help you make connections with the right types of people and using it will also add a highly visible profile to Google search results for your personal brand and business. The key to success with Google+ lies in mastering your circles.
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