Podcast appearances and mentions of Herbert Simon

Using language is a complex business. Let's say you want to understand a sentence. You first need to parse a sequence of sounds—if the sentence is spoken—or images—if it's signed or written. You need to figure out the meanings of the individual words and then you need to put those meanings together to form a bigger whole. Of course, you also need to think about the larger context—the conversation, the person you're talking to, the kind of situation you're in. So how does the brain do all of this? Is there just one neural system that deals with language or several? Do different parts of the brain care about different aspects of language? And, more basically: What scientific tools and techniques should we be using to try to figure this all out?   My guest today is Dr. Ev Fedorenko. Ev is a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT, where she and her research group study how the brains supports language and complex thought. Ev and her colleagues recently wrote a detailed overview of their work on the language network—the specialized system in our brain that underlies our ability to use language. This network has some features you might have expected, and—as we'll see—other features you probably didn't.   Here, Ev and I talk about the history of our effort to understand the neurobiology of language. We lay out the current understanding of the language network, and its relationship to the brain areas historically associated with language abilities—especially Broca's area and Wernicke's area. We talk about whether the language network can be partitioned according to the subfields of linguistics, such as syntax and semantics. We discuss the power and limitations of fMRI, and the advantages of the single-subject analyses that Ev and her lab primarily use. We consider how the language network interfaces with other major neural networks—for instance, the theory of mind network and the so-called default network. And we discuss what this all tells us about the longstanding controversial claim that language is primarily for thinking rather than communicating.   Along the way, Ev and I touch on: some especially interesting brains; plasticity and redundancy; the puzzle of lateralization; polyglots; aphasia; the localizer method; the decline of certain Chomskyan perspectives; the idea that brain networks are "natural kinds"; the heart of the language network; and the question of what the brain may tell us—if anything—about how language evolved.   Alright friends, this is a fun one. On to my conversation with Dr. Ev Fedorenko. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode will be available soon.     Notes and links 3:00 – The article by a New York Times reporter who is missing a portion of her temporal lobe. The website for the Interesting Brains project.  5:30 – A recent paper from Dr. Fedorenko's lab on the brains of three siblings, two of whom were missing portions of their brains.  13:00 – Broca's original 1861 report.  18:00 – Many of Noam Chomsky's ideas about the innateness of language and the centrality of syntax are covered in his book Language and Mind, among other publications. 19:30 – For an influential critique of the tradition of localizing functions in the brain, see William R. Uttal's The New Phrenology. 23:00 – The new review paper by Dr. Fedorenko and colleagues on the language network.  26:00 – For more discussion of the different formats or modalities of language, see our earlier episode with Dr. Neil Cohn. 30:00 – A classic paper by Herbert Simon on the “architecture of complexity.” 31:00 – For one example of a naturalistic, “task-free” study that reveals the brain's language network, see here.  33:30 – See the recent paper arguing “against cortical reorganization.” 33:00 – For more on the concept of “natural kind” in philosophy, see here.  38:00 – On the “multiple-demand network,” see a recent study by Dr. Fedorenko and colleagues.  41:00 – For a study from Dr. Fedorenko's lab finding that syntax and semantics are distributed throughout the language network, see here. For an example of work in linguistics that does not make a tidy distinction between syntax and semantics, see here.  53:30 – See Dr. Fedorenko's recent article on the history of individual-subject analyses in neuroscience.  1:01:00 – For an in-depth treatment of one localizer used in Dr. Fedorenko's research, see here.  1:03:30 – A paper by Dr. Stephen Wilson and colleagues, describing recovery of language ability following stroke as a function of the location of the lesion within the language network. 1:04:20 – A paper from Dr. Fedorenko's lab on the small language networks of polyglots.  1:09:00 – For more on the Visual Word Form Area (or VWFA), see here. For discussion of Exner's Area, see here.   1:14:30 – For a discussion of the brain's so-called default network, see here.  1:17:00 – See here for Dr. Fedorenko and colleagues' recent paper on the function of language. For more on the question of what language is for, see our earlier episode with Dr. Nick Enfield.  1:19:00 – A paper by Dr. Fedorenko and Dr. Rosemary Varley arguing for intact thinking ability in patients with aphasia.  1:22:00 – A recent paper on individual differences in the experience of inner speech.   Recommendations Dr. Ted Gibson's book on syntax (forthcoming with MIT press) Nancy Kanwisher, ‘Functional specificity in the human brain'    Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.   Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.    