168 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. you have the slime mold and you put a piece of oat which the Slime wants to eat

      for - individual or collective behavior - slime mold - prisoner's dilemma and slime molds - slime molds - me vs we - me vs we - slime molds - adjacency - slime molds - me vs we - multicellular organisms

      • quote
        • You have the slime mold and you put a piece of oat which the Slime wants to eat and
        • it starts to crawl towards that oat and then
        • What you can do is you can take a razor blade and just cut off that leading edge
          • the little piece of it that's moving towards the oat
        • Now as soon as you've done that
        • that little piece is a new individual and
        • it has a decision to make
          • it can go in and get the oat and exploit that resource and not have to share it with this giant mass of faizaram that's back here or
          • it can first merge back and connect back to the original mass
            • because they can reconnect quite easily and then they go get the oat
        • Now the thing is that the the payoff Matrix looks quite different because
        • when it's by itself it can do this calculus of "well, it's better for me to go get the food instead of and not share it with this other thing"
        • but as soon as you connect, that payoff Matrix changes because there is no me and you
          • there's just we and at that point it doesn't make any sense to the fact that
          • you can't defect against yourself so that payoff table of actions and consequences looks quite different
          • because some of the actions change the number of players and
          • that's really weird

      adjacency between - slime molds - me vs we -multicellular organisms - social superorganism and societal breakdown - adjacency statement - A simple slime mold experiment could make an excellent BEing journey - to demonstrate how multicellular beings operate through higher order organizational principle of collaboration that - keeps cells aligned with a common purpose, - but that each cellular unit also comes equipped with - an evolutionarily inherited legacy of individual control system - normally, the evolutionarily later and higher order collaborative signaling that keeps the multi-cellular being unified overrides the lower order, evolutionarily more primitive autonomous cellular control system - however, pathological conditions can occur that disrupt the collaborative signaling, causing an override condition, and individual cells to revert back to their more primitive legacy survival system - The same principles happen at a societal level. - In a healthy, well-functioning society, the collaborative signaling keeps the society together - but if it is severely disrupted, social order breakdown ensues and - individual human beings and small groups resort to individual survival behavior

  2. Dec 2022
    1. Drawing from negativity bias theory, CFM, ICM, and arousal theory, this study characterizes the emotional responses of social media users and verifies how emotional factors affect the number of reposts of social media content after two natural disasters (predictable and unpredictable disasters). In addition, results from defining the influential users as those with many followers and high activity users and then characterizing how they affect the number of reposts after natural disasters
    1. Using actual fake-news headlines presented as they were seen on Facebook, we show that even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy, both within the same session and after a week. Moreover, this “illusory truth effect” for fake-news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology. These results suggest that social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem.
    1. Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with the use of toxic language and moral outrage.

      Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the toxicity of the language used in their tweets, measured using the Google Jigsaw Perspective API27, and (b) the extent to which their tweets involved expressions of moral outrage, measured using the algorithm from ref. 28. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

  3. Aug 2022
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  7. Dec 2021
    1. Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that werestartling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Nowtheir ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them thatjustifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If socialscientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic,two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anythingoriginal, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists areexpected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is toimpoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our senseof possibility.

      The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.

      Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.


      This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA

  8. Nov 2021
    1. i think the focus was very much on energy supply and to a limited extent on things like um yeah technologies and like vehicle 01:00:07 technologies for example but um much much less in terms of getting people to particularly in developed countries to use less energy and to change diet and to travel less and fly less and all these these things and i think part of 01:00:19 that and it is also reflected in the fact that it was fairly much absent in the uk's net zero strategy is that it is seen as being politically difficult that it might be a you know it might mean that they that politicians lose votes that 01:00:33 it's just too difficult to get people to change their behavior that it's threatening that it might mean lower standards of living um in developed countries etc so i think kind of it's still it's still seen as something and that that was quite explicit i think in 01:00:45 the forward to the uk strategy um so i think in terms of how we move beyond that that's that's difficult but i think it is about reframing behavior change and demand demand management in 01:00:58 much more positive terms to say this isn't a threat there are actually opportunities there are opportunities to improve people's health and well-being to create green jobs to reskill people in new sectors and 01:01:09 and so on and it is not about you know reducing uh quality of life or well-being it's not about people losing jobs etc so this is i think there's a job here to kind of reframe it in terms of those those opportunities and those 01:01:22 co-benefits so that would be my my initial thought

      Reframing loss as gain is one strategy worth exploring for behavior change. Also explore social tipping points of complex contagion.

    1. Many high-carbon activities are also highly routinized. From a psychological perspective, this bears the hallmarks of habitual behavior, in that environmentally significant actions are often stable, persistent, and an automatic response to particular contexts (159), e.g., commuting by car repeatedly over many months or years. Theories of social practice offer a contrasting account in which routines coevolve with infrastructures, competencies, conventions, and expectations (160). For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social significance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobility (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumption have led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patterns of domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoor temperature control (163). Although such assemblages shift over time, policy and action intended to reduce emissions have been ineffective in coordinating changes throughout these social and material configurations. As a consequence, routinized, commonplace, and largely unconscious behaviors remain mostly unaffected, with many high-carbon activities even growing and expanding (e.g., frequent flying).

      New stories and narratives, in other words, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

      As mentioned above, community economists Michael Shuman demonstrates how relocalizing can create new patterns of behavior consistent with a desirable future.

      The Swiss 2000 Watt society is another example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

      We must engage film-makers, artists, playwrights to create stories of such alternative futures of living within planetary boundaries, doughnut economics and eco-civilizations.

  9. Oct 2021
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  19. Dec 2020
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  25. Jun 2020
    1. McBride, O., Murphy, J., Shevlin, M., Gibson Miller, J., Hartman, T. K., Hyland, P., Levita, L., Mason, L., Martinez, A. P., McKay, R., Stocks, T. V. A., bennett, kate m, Vallières, F., Karatzias, T., Valiente, C., Vazquez, C., & Bentall, R. (2020). An overview of the context, design and conduct of the first two waves of the COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/z3q5p

  26. May 2020
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  28. Nov 2015
    1. If this were true for modern society, it has multiplied in ourage of social media, in which control and value are indissolubly linked to the machine ensemblesthat comprise contemporary digital infrastructures.

      I have studied in my International Marketing course here how social media is a cultural institution in society and has an extremely powerful influence on societal structures regarding preferences, levels of acceptance of products/technology, and how consumers are influenced to use them.

  29. Sep 2015
    1. The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the 17th century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which violent acts are the entrée to paradise and other religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves.
    1. Sandy, as well as the other girls, adapt to ritual displays such as these while most female customers would find it intimidating to find themselves in the midst of such male-oriented talk.

      I get that Brady's Bar is typically a place for men or college football players to go which I think is acceptable, but there should still be a line (non-physical) of what is and isn't respectable behavior customers should adhere to.