BC SCIENCE
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

It is astonishing that most of cognitive science ignores an obvious reality. That there are two kinds of humans.

 Tomasello has a very credible hypothesis that what distinguishes humans from the great apes is the inclination towards shared intentional behavior. What is innate is the disposition and like personalities, it is what defines our cognition as we grow.
If cognitive preference is so critical in cognitive development then why is it that we seem to have completely ignored the difference in cognitive preferences between men and women?
Humans are that species of primates that wandered out into the savannah. The savannah is different enough from a dense jungle to exert the evolutionary pressures that encourage the development of planning and forecasting skills.
Furthermore, human infants required a disproportional amount of effort to rear. This meant the specialization of roles between women who were responsible for rearing offspring and men who were responsible for bringing home the bacon. Failure in either implied death.
To be competent in child rearing, one is constantly challenged in trying to understand the needs of a child. A good mother is one that best understands the needs of a child and how best to accommodate those needs. Needs here isn't confined to immediate needs.
In contrast, the male human in the savannah needs to figure out where the next meal is coming from. In the savannah a human is one of the least physically gifted animals. Humans are relatively slow bipedal mammals.
The only animal perhaps with an approximate speed as humans are bigger mammals. The kind of mammals that can gore and kill a human. So when humans went hunting, there was a real possibility that it would be their last hunt.
So how does a human conjure up the courage to attack another animal that can kill them? They need to develop a kind of cognitive skill that is the opposite of empathy. That is, apathy. A detachment from knowing the consequences of being killed or maimed for life.
So what we thus have are primates a inclination towards shared intentional behavior (i.e. cooperation) that is also differentiated by a preference for empathy or a preference for detachment.
I use the word preference here because humans are complex enough not to be completely devoid of empathy or completely devoid of the ability to detach themselves.
Humans like dogs, dolphins and killer whales hunt as a group. The most cognitively sophisticated of animals are the kinds that need to coordinate a group that seek out energy resources that are also other autonomous things.
Well, it turns out that the most important gender of a social species are the females. We can make an analogy with the human body. Our reproductive cells are encapsulated away from the other cells in the body that is doing all the work.
Biologically, the males of the species are the venturers and also the sacrificial lambs of the species. The females are the ones that are to be protected at all costs. The information to replicate individuals is only available to females.
Organic social groups therefore tend to be matriarchal in nature. Even in human experience, it is usually the women in the family that ensure the maintenance of bonds between other relatives.
But an unnatural thing happened with the scaling up of social groups into much larger societies. The power dynamics of the group changes because the mechanisms of social cohesion has to change from the order of O(n^2) to O(n log n)
Human shared intentionality is made more effective through the use of language. The standardization of languages allows larger groups to communicate. The codification of language allows for information to transcend generations.
The initial usefulness of the codification of language (i.e. writing it down) is to preserve legacy. Legacy in the form of ownership. Writing information of ownership on paper is necessary for resolving future disputes. In fact, going meta means writing down the rules of dispute.
Civilizations scale because norms are written down and agreed upon by their citizens. Not everything can be expressed and written down. These are the tacit norms of society that is carried from one generation to another through practices and rituals.
Now one can make the case that the switch in power dynamics from women to men is a consequence of the written word. See: https://t.co/z5S17hY5Zu
The written word emphasizes detachment instead of empathy. In C.S.Peirce formulation of signs, symbols are detached from individual grounding and are instead understood through norms shared by a collective.
The symbol grounding at the level of the collective is different from the symbol grounding at the level of the individual. The effect of abstraction is that the concerns of the individual are coarse grained away in favor of the concerns of the collective.
Because our thought processes are so dependent on the language that influences our thoughts, modern humans are unable to intuit what they've lost through the habit of using symbols to express thought.
What was lost was empathy. But here's the rub, language is not the core of general intelligence but rather empathy is at the core of general intelligence. Humans by virtual of being shared intentional beings require empathy to find meaning in this world.
Humans who commit suicide are the ones who momentarily discover the lack of meaning in this world. How does that happen if not for the same mechanism that allows for the detachment from this world?
Side note: The danger in American society is that the culture is verbal in nature and has a propensity to favor symbols over empathy. What happens when those symbols are discovered to be lies?
Humans are innately equipped with two kinds of minds. The empathic mind and the symbolic mind. The former addresses complexities of human relationships and the latter abstracts away the complexity the arises from combinatorial explosions of states of affairs.
Computers have shown that we can mechanize the symbolic mind. However, as GPT-3 has shown, the mechanized symbolic mind is devoid of meaning. It requires the empathic mind to discover meaning in the words.
That is because it is the empathic mind that is actually embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective in this world. The purpose of things that are digital is to transcend our legacy into the futire. The purpose of things that are analog is to live in the present.
Join me in this journey here: https://t.co/CKl7IvNWys
@threadreaderapp unroll

More from Carlos E. Perez

Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Chess may be a good analogy for explaining the difference between a descriptive model of reality and a generative model of reality.