For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Does a surplus of information create a shortage of attention? Are today's young people really unable to focus? And do goldfish need better PR?  SOURCES:Neil Bradbury, professor of physiology at Rosalind Franklin University.Nicholas Carr, writer and journalist.Johann Hari, writer and journalist.Charles Howard, University Chaplain and Vice President for Social Equity & Community at the University of Pennsylvania.Felicity Huntingford, emeritus professor of functional ecology at the university of Glasgow.Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine.Rick Rubin, music producer and record executive.Herbert Simon, professor of computer science and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. RESOURCES:Uncovering Your Path: Spiritual Reflections for Finding Your Purpose, by Charles Lattimore Howard (forthcoming 2025).Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, by Gloria Mark (2023).The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin (2023).Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari (2022)."Quibi's Founder and CEO Explain What Went Wrong," by Jessica Bursztynsky (CNBC, 2020)."Digital Democracy Survey, Eleventh Edition," by Deloitte (2017)."Busting the Attention Span Myth," by Simon Maybin (BBC News, 2017)."Attention Span During Lectures: 8 Seconds, 10 Minutes, or More?" by Neil Bradbury (Advances in Physiology Education, 2016)."Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr (The Atlantic, 2008)."Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," by Herbert Simon (Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, 1971). EXTRAS:"Multitasking Doesn't Work. So Why Do We Keep Trying?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024)."Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career ✓ Claim Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgRory Sutherland is widely regarded as one of the most influential (and most entertaining) thinkers in marketing and behavioral science. He's the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, and the founder of Nudgestock, the world's biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity. He champions thinking from first principles and using human psychology—what he calls “thinking psycho-logically”—over mere logic. In our conversation, we cover:• Why good products don't always succeed, and bad ones don't necessarily fail• Why less functionality can sometimes be more valuable• The importance of fame in building successful brands• The importance of timing in product success• The concept of “most advanced, yet acceptable”• Why metrics-driven workplaces can be demotivating• Lots of real-world case studies• Much moreNote: We encountered some technical difficulties that led to less than ideal video quality for this episode, but the lessons from this conversation made it impossible for me to not publish it anyway. Thanks for your understanding and for bearing with the less-than-ideal video quality. —Brought to you by:• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application• Cycle—Your feedback hub, on autopilot• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-most-people-miss-about-marketing—Where to find Rory Sutherland:• X: https://x.com/rorysutherland• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland• Book: Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Rory's background(02:37) The success and failure of products(04:08) Why the urge to appear serious can be a disaster in marketing(08:05) The role of distinctiveness in product design(12:29) The MAYA principle(15:50) How thinking irrationally can be advantageous(17:40) The fault of multiple-choice tests(21:31) Companies that have successfully implemented out-of-the-box thinking(30:31) “Psycho-logical” thinking(31:45) The hare and the dog metaphor(38:51) Marketing's crucial role in product adoption(49:21) The quirks of Google Glass(55:44) Survivorship bias(56:09) Balancing rational ideas with irrational ideas(01:06:19) The rise and fall of tech innovations(01:09:54) Consistency, distinctiveness, and clarity(01:21:12) Considering psychological, technological, and economic factors in parallel(01:23:35) Where to find Rory—Referenced:• Google Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass• Meta Portal TV: https://www.meta.com/portal/products/portal-tv/• Rory's quote in a LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brad-jackson-04766642_the-urge-to-appear-serious-is-a-disaster-activity-7093497742710210560-1LYN/• The MAYA Principle: Design for the Future, but Balance It with Your Users' Present: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-for-the-future-but-balance-it-with-your-users-present• Ogilvy: https://www.ogilvy.com/• MCI: https://www.mci.world/• Veuve Clicquot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veuve_Clicquot• Why do the French call the British ‘the roast beefs'?: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2913151.stm• The Killing on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-killing-f5da5c2d-4626-4ba9-bcf3-ff5f891771fb• Original The Killing on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017h7m1• The Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong: https://www.mandarinoriental.com/en/hong-kong/victoria-harbour• SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat• The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test: https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html• What is the age of the captain?: https://www.icopilots.com/what-is-the-age-of-the-captain/• Octopus