Cognition
Teaching Metacognition to 7th Graders
Gary Marcus says he’d like for there to be a course on metacognition for kids:
Call it “The Human Mind: A User’s Guide,” aimed at, say, seventh-graders. Instead of emphasizing facts, I’d expose students to the architecture of the mind, what it does well, and what it doesn’t. And most important, how to cope with its limitations, to consider evidence in a more balanced way, to be sensitive to biases in our reasoning, to make choices in ways that better suit our long-term goals.
What a brilliant and practical idea.
Anyone want to take a stab at a syllabus?…
Why It's Important to be an Optimist
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. (James Branch Cabell)
I am currently reading What Are You Optimistic About?, a collection of short essays by thought leaders in many different disciplines on the eponymous subject. I’m also reading True Enough, a compelling argument by Farhad Manjoo for how despite — nay, because of — the fire hose of information that permeates modern society and is available for the asking, the schism between what’s true and what we believe is widening; a polemic on polemics if you will. Taken together, these two books suggest to me that there is a case, not for being optimistic per se, but for why you should consciously, actively try hard to become an optimist if you aren’t already.…
Red Pill or Blue Pill?
As we approach the inauguration of a new leader who trying to be truly post-partisan, I think Jonathan Haidt’s TED brilliant talk is apropos:…
Making Great Decisions When it Counts
Some friends and I watched the above talk together by Dan Gilbert on the various ways humans made logical errors in decision making. If you are a behavioral economist or are into psychology literature, you are probably all too familiar with the experiments on this subject, but it’s worth watching anyway.
There was some criticism of the talk in that it does ignore the fact that given limited resources in making decisions, the heuristics that we humans use (i.e. the rules of thumb, like price being a good indicator of quality) serve us very well most of the time. It’s only under specific circumstances that these heuristics lead to logical errors and bad decisions. Thus, the talk left some people thinking that the point Gilbert was making is that we’re all pretty bad decision makers and we should learn to transcend these error-prone heuristics. The critics further suggested that no, we’re not bad decision makers, we are in fact really good 95% of the time, …
Embodied Cognition
Until recently, Artificial Intelligence research has been grounded on a theory of cognition that is based on symbolic reasoning. That is, somewhere in our heads the concepts are represented symbolically and reasoned about via deduction and induction.
At long last, AI researchers are truly learning from human cognition (oh the irony!) Introducing Leo, the robot that learns to model and reason about the world like human babies do, via embodied experience and social interactions:
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