BMAI friends. The following ramble is my first cut at making sense of the grave role racial (and other) bias is playing in the world today. This was prompted by comments I see daily from my family and friends on social media. Thinking about the great lack of self- and group-awareness many of the commenters display, I turned my scope inward. How do my own innate, evolved biases slant me to take my group’s and my own privileges for granted and…
According to this article in Applied Cognitive Psychology. The summary follows. The entire article can be accessed at Sci-Hub. “Although supernatural beliefs often paint a peculiar picture about the physical world, the possibility that the beliefs might be based on inadequate understanding of the non-social world has not received research attention. In this study (N = 258), we therefore examined how physical-world skills and knowledge predict religious and paranormal beliefs. The results showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were…
The Global Consciousness Project, Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS, for which I was once Hawaii state coordinator) and Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) are collaborating to release a smart phone app, Entangled, that aims to Monitor your mind’s influence on your physical environment Let you take part in large-scale consciousness experiments Support ongoing development of a”consciousness technology” platform for developers and artists Monitor global consciousness data in real-time Before you think I’ve gone off the deep end, let me explain that I…
In preparation for the March meeting topic, Your Political Brain, please recommend any resources you have found particularly enlightening about why humans evolved political thinking. Also, please share references about how brain functions lead to political perceptions. I’m assuming political perceptions result from more fundamental cognitive orientations, and that those arise in part from one’s genetics and in part from environment (during development and afterward). Let’s use the following description from Wikipedia: Politics is the process of making decisions applying…
Brain imaging research indicates some aspects of individual political orientation correlate significantly with the mass and activity of particular brain structures including the right amygdala and the insula. This correlation may derive in part from genetics, but is also influenced by environment and behavior. “there’s a critical nuance here. Schreiber thinks the current research suggests not only that having a particular brain influences your political views, but also that having a particular political view influences and changes your brain. The…
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/cognitive-bias-president-trump-understands-better/ “When something is memorable, it tends to be the thing you think of first, and then it has an outsize influence on your understanding of the world. After the movie Jaws came out, a generation of people was afraid to swim in the sea—not because shark attacks were more likely but because all those movie viewers could more readily imagine them.”
Here’s a useful artificial intelligence introductory lesson from an MIT course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-825-techniques-in-artificial-intelligence-sma-5504-fall-2002/lecture-notes/Lecture1Final.pdf
Cognitive bias article of the day: How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail A concise, timely look at how worldview-driven cognitive dissonance leads people to double down on their misbeliefs in the face of challenging evidence. It also recommends steps for having more meaningful conversations with others whose irrational positions differ from your own. 😉
“Once the trained CNN [convolutional neural network] showed solid performance in the simulator, we loaded it onto DRIVE PX [vehicle control computer] and took it out for a road test in the car. The vehicle drove along paved and unpaved roads with and without lane markings, and handled a wide range of weather conditions. As more training data was gathered, performance continually improved. The car even flawlessly cruised the Garden State Parkway.”