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Charles van der Haegen

Turing's Cathedral. Author George Dyson in Conversation with John Hollar - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 17 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 17 Oct 12
     
    "Publiée le 19 mars 2012 par ComputerHistory [Recorded: March 7, 2012] I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers. John von Neumann, 1946 The most powerful technology of the last century was not the atomic bomb, but software-and both were invented by the same folks. Even as they were inventing it, the original geniuses imagined almost everything software has become since. At long last, George Dyson delivers the untold story of software's creation. It is an amazing tale brilliantly deciphered. Kevin Kelly, cofounder of WIRED magazine, author of What Technology Wants Legendary historian George Dyson vividly re-creates the scenes of focused experimentation, incredible mathematical insight, and pure creative genius that gave us computers, digital television, modern genetics, models of stellar evolution-in other words, computer code. In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses-led by John von Neumann-gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results: the computer that they built also led directly to the hydrogen bomb. George Dyson has uncovered a wealth of new material about this project, and in bringing the story of these men and women and their ideas to life, he shows how the crucial advancements that dominated twentieth-century technology emerged from one computer in one laboratory, where the digital universe as we know it was born. Join John Hollar for a captivating conversation with Dyson about John von Neumann and the beginnings of the digital universe. This event is part of ou
  • Charles van der Haegen on 17 Oct 12
     
    view this
Charles van der Haegen

Ribbonfarm and Venkatesh Rao - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/about

unusual perspectives refactored perception philosophy sociology business innovation technology

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11
     
    "My name is Venkatesh Rao (I go by 'Venkat') and I started writing the ribbonfarm blog in 2007. Since March, 2011, it has been my base for full-time writing, independent research, consulting and other random activities. I am also the author of a book on the interplay of timing and decision-making, Tempo and write an email newsletter called Be Slightly Evil. Between 1997 and 2011, I pursued a traditional research/entrepreneurial career (a PhD, a postdoc, a startup, and an industrial R&D lab where among other things, I founded trailmeme.com as Entrenrepeur-in-Residence). Ribbonfarm is a blog about looking at things from unusual perspectives (that's the "refactored perception" bit). The topics range from philosophy, art and sociology to business, innovation and technology. Unlike blogs that serve as content marketing channels for other products and services, Ribbonfarm is the main act here, and I try to organize the rest of my life and work around it.
  • Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11
     
    I am looking for more people like this , looking at things from unusual perspectives (that's the "refactored perception" bit). The topics range from philosophy, art and sociology to business, innovation and technology. If you can indicate them to me, please do...
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 1 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      New theme
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Key to the Mindamp group is finding ways to create this environment
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      balance - a good idea
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Applied Serendipity at GE - "having fun?"
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Perhaps an example of embodied cognition. Our senses know something our brains don't.
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity

filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
  • If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusions
  • The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
  • He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
  • They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
  • A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
  • The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
  • Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
  • It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
  • knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
  • If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
  • SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
  • Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusion?
  • - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
  • “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
  • Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
  • We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
  • I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
  • There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      interesting view of curation
  • Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
  • US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
  • What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
  • on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
  • The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
  • I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
  • Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
  • The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
  • he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
  • vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
  • The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
David McGavock

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...306868

Nicholas Carr Scientific Management Information distracted

shared by David McGavock on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
  • I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
  • For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
  • As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
  • The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
  • “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      Unlikely. He hasn't lost the ability but the desire.
  • recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
  • new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s
  • “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
  • the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
  • even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
  • Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”
  • In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
  • The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
  • The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
  • The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”
  • In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
  • their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
  • there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
  • The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I find this the most compelling argument. "Business" has an interest in selling things. Moving us faster, increasing our "seeking" instinct is one of the keys to this consumption frenzy. The individual needs to understand and manage these forces.
  • The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
  • we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I like this metaphor. Pancake people
David McGavock

Do Babies Have a Moral Compass? Debate Heats Up | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/2399-babies-moral-compass.html

babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation

shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • In the original study, conducted by Yale researchers in 2007, groups of 6-month-olds and 10-month-olds watched a puppet show with neutral wooden figures, where one figure, the climber, was trying to get up a hill. In one scenario, one of the other figures, called the helper, assisted the climber up the hill. In the other scenario, a third figure, called the hinderer, pushed the climber down. Babies were then presented with the helper and hinderer figures so they could pick which one they preferred, and 14 out of 16 babies in the older group (10 months old) and all 12 of the 6-month-olds picked the helper. The study, which was published in the journal Nature, seemed to imply that infants could be good judges of character. [In Photos: How Babies Learn]
  • discrepancies would seem to make it tricky for infants to know that the climber needed help, and if they did, for them to know that the helper was helping. As such, it's possible the infants in the new study looked to these other variables (collisions and bounces) to make their decisions, Hamlin suggests.
  • Even if flaws did exist in their study, Hamlin and her colleagues point to various independent studies, one of which uses a similar setup without the "bouncing" of the climber, that support the "babies have a moral compass" theory. The researchers go on to note they have replicated their findings, that infants prefer prosocial others, in a range of social scenarios that don't include climbing, colliding or bouncing. Hamlin's other studies have shown babies are good judges of character.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "On the help and hinder trials, the toys collided with one another, an event we thought infants may not like," lead researchers Damian Scarf said in a statement from New Zealand's University of Otago. "Furthermore, only on the help trials, the climber bounced up and down at the top of hill, an event we thought infants may enjoy."
  • David McGavock on 06 May 14
     
    "An experiment five years ago suggested that babies are equipped with an innate moral compass, which drives them to choose good individuals over the bad in a wooden puppet show. But new research casts doubt on those findings, demonstrating that a baby's apparent preference for what's right might just reflect a fondness for bouncy things."
David McGavock

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

edge.org/...-culture-drove-human-evolution

anthropology evolution culture tools cooperation religion neuroscience

shared by David McGavock on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...116 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • David McGavock on 07 May 14
     
    [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.
Charles van der Haegen

Collusion - 0 views

collusion.toolness.org

tracking personal behavior web internet cookies freedom privacy independence

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    I followwed Georges Siemens' advice on twitter Have a look at Collusion: http://bit.ly/pwcMSc Follow the directions to see how you are tracked across sites. Connections amplify insight I found the site "Collusion" ttp://collusion.toolness.org/ The fundamental problem of the web, and why the battle for web freedom will be so harch to win The site provides you indication which tools you might use to limit companies (and other services) tracking you See also Eli Parisels Ted Talk for his warning of not transparant behavior on the web, or read Jonathan Zittrain's book The Future of Internet
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    This is a great demo, I recomment you to follow and view, and learn and decide from it
David McGavock

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

socialmediaclassroom.com/...ion-questions-action-requested

HRU cooperation action social support

shared by David McGavock on 25 May 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • David McGavock on 25 May 14
     
    Answers from all co-learners
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