A descriptive model of chess will describe the rules (i.e. initial setup, allowed moves, points per piece, objectives). This tells you how a chessboard might evolve and also narrows the combinations of realistic chess positions.

In contrast, a generative model involves the actual gameplay between competing players that follow the rules. It generates new styles and patterns. It establishes new strategies and tactics. It generates new openings, middle gameplay, and end game tactics.

A generative model is an evolutionary model that leads to emergent behavior. As a consequence, a master of chess is able to recall the layout of chess positions in a real game in an instant, yet is unable to remember pieces placed in random positions.

That is because causality is present in the movements of pieces in a chessboard. An intuitive system like the human mind is able to capture that causality as a means to understanding and recall.
INTERNET
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
My attempt to map the research *doctrines* of various groups working on Artificial General Intelligence.


Although one might see names of individuals here as well as organizations, take it just as identification of the organization behind the person and a very narrow slice of their overall research portfolio.

Here is a @swardley map that captures the relationship of doctrine with other individual and organizational processes.


We can capture a party's doctrine by either an explicitly stated agenda or an aggregation of the kind of approach that is pursued. A doctrine is an invariant property of the overall behavior of a party.

In this map one can see the conflict between different parties (compare @garymarcus with the deep learning folks).
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
A children's book written in 1954 inspired by Wiener's Cybernetics that explains some common day analog systems:

Analog computation originally meant the construction of a simulation of another system by means of a mechanical or electrical system that represented the same dynamics as the physical system. That is an analog of what's being simulated.

Nobert Wiener generalized this idea in Cybernetics to describe control systems that through negative feedback promoted stability.

W.Ross Ashby argued that negative feedback was insufficient for maintaining the stability (homeostasis) of complex system. Ashby proposed the Law of Requisite Variety.

These machines that 'seem to think' are examples of what was known as analog computation. Cybernetics, control theory, biology are examples of analog computation. But what does this mean other than being the opposite of discrete/digital computation?
BOOK
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Interesting to realize that the living things that lay the foundation of the biosphere are extremely robust as compared to the humans that are destroying the biosphere.

Seed can remain dry and dormant for ages only to reborn when provided the proper nutrients. In contrast, most animals require a continual living vessel to reconstruct itself from its DNA.

Evolution appears to constantly perform tradeoffs between robust organisms and organisms that are adaptable. Co-evolution makes possible the development of complex species as a consequence of robust organisms.

We exist as a consequence of the multitude of less complex individuals that make up our biosphere. We are in fact symbionts that are in constant cooperation with our microbiome. Absent our individual ecologies leads to death.

We are inseparable from our microbiome, we are inseparable from our societies, and we are inseparable from our biosphere. The biggest lie we are told is that as individuals, we are independent of our world.
WORLD
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Constructivism is perhaps the most important idea that will shape the future of humanity. The ills of society are a consequence of the willful ignorance of constructivism.

There are two important definitions of constructivism, one comes from mathematics and the other from psychology. The mathematical definition leads rejects the law of excluded middle. It's relevant in understanding causation.

The psychological definition: "Humans actively construct their own knowledge, and that reality is determined by our experiences as a learner."

The models of causality that our brains invent to navigate the world is a consequence of our progressive development in the world we live in. Robert Kegan calls his theory constructive developmental theory to emphasize two important aspects of cognitive growth.

Cognitive growth is constructive as explained above. It is also developmental in the sense that our mental models of the world make abrupt changes as we grow in maturity. The symmetries in our models break and lead to new symmetries.
LIFE

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@NGKabra
Did you know that all the nuclear bombs we exploded in the '40s-50s-60s have permanently contaminated all the steel the world has produced since then? All steel in the world is divided into two categories: pre-1945 non-contaminated steel, and post-1945 contaminated steel.

How?

Nuclear bombs (including the tests) create a lot of radioisotopes that are not found in nature. For example Cobalt-60 (a radioactive version of Cobalt-59). And since the 1945 Trinity test, these have all dispersed in the atmosphere.

What does this have to do with steel?

The process of manufacturing steel uses atmospheric air (or atmospheric oxygen). Some of the radioisotopes like Cobalt-60 get pulled in too, and as a result, any steel produced after 1945 has embedded in it some of these radioisotopes, sitting there emitting gamma rays.

Why do we care about traces of radioisotopes in steel? When making Geiger counters, or medical devices to check for radioactive contamination, or astronomical instruments, the emissions from the contaminated steel would interfere with the measurements.

So we need pre-1945 steel

Pre-1945 non-contaminated steel is called "low background steel". And when we need it, where do we get it from?

We go, find pre-World-War-II sunken shipwrecks, and then salvage the steel (and lead) from those to build our instruments which need heavy radiation shielding.
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Eric Holthaus
Eric Holthaus
@EricHolthaus
JUST IN: The U.S. National Climate Assessment is now public.

This is the report that the Trump Administration doesn’t want you to see. Years in the making, released on the day after Thanksgiving. #ClimateFriday

Here are some of the main

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300 experts in 13 federal agencies volunteered their time to make sure you have this information.