Energy: https://octopus.energy/• Kraken: https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies• Toby Shannan: https://theorg.com/org/shopify/org-chart/toby-shannan• Dunbar's number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191001-dunbars-number-why-we-can-only-maintain-150-relationships• AO: https://ao.com/• Zappos: https://www.zappos.com/• Joe Cano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeycano/• John Ralston Saul's website: https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/• Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West: https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/0679748199• Psycho-Logic: Why Too Much Logic Deters Magic: https://coffeeandjunk.com/psycho-logic/• Herbert Simon's Decision-Making Approach: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/4995/1/Fulltext.pdf• Robert Trivers's website: https://roberttrivers.com/Welcome.html• Crazy Ivan: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Crazy_Ivan• The Joys of Being a Late Tech Adopter: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/technology/personaltech/joys-late-tech-adopter.html• Jean-Claude Van Damme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Van_Damme• Tim Berners-Lee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee• Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/• The real story behind penicillin: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-real-story-behind-the-worlds-first-antibiotic• What Are Japanese Toilets?: https://www.bigbathroomshop.co.uk/info/blog/japanese-toilets/• reMarkable: https://remarkable.com/• Chumby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby• Survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias• Jony Ive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jony_Ive• Marc Newson's website: https://marc-newson.com/• Designing Men: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2013/11/jony-ive-marc-newson-design-auction• Qantas A330: https://marc-newson.com/qantas-a330/• Herodotus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus• Big Decision? Consider It Both Drunk and Sober: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2016/03/22/wine-and-sleep-make-for-better-decisions/?sh=5c97fdc524b1• How Henry Ford and Thomas Edison killed the electric car: https://www.speakev.com/threads/how-henry-ford-and-thomas-edison-killed-the-electric-car.4270/• Watch Jay Leno get nostalgic and swoon over this 1909 EV: https://thenextweb.com/news/jay-leno-talk-about-electric-car-1909-baker• Jay Leno's Garage: https://www.youtube.com/@jaylenosgarage• Nudgestock: https://nudgestock.com/• Akio Morita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita• Don Norman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnorman/• What Makes Tesla's Business Model Different: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/072115/what-makes-teslas-business-model-different.asp• Monica Lewinsky on X: https://x.com/MonicaLewinsky• Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains: azon.com/Blindsight-Mostly-Hidden-Marketing-Reshapes-ebook/dp/B07ZKZ5DWF• Branding That Means Business: https://www.amazon.com/Branding-that-Means-Business-Economist-ebook/dp/B09QBCCH9N• PwC: https://www.pwc.com• Ryanair: https://www.ryanair.com• British Airways: https://www.britishairways.com/• Wrigley's began as a soap business: know when to pivot: https://theamericangenius.com/entrepreneur/wrigleys-began-as-soap-know-when-to-pivot/• Transport for Humans: https://www.amazon.com/Transport-Humans-Perspectives-Pete-Dyson/dp/1913019357—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career ✓ Claim Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgRory Sutherland is widely regarded as one of the most influential (and most entertaining) thinkers in marketing and behavioral science. He's the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, and the founder of Nudgestock, the world's biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity. He champions thinking from first principles and using human psychology—what he calls “thinking psycho-logically”—over mere logic. In our conversation, we cover:• Why good products don't always succeed, and bad ones don't necessarily fail• Why less functionality can sometimes be more valuable• The importance of fame in building successful brands• The importance of timing in product success• The concept of “most advanced, yet acceptable”• Why metrics-driven workplaces can be demotivating• Lots of real-world case studies• Much moreNote: We encountered some technical difficulties that led to less than ideal video quality for this episode, but the lessons from this conversation made it impossible for me to not publish it anyway. Thanks for your understanding and for bearing with the less-than-ideal video quality. —Brought to you by:• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application• Cycle—Your feedback hub, on autopilot• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-most-people-miss-about-marketing—Where to find Rory Sutherland:• X: https://x.com/rorysutherland• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland• Book: Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Rory's background(02:37) The success and failure of products(04:08) Why the urge to appear serious can be a disaster in marketing(08:05) The role of distinctiveness in product design(12:29) The MAYA principle(15:50) How thinking irrationally can be advantageous(17:40) The fault of multiple-choice tests(21:31) Companies that have successfully