Friday, September 29, 2017

Does it matter whether we believe in free will or not?

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From Genschow et al. : Significance The question whether free will exists or not has been a matter of debate in philosophy for centurie...
Thursday, September 28, 2017

Greater internet use does not correlate with faster growth of political polarization.

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Continuing a topic from MindBlog's April 20 post ...Most writing on the increase in political polarization over the past decades argues ...
Wednesday, September 27, 2017

“No problem” vs “you’re welcome”

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My daughter pointed me to this piece by Gretchen McCulloch , which gives me some insight into what I have considered the annoying habit of ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The science of emotion - now at least 27 categories of emotional states.

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So...I guess we knew emotions are complicated. There has been intense debate on how to describe them in semantic and geometric dimensions su...
Monday, September 25, 2017

Will you be above or below “the API” in the emerging economy?

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An application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools that are building blocks for application...
Friday, September 22, 2017

Color naming across languages reflects color use

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Gibson et al. do a study showing that warm colors are communicated more efficiently than cool colors, and that this cross-linguistic patter...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 21, 2017

Separate prefrontal areas code desirability versus availability.

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When we make a decision, we calculate its “expected value,” by multiplying the value of something (how much we want or need it) with the pro...
Wednesday, September 20, 2017

How we see what we expect to see.

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Kok et al. show that expectations can induce the preactivation of stimulus templates in our brain that resemble the neural signals actually...
Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Computer design cues taken from human brains

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Metz does an interesting article on the waning of do-it-all chips, central processing units of the sort that are running my MacBook Air as ...
Monday, September 18, 2017

It’s all about tribes - not ideas, morals, or principles.

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Thomas Edsall does another excellent piece on what is happening in our politics. I suggest you read it...here are a few clips: Since the ...
1 comment:
Friday, September 15, 2017

The intractability of racial discrimination

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Sobering findings from Quillian et al. : Significance Many scholars have argued that discrimination in American society has decreased o...
Thursday, September 14, 2017

Neuroforecasting crowd funding outcomes

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Genevsky et al. find that directly measuring brain activities in the nucleus accumbens of individuals while they decide whether to fund pro...
Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Do Americans care about rising inequality?

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Interesting ideas from McCall et al. : Significance Although rising economic inequality in the United States has alarmed many, research...
Tuesday, September 12, 2017

How to regulate Artificial Intelligence

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As a postscript to MindBlog's Aug. 23 post on Artificial Intelligence (AI), I pass on chunks from Oren Etzioni's more recent piece ...
Monday, September 11, 2017

How “ought” exceeds but implies “can”

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From John Turri : This paper tests a theory about the relationship between two important topics in moral philosophy and psychology. One top...
Friday, September 08, 2017

Debate over a scientific wellness study.

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Ryan Cross discusses reactions to a new "Scientific Wellness" pilot study set up by distinguished biologist Lee Hood and their re...
Thursday, September 07, 2017

Oxytocin reduces xenophobic outgroup rejection.

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This work from Marsh et al. suggests that it might be useful to spritz a bit of oxytocin up the noses of alt-right, alt-left, fascist, and ...
Wednesday, September 06, 2017

Evaluation of brain training programs.

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By now there is a consensus that most claims about brain training making improving mental agility have no scientific basis. Most brain train...
Tuesday, September 05, 2017

American Nirvana

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I've been meaning to point to an engaging article by polymath Adam Gopnik reviewing Robert Wright's recent book "Why Buddhism ...
Monday, September 04, 2017

Washing away your sins in the brain.

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From Tang et al. The association between moral purity and physical cleanliness has been widely discussed recently. Studies found that mo...
1 comment: