Group items tagged

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.

"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."

ToM deficits have been observed in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenics, persons under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, sleep-deprived persons, and persons who are experiencing severe emotional or physical pain.

Research by Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga and Giacomo Rizzolatti (reviewed in [51]) has shown that some sensorimotor neurons, which are referred to as mirror neurons, first discovered in the premotor cortex of rhesus monkeys, may be involved in action understanding.

Neuropsychological evidence has provided support for neuroimaging results on the neural basis of theory of mind. A study with patients suffering from a lesion of the temporoparietal junction of the brain (between the temporal lobe and parietal lobe) reported that they have difficulty with some theory of mind tasks.[49] This shows that theory of mind abilities are associated with specific parts of the human brain.

However, there is also evidence against the link between mirror neurons and theory of mind. First, macaque monkeys have mirror neurons but do not seem to have a 'human-like' capacity to understand theory of mind and belief. Second, fMRI studies of theory of mind typically report activation in the mPFC, temporal poles and TPJ or STS,[54] but these brain areas are not part of the mirror neuron system.

The presumption that others have a mind is termed a theory of mind because each human can only intuit the existence of his/her own mind through introspection, and no one has direct access to the mind of another.

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.

But when you add to it this religious narrative that's a version of the Frankenstein myth, where you say well, but these things are all leading to a creation of life, and this life will be superior to us and will be dangerous

I'm going to go through a couple of layers of how the mythology does harm.

this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.

If a program tells you, well, this is how things are, this is who you are, this is what you like, or this is what you should do, we have a tendency to accept that.

our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on

people often accept that

all this overpromising that AIs will be about to do this or that. It might be to become fully autonomous driving vehicles instead of only partially autonomous, or it might be being able to fully have a conversation as opposed to only having a useful part of a conversation to help you interface with the device.

other cases where the recommendation engine is not serving that function, because there is a lot of choice, and yet there's still no evidence that the recommendations are particularly good.

there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.

if the preponderance of those people have grown up in the system and are responding to whatever choices it gave them, there's not enough new data coming into it for even the most ideal or intelligent recommendation engine to do anything meaningful.

it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened

What's not clear is where the boundary is.

If you ask: is a recommendation engine like Amazon more manipulative, or more of a legitimate measurement device? There's no way to know.

we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.

If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore

not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense.

because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth.

Cortana or a Siri

This pattern—of AI only working when there's what we call big data, but then using big data in order to not pay large numbers of people who are contributing—is a rising trend in our civilization, which is totally non-sustainable

If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous.

It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.

I'm going to give you two scenarios.

let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.

Having said all that, let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything.

some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly

This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it.

the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality

not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI

The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate.

What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative.

another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people.

There's a whole other problem area that has to do with neuroscience, where if we pretend we understand things before we do, we do damage to science,

You have to be able to accept what your ignorances are in order to do good science. To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist.

To my mind, the mythology around AI is a re-creation of some of the traditional ideas about religion, but applied to the technical world.

The notion of this particular threshold—which is sometimes called the singularity, or super-intelligence, or all sorts of different terms in different periods—is similar to divinity.

In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.

If AI means this mythology of this new creature we're creating, then it's just a stupid mess that's confusing everybody, and harming the future of the economy. If what we're talking about is a set of algorithms and actuators that we can improve and apply in useful ways, then I'm very interested, and I'm very much a participant in the community that's improving those things.

A lot of people in the religious world are just great, and I respect and like them. That goes hand-in-hand with my feeling that some of the mythology in big religion still leads us into trouble that we impose on ourselves and don't need.

The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations

The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers.

Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of “preferential attachment” (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other’s choices. Agents view others’ choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly .

This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals— likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19)

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.