Friday, March 30, 2018

Young muscles and immune systems in aging cyclists.

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I pass on the technical abstracts of two striking papers referenced by a Gretchen Reynolds article showing that the leg muscles and immune ...
Thursday, March 29, 2018

How is tech dividing us?

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Comments by David Autor during an interview by Nancy Scola: ...it's definitely the case that automation is raising the demand for skil...
Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Logic in babies.

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Halberda does a commentary on work of Cesana-Arlotti et al. showing that one essential form of logical inference, process of elimination, ...
Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Different kinds of smiles elicit different physiological responses

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Martin et al. show that our stress chemistry (HPA, or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) is augmented or dampened by different kinds of s...
Monday, March 26, 2018

YouTube's A.I. finds that radicalization gets more ad revenue.

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Tufekci points to yet another pathological social consequence of A.I. algorithms designed to make people stay on a website longer, and thus...
Friday, March 23, 2018

The reputation age.

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I would like to point to this brief essay by Italian philosopher Gloria Origgi, which offers, after its beginning paragraphs (below), sever...
Thursday, March 22, 2018

Think you’re not a competitor? Think again.

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From Raghabendra et al. : We report a series of experimental studies that investigate the influence of a competition on noncompetitors wh...
Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Brain coupling during holding hands correlates with pain reduction

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From Goldstein et al. : The mechanisms underlying analgesia related to social touch are not clear. While recent research highlights the rol...
Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Being what we think we are.

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Gretchen Reynolds points to an interesting article in Health Psychology by Zahrt and Crum . Following up on an earlier article in which ...
2 comments:
Monday, March 19, 2018

Rationalizing undesired change as soon as it takes effect.

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Lauren does interesting work illustrating how our psychological immune system acts to rationalize and make us feel better about changes we ...
Friday, March 16, 2018

Dying for the group - a theory of extreme self-sacrifice

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I'm on Behavioral and Brain Sciences' mailing list of potential commentators on its forthcoming articles, and now pass on the abstra...
Thursday, March 15, 2018

We project our own spatial bias onto others.

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Graziano's group has done an experiment suggesting that our spatial bias in processing objects in the right visual field better than th...
Wednesday, March 14, 2018

A Slow Thought Manifesto

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I am on Aeon’s mailing list to receive three essays from its archive each day, three more items to scan in a daily stream of emails from ag...
Tuesday, March 13, 2018

On social media lies spread faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth.

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Here is the link to the widely reported open access Science Magazine article by Vosoughi et al. showing that social media propagate false n...
Monday, March 12, 2018

Critical comment on Pinker's "Enlightenment Now"

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In this final post on Pinker’s new book, “Enlightenment Now” I want to note several reviews that offer reservations about the book (and offe...
Friday, March 09, 2018

Pinker on humanism and human flourishing.

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These clips from the last chapter (chapter 23) of Pinker's new book "Enlightenment Now" conclude my passing on of some of the ...
Thursday, March 08, 2018

Pinker on reason, and our presumed post-truth era

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The last section, part III, of Pinker's new book "Enlightenment Now" is titled Reason, Science, and Humanism. Here I pass on a...
Wednesday, March 07, 2018

The Future of Progress - return to the Middle Ages, or continuing upward curve?

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Continuing the series of posts on Pinker's new book "Enlightenment Now", I want to pass on clips from the last chapter (Chapt...
Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Pinker on progress

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This post is my third installment of summarizing or passing on bits of Pinker’s new book “Enlightenment Now”. The previous installments dea...
Monday, March 05, 2018

Progressophobia

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In this post I continue to pass on brief clips from Pinker's new book "Enlightenment Now" that I found most fascinating. The ...