In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.
Psychological nativism - Wikipedia - 0 views
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Some nativists believe that specific beliefs or preferences are "hard-wired". For example, one might argue that some moral intuitions are innate or that color preferences are innate. A less established argument is that nature supplies the human mind with specialized learning devices. This latter view differs from empiricism only to the extent that the algorithms that translate experience into information may be more complex and specialized in nativist theories than in empiricist theories. However, empiricists largely remain open to the nature of learning algorithms and are by no means restricted to the historical associationist mechanisms of behaviorism.
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Nativism has a history in philosophy, particularly as a reaction to the straightforward empiricist views of John Locke and David Hume. Hume had given persuasive logical arguments that people cannot infer causality from perceptual input. The most one could hope to infer is that two events happen in succession or simultaneously. One response to this argument involves positing that concepts not supplied by experience, such as causality, must exist prior to any experience and hence must be innate.
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Opinion | Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT - The New York Times - 0 views
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we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.
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OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought
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if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I
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Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds | The New Yorker - 0 views
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n 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
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Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times
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Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instance
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Elon Musk May Kill Us Even If Donald Trump Doesn't - 0 views
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In his extraordinary 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at Brookings, writes that modern societies have developed an implicit “epistemic” compact–an agreement about how we determine truth–that rests on a broad public acceptance of science and reason, and a respect and forbearance towards institutions charged with advancing knowledge.
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Today, Rauch writes, those institutions have given way to digital “platforms” that traffic in “information” rather than knowledge and disseminate that information not according to its accuracy but its popularity. And what is popular is sensation, shock, outrage. The old elite consensus has given way to an algorithm. Donald Trump, an entrepreneur of outrage, capitalized on the new technology to lead what Rauch calls “an epistemic secession.”
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Rauch foresees the arrival of “Internet 3.0,” in which the big companies accept that content regulation is in their interest and erect suitable “guardrails.” In conversation with me, Rauch said that social media companies now recognize that their algorithm are “toxic,” and spoke hopefully of alternative models like Mastodon, which eschews algorithms and allows users to curate their own feeds
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The new science of death: 'There's something happening in the brain that makes no sense... - 0 views
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Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness
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Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived
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when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.
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Opinion | America's Irrational Macreconomic Freak Out - The New York Times - 0 views
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The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel.
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It follows that the typical worker can now afford two percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a faster rate of improvement than the average rate of real wage growth over the past few decades.
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many folks feel that they’re falling behind, even when a careful analysis of the numbers suggests they’re not.
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Why It's So Hard To Pay Attention, Explained By Science - Fast Company - 0 views
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Today, each of us individually generates more information than ever before in human history. Our world is now awash in an unprecedented volume of data. The trouble is, our brains haven’t evolved to be able to process it all.
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information “tumbles faster and faster through bigger and bigger computers down to everybody’s fingertips, which are holding devices with more processing power than the Apollo mission control.”
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Information scientists have quantified all this: In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986—the equivalent of 174 newspapers.
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