implemented out-of-the-box thinking(30:31) “Psycho-logical” thinking(31:45) The hare and the dog metaphor(38:51) Marketing's crucial role in product adoption(49:21) The quirks of Google Glass(55:44) Survivorship bias(56:09) Balancing rational ideas with irrational ideas(01:06:19) The rise and fall of tech innovations(01:09:54) Consistency, distinctiveness, and clarity(01:21:12) Considering psychological, technological, and economic factors in parallel(01:23:35) Where to find Rory—Referenced:• Google Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass• Meta Portal TV: https://www.meta.com/portal/products/portal-tv/• Rory's quote in a LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brad-jackson-04766642_the-urge-to-appear-serious-is-a-disaster-activity-7093497742710210560-1LYN/• The MAYA Principle: Design for the Future, but Balance It with Your Users' Present: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-for-the-future-but-balance-it-with-your-users-present• Ogilvy: https://www.ogilvy.com/• MCI: https://www.mci.world/• Veuve Clicquot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veuve_Clicquot• Why do the French call the British ‘the roast beefs'?: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2913151.stm• The Killing on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-killing-f5da5c2d-4626-4ba9-bcf3-ff5f891771fb• Original The Killing on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017h7m1• The Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong: https://www.mandarinoriental.com/en/hong-kong/victoria-harbour• SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat• The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test: https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html• What is the age of the captain?: https://www.icopilots.com/what-is-the-age-of-the-captain/• Octopus Energy: https://octopus.energy/• Kraken: https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies• Toby Shannan: https://theorg.com/org/shopify/org-chart/toby-shannan• Dunbar's number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191001-dunbars-number-why-we-can-only-maintain-150-relationships• AO: https://ao.com/• Zappos: https://www.zappos.com/• Joe Cano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeycano/• John Ralston Saul's website: https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/• Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West: https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/0679748199• Psycho-Logic: Why Too Much Logic Deters Magic: https://coffeeandjunk.com/psycho-logic/• Herbert Simon's Decision-Making Approach: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/4995/1/Fulltext.pdf• Robert Trivers's website: https://roberttrivers.com/Welcome.html• Crazy Ivan: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Crazy_Ivan• The Joys of Being a Late Tech Adopter: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/technology/personaltech/joys-late-tech-adopter.html• Jean-Claude Van Damme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Van_Damme• Tim Berners-Lee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee• Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/• The real story behind penicillin: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-real-story-behind-the-worlds-first-antibiotic• What Are Japanese Toilets?: https://www.bigbathroomshop.co.uk/info/blog/japanese-toilets/• reMarkable: https://remarkable.com/• Chumby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby• Survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias• Jony Ive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jony_Ive• Marc Newson's website: https://marc-newson.com/• Designing Men: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2013/11/jony-ive-marc-newson-design-auction• Qantas A330: https://marc-newson.com/qantas-a330/• Herodotus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus• Big Decision? Consider It Both Drunk and Sober: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2016/03/22/wine-and-sleep-make-for-better-decisions/?sh=5c97fdc524b1• How Henry Ford and Thomas Edison killed the electric car: https://www.speakev.com/threads/how-henry-ford-and-thomas-edison-killed-the-electric-car.4270/• Watch Jay Leno get nostalgic and swoon over this 1909 EV: https://thenextweb.com/news/jay-leno-talk-about-electric-car-1909-baker• Jay Leno's Garage: https://www.youtube.com/@jaylenosgarage• Nudgestock: https://nudgestock.com/• Akio Morita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita• Don Norman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnorman/• What Makes Tesla's Business Model Different: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/072115/what-makes-teslas-business-model-different.asp• Monica Lewinsky on X: https://x.com/MonicaLewinsky• Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains: azon.com/Blindsight-Mostly-Hidden-Marketing-Reshapes-ebook/dp/B07ZKZ5DWF• Branding That Means Business: https://www.amazon.com/Branding-that-Means-Business-Economist-ebook/dp/B09QBCCH9N• PwC: https://www.pwc.com• Ryanair: https://www.ryanair.com• British Airways: https://www.britishairways.com/• Wrigley's began as a soap business: know when to pivot: https://theamericangenius.com/entrepreneur/wrigleys-began-as-soap-know-when-to-pivot/• Transport for Humans: https://www.amazon.com/Transport-Humans-Perspectives-Pete-Dyson/dp/1913019357—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career ✓ Claim Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgRory Sutherland is widely regarded as one of the most influential (and most entertaining) thinkers in marketing and behavioral science. He's the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, and the founder of Nudgestock, the world's biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity. He champions thinking from first principles and using human psychology—what he calls “thinking psycho-logically”—over mere logic. In our conversation, we cover:• Why good products don't always succeed, and bad ones don't necessarily fail• Why less functionality can sometimes be more valuable• The importance of fame in building successful brands• The importance of timing in product success• The concept of “most advanced, yet acceptable”• Why metrics-driven workplaces can be demotivating• Lots of real-world case studies• Much moreNote: We encountered some technical difficulties that led to less than ideal video quality for this episode, but the lessons from this conversation made it impossible for me to not publish it anyway. Thanks for your understanding and for bearing with the less-than-ideal video quality. —Brought to you by:• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application• Cycle—Your feedback hub, on autopilot• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-most-people-miss-about-marketing—Where to find Rory Sutherland:• X: https://x.com/rorysutherland• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland• Book: Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Rory's background(02:37) The success and failure of products(04:08) Why the urge to appear serious can be a disaster in marketing(08:05) The role of distinctiveness in product design(12:29) The MAYA principle(15:50) How thinking irrationally can be advantageous(17:40) The fault of multiple-choice tests(21:31) Companies that have successfully implemented out-of-the-box thinking(30:31) “Psycho-logical” thinking(31:45) The hare and the dog metaphor(38:51) Marketing's crucial role in product adoption(49:21) The quirks of Google Glass(55:44) Survivorship bias(56:09) Balancing rational ideas with irrational ideas(01:06:19) The rise and fall of tech innovations(01:09:54) Consistency, distinctiveness, and clarity(01:21:12) Considering psychological, technological, and economic factors in parallel(01:23:35) Where to find Rory—Referenced:• Google Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass• Meta Portal TV: https://www.meta.com/portal/products/portal-tv/• Rory's quote in a LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brad-jackson-04766642_the-urge-to-appear-serious-is-a-disaster-activity-7093497742710210560-1LYN/• The MAYA Principle: Design for the Future, but Balance It with Your Users' Present: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-for-the-future-but-balance-it-with-your-users-present• Ogilvy: https://www.ogilvy.com/• MCI: https://www.mci.world/• Veuve Clicquot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veuve_Clicquot• Why do the French call the British ‘the roast beefs'?: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2913151.stm• The Killing on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-killing-f5da5c2d-4626-4ba9-bcf3-ff5f891771fb• Original The Killing on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017h7m1• The Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong: https://www.mandarinoriental.com/en/hong-kong/victoria-harbour• SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat• The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test: https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html• What is the age of the captain?: https://www.icopilots.com/what-is-the-age-of-the-captain/• Octopus Energy: https://octopus.energy/• Kraken: https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies• Toby Shannan: https://theorg.com/org/shopify/org-chart/toby-shannan• Dunbar's number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191001-dunbars-number-why-we-can-only-maintain-150-relationships• AO: https://ao.com/• Zappos: https://www.zappos.com/• Joe Cano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeycano/• John Ralston Saul's website: https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/• Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West: https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/0679748199• Psycho-Logic: Why Too Much Logic Deters Magic: https://coffeeandjunk.com/psycho-logic/• Herbert Simon's Decision-Making Approach: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/4995/1/Fulltext.pdf• Robert Trivers's website: https://roberttrivers.com/Welcome.html• Crazy Ivan: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Crazy_Ivan• The Joys of Being a Late Tech Adopter: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/technology/personaltech/joys-late-tech-adopter.html• Jean-Claude Van Damme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Van_Damme• Tim Berners-Lee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee• Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/• The real story behind penicillin: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-real-story-behind-the-worlds-first-antibiotic• What Are Japanese Toilets?: https://www.bigbathroomshop.co.uk/info/blog/japanese-toilets/• reMarkable: https://remarkable.com/• Chumby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby• Survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias• Jony Ive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jony_Ive• Marc Newson's website: https://marc-newson.com/• Designing