Please share it widely.
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The top finding:

“Climate change is projected to significantly affect human health, the economy, and the environment in the United

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Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll
@seanmcarroll
Hugh Everett's birthday! Pioneer of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Let us celebrate by thinking about ontological extravagance. I will do so by way of analogy, because I have found that everyone loves analogies and nobody ever willfully misconstrues them.


We look at the night sky and see photons arriving to us, emitted by distant stars. Let's contrast two different theories about how stars emit photons.

One theory says, we know how stars shine, and our equations predict that they emit photons roughly uniformly in all directions. Call this the "Many-Photons Interpretation" (MPI).

But! Others object. That is *so many photons*. Most of which we don't observe, and can't observe, since they're moving away at the speed of light. It's too ontologically extravagant to posit a huge number of unobservable things!

So they suggest a "Photon Collapse Interpretation." According to this theory, the photons emitted toward us actually exist. But photons that would be emitted in directions we will never observe simply collapse into utter non-existence.
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Prof Francois Balloux
Prof Francois Balloux
@BallouxFrancois
@mugecevik is an excellent scientist and a responsible professional. She likely read the paper more carefully than most. She grasped some of its strengths and weaknesses that are not apparent from a cursory glance. Below, I will mention a few points some may have missed.
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The paper primarily evaluates data from March and April 2020. The article is not particularly clear about this limitation, but the information can be found in the hefty supplementary material.
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The authors applied four different regression methods (some fancier than others) to the same data. The outcomes of the different regression models are correlated (enough to reach statistical significance), but they vary a lot. (heat map on the right below).
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The effect of individual interventions is extremely difficult to disentangle as the authors stress themselves. There is a very large number of interventions considered and the model was run on 49 countries and 26 US States (and not >200 countries).
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Tennessee Stands - Covid Data & Research
Tennessee Stands - Cov...
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"We have purposely avoided directly confronting the issue of masks because it is such an emotional and political issue. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull, the topic elicits strong emotions which overwhelms

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Like most of you, we rarely wash the mask, we stick it in our pockets, pick it out of the glove compartment or off the floorboard when we need it.

In truth, we wish masks worked. If they did, it would be a cheap, and easy way to control the spread of Covid.

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The idea that they protect not only their wearer, but also those people around them seems noble. We wished masks worked because citizens are spending billions of dollars on them.

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Santkumaras-The four adorable kids of the Universe.

The Kumaras r the four sages who roam the Universe as children from the Puranic texts of Hinduism named,Sanaka, Sanatana,Sanandana& Sanatkumara.They r described as the first mind-born creations &sons of the creator God Brahma.


Brahma,who had received the knowledge of Puranas from the Universal being(God Himself), imbibed this to his 4 Kumaras.
Sanat Kumaras then taught the Puranas to Narada.Narada transmitted it to Krishna Dwaipayana who in turn scripted them in monumental epic documents of 18 Puranas.

The Vishnu Purana is recorded in two parts,the Vishnu Purana & Naradiya Purana.The teachings of Sanaka of the Kumara brothers r contained in the Naradiya Purana which is also divided in two parts, the first part containing the teachings of Sanaka &second part,teachings of others.


Born from Brahma's mind,4 Kumars took lifelong vows of celibacy against their father's wishes.They r said to wander throughout materialistic &spiritualistic universe without any desire but with the aim to teach.All 4 brothers studied Vedas from their Childhood&travelled together.


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"The MAD Primer of Bigots, Extremists and Other Loose Ends," from September 1969.

Seen a couple of these panels make the rounds from time to time, so here's the complete set of 10 (something to amuse and/or offend almost everyone).


Chapter 1: The Super Patriot


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Paul M Domenick\U0001f43a
Paul M Domenick🐺...
@PaulMDomenick
10 Signs of Social Intelligence 🧠

1-Smile
2-Good posture
3-Strong eye contact
4-Fluid hand gestures
5-Let’s others talk more
6-Listens & relates
7-Comfortable Touching people
8-Walk with a swagger
9-Speaks at slower pace
10-Keeps calm under criticism

[ QUICK THREAD ]


1-Smile

How do you feel when you see someone that looks angry?

It’s a downer

No one will want to interact with you if you look pissed all of the time, it’s just negative energy

Plus, smiling is a sign of confidence and boosts others moods


2-Good posture

Don’t walk Into any social setting looking like the hunchback

It’s weak and makes you look low energy

Plus, you’re displaying low status with weak posture

Stand up straight with your chin up & chest out like a god

Walk like you’re proud of yourself


3- Strong eye contact

Ever shake someone’s hand & their eyes are either looking down or darting?

It’s weak & you probably won’t trust them

Or in conversation?

Eye contact while talking means you’re listening and paying *Attention*

Strong eye contact displays confidence


4-Fluid hand gestures

Use your hands to talk & express your points

Don’t stand there like a robot

Using the hands can make what you’re talking about exciting

It can also be used to emphasize

Exciting = positive emotion

Remember, making people FEEL is what’s important
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James Clear
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https://t.co/xj4js6shhy


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Sumit Grrg
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These 10 threads will teach you more than reading 100 books

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