Men: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2013/11/jony-ive-marc-newson-design-auction• Qantas A330: https://marc-newson.com/qantas-a330/• Herodotus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus• Big Decision? Consider It Both Drunk and Sober: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2016/03/22/wine-and-sleep-make-for-better-decisions/?sh=5c97fdc524b1• How Henry Ford and Thomas Edison killed the electric car: https://www.speakev.com/threads/how-henry-ford-and-thomas-edison-killed-the-electric-car.4270/• Watch Jay Leno get nostalgic and swoon over this 1909 EV: https://thenextweb.com/news/jay-leno-talk-about-electric-car-1909-baker• Jay Leno's Garage: https://www.youtube.com/@jaylenosgarage• Nudgestock: https://nudgestock.com/• Akio Morita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita• Don Norman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnorman/• What Makes Tesla's Business Model Different: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/072115/what-makes-teslas-business-model-different.asp• Monica Lewinsky on X: https://x.com/MonicaLewinsky• Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains: azon.com/Blindsight-Mostly-Hidden-Marketing-Reshapes-ebook/dp/B07ZKZ5DWF• Branding That Means Business: https://www.amazon.com/Branding-that-Means-Business-Economist-ebook/dp/B09QBCCH9N• PwC: https://www.pwc.com• Ryanair: https://www.ryanair.com• British Airways: https://www.britishairways.com/• Wrigley's began as a soap business: know when to pivot: https://theamericangenius.com/entrepreneur/wrigleys-began-as-soap-know-when-to-pivot/• Transport for Humans: https://www.amazon.com/Transport-Humans-Perspectives-Pete-Dyson/dp/1913019357—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Rory Sutherland is widely regarded as one of the most influential (and most entertaining) thinkers in marketing and behavioral science. He's the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, and the founder of Nudgestock, the world's biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity. He champions thinking from first principles and using human psychology—what he calls “thinking psycho-logically”—over mere logic. In our conversation, we cover:• Why good products don't always succeed, and bad ones don't necessarily fail• Why less functionality can sometimes be more valuable• The importance of fame in building successful brands• The importance of timing in product success• The concept of “most advanced, yet acceptable”• Why metrics-driven workplaces can be demotivating• Lots of real-world case studies• Much more—Brought to you by:• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application• Cycle—Your feedback hub, on autopilot• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-most-people-miss-about-marketing—Where to find Rory Sutherland:• X: https://x.com/rorysutherland• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland• Book: Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Rory's background(02:37) The success and failure of products(04:08) Why the urge to appear serious can be a disaster in marketing(08:05) The role of distinctiveness in product design(12:29) The MAYA principle(15:50) How thinking irrationally can be advantageous(17:40) The fault of multiple-choice tests(21:31) Companies that have successfully implemented out-of-the-box thinking(30:31) “Psycho-logical” thinking(31:45) The hare and the dog metaphor(38:51) Marketing's crucial role in product adoption(49:21) The quirks of Google Glass(55:44) Survivorship bias(56:09) Balancing rational ideas with irrational ideas(01:06:19) The rise and fall of tech innovations(01:09:54) Consistency, distinctiveness, and clarity(01:21:12) Considering psychological, technological, and economic factors in parallel(01:23:35) Where to find Rory—Referenced:• Google Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass• Meta Portal TV: https://www.meta.com/portal/products/portal-tv/• Rory's quote in a LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brad-jackson-04766642_the-urge-to-appear-serious-is-a-disaster-activity-7093497742710210560-1LYN/• The MAYA Principle: Design for the Future, but Balance It with Your Users' Present: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-for-the-future-but-balance-it-with-your-users-present• Ogilvy: https://www.ogilvy.com/• MCI: https://www.mci.world/• Veuve Clicquot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veuve_Clicquot• Why do the French call the British ‘the roast beefs'?: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2913151.stm• The Killing on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-killing-f5da5c2d-4626-4ba9-bcf3-ff5f891771fb• Original The Killing on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017h7m1• The Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong: https://www.mandarinoriental.com/en/hong-kong/victoria-harbour• SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat• The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test: https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html• What is the age of the captain?: https://www.icopilots.com/what-is-the-age-of-the-captain/• Octopus Energy: https://octopus.energy/• Kraken: https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies• Toby Shannan: https://theorg.com/org/shopify/org-chart/toby-shannan• Dunbar's number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191001-dunbars-number-why-we-can-only-maintain-150-relationships• AO: https://ao.com/• Zappos: https://www.zappos.com/• Joe Cano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeycano/• John Ralston Saul's website: https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/• Voltaire's B******s: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West: https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-B******s-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/0679748199• Psycho-Logic: Why Too Much Logic Deters Magic: https://coffeeandjunk.com/psycho-logic/• Herbert Simon's Decision-Making Approach: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/4995/1/Fulltext.pdf• Robert Trivers's website: https://roberttrivers.com/Welcome.html• Crazy Ivan: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Crazy_Ivan• The Joys of Being a Late Tech Adopter: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/technology/personaltech/joys-late-tech-adopter.html• Jean-Claude Van Damme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Van_Damme• Tim Berners-Lee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee• Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/• The real story behind penicillin: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-real-story-behind-the-worlds-first-antibiotic• What Are Japanese Toilets?: https://www.bigbathroomshop.co.uk/info/blog/japanese-toilets/• reMarkable: https://remarkable.com/• Chumby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby• Survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias• Jony Ive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jony_Ive• Marc Newson's website: https://marc-newson.com/• Designing Men: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2013/11/jony-ive-marc-newson-design-auction• Qantas A330: https://marc-newson.com/qantas-a330/• Herodotus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus• Big Decision? Consider It Both Drunk and Sober: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2016/03/22/wine-and-sleep-make-for-better-decisions/?sh=5c97fdc524b1• How Henry Ford and Thomas Edison killed the electric car: https://www.speakev.com/threads/how-henry-ford-and-thomas-edison-killed-the-electric-car.4270/• Watch Jay Leno get nostalgic and swoon over this 1909 EV: https://thenextweb.com/news/jay-leno-talk-about-electric-car-1909-baker• Jay Leno's Garage: https://www.youtube.com/@jaylenosgarage• Nudgestock: https://nudgestock.com/• Akio Morita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita• Don Norman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnorman/• What Makes Tesla's Business Model Different: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/072115/what-makes-teslas-business-model-different.asp• Monica Lewinsky on X: https://x.com/MonicaLewinsky• Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains: azon.com/Blindsight-Mostly-Hidden-Marketing-Reshapes-ebook/dp/B07ZKZ5DWF• Branding That Means Business: https://www.amazon.com/Branding-that-Means-Business-Economist-ebook/dp/B09QBCCH9N• PwC: https://www.pwc.com• Ryanair: https://www.ryanair.com• British Airways: https://www.britishairways.com/• Wrigley's began as a soap business: know when to pivot: https://theamericangenius.com/entrepreneur/wrigleys-began-as-soap-know-when-to-pivot/• Transport for Humans: https://www.amazon.com/Transport-Humans-Perspectives-Pete-Dyson/dp/1913019357—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

One of the fundamental principles of orthodox economics the idea that all economic agents "maximise" - consumers aim to maximise utility (econ speak for happiness) and producers profit. Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon challenged this assumption and in doing so coined a new verb, ‘to satisfice' to show how consumers and producers in the ‘real world' behave somewhat differently. This is the first episode of Season 8 of our award winning podcast, with the theme of the season being "the economists' economist'. In this episode, your friendly neighbourhood economists, Pete and Gav, enter the world of Ha-Joon Chang's favourite economist - Herbert Simon. In the course of our journey of discovery we will meet a robot named after Herb, suggest the perfect past-time for long train journeys and discover Simon's surprising and unusual sartorial choices. As always there is a challenging quiz and lashings of bonhomie. Technical support comes from our muse Nic. PS You may hear background vocals from baby Henry during the course of the episode and we would correct the following errata which occurred during the course of enthusiastic discussions: Tom Swift was a character from American teen sci-fi books Mr Miyagi of Karate Kid fame was, in fact, Japanese

Become a merchant:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfhIe31ZRuQhugmgHbe98TASLMSV-1O4Z6nH6PFf2UZzhQZmQ/viewform?usp=pp_urlApply to join our private community: https://www.skool.com/youtubebusinessacademyIn this episode, George shares that his Amazon affiliate commissions have tripled to $1,000 in the past month. Ron reports steady progress with his YouTube channel and affiliate earnings. The hosts discuss how their relatable personalities attract an audience of middle-aged women. George explains how he connected a listener interested in becoming an affiliate merchant with his contact at ShareASale. Ron and George reveal they earn $7,000-$8,000 monthly from their various online income streams. George reads insights on intellect, teaching, and decision-making from the book "Models of Life" by Herbert Simon.Join us as we welcome industry experts, entrepreneurs, and YouTube business owners who open up about their strategies and successes on the platform.

L'IA en chatbot (LLM), c'est (déjà) le passé. Yann Le Cun, scientifique en chef et fondateur du pôle IA chez Meta est l'une des divinités de l'IA au même titre que Sam Altman, Laurent Alexandre et compagnie. Une question l'anime : quel est le mystère de l'intelligence ? Considéré comme l'inventeur du Deep Learning, Yann est l'un des pères fondateurs de l'IA et des réseaux cognitifs. Il a publié plus de 180 articles scientifiques et travaille pour Meta depuis 2013. Yann repose les bases de la technologie phare du XXIème siècle. Il dévoile quelles seront les prochaines vagues pour une fenêtre sur le futur et une exploration des défis occupant les plus grands scientifiques de notre temps : Pourquoi les LLM étaient des jeux d'enfants à côté des modèles multimodaux et sensoriels ? Devons-nous nous préparer à un siècle des lumières amplifié ou bien à une société à la Big Brother ? Pourquoi “l'histoire de l'IA est jonchée de cadavres” ? Pourquoi un enfant de 4 ans est “plus intelligent” que ChatGPT ? Quelle est la stratégie de Meta à court-moyen terme ? Comment travailler dans le secteur de l'IA ? Les formations, les prochaines innovations, les évolutions de marchés… Pourquoi le casque Apple Vision Pro est un raté et à quoi ressembleront les lunettes du futur ? Quel est le vrai danger de l'IA ? TIMELINE: 00:00:00 : Petit vocabulaire du XXIème siècle : LLM, Deep Learning 0 0:09:09 : Comment entraîner une IA : les différentes méthodes 00 :15:04 : La génération par LLM : une intelligence factice ? 00:19:18 : Le chou, la chèvre, le loup et les limites du langage 00:27:38 : L'intelligence artificielle générale (IAG ou AGI) : où en est-on ? 00:37:02 : Les LLM c'est (déjà) le passé 00:43:56 : Llama, le modèle IA open source 00:47:57 : La réalité augmentée arrive : les “wearables” de Meta 00:52 :01 : Comment se former à l'IA pour tirer profit ? 00:56:26 : Ce que les LLM ne comprennent pas 01:10:30 : Comment évolue la recherche : philosophie, capteurs sensoriels, raisonnements logiques… 01:19:15 : Voitures autonomes : « Oh my God, je vais renverser ce vélo » 01:24:13 : Un siècle des lumières amplifié ou l'ère de Big Brother ? 01:36:41 : Le couple gagnant : internet et IA Les anciens épisodes de GDIY mentionnés : #219 - Bob Sinclar - DJ - Mélanger des sons pour faire danser les gens #327 - Laurent Alexandre - Auteur - ChatGPT & IA : “Dans 6 mois, il sera trop tard pour s'y intéresser” #381 - Marjolaine Grondin - Jam - Travailler mieux et devenir libre grâce à l'IA #396 - Gérard Saillant - Institut du Cerveau - Le chirurgien de Ronaldo, Schumacher, du PSG et de la FIA #238 - Clément Delangue - Hugging Face - Démocratiser le machine learning pour impacter des milliards d'individus #353 - Stanislas Polu - Dust - La vérité sur ce que l'IA nous réserve #321 - Georges-Olivier Reymond - Pasqal - Et si le leader mondial du Quantum Computing était Français ? Avec Yann, nous avons parlé de : LLM = Large Language Model Lex Fridman avec Yann round 1 Lex Fridman avec Yann round 2 Lex Fridman avec Yann round 3 Ray-Ban Meta Galactica, l'IA générative scientifique de Meta Seamless Communication Conjecture de Goldbach ("Tout nombre pair supérieur à 2 est la somme de deux nombres premiers.”) Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Mistral AI Cours Deep Learning de Yann à NYU (sous-titres en français) PyTorch Meta Llama 3 Hugging Face JEPA : Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture General Problem Solver : programme informatique par Herbert Simon, Cliff Shaw et Allen Newell DINO Les recommandations de lecture : QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (en) Lumière et matière - Une étrange histoire (fr) La Plus Belle Histoire de l'intelligence: Des origines aux neurones artificiels : vers une nouvelle étape de l'évolution Quand la machine apprend: La révolution des neurones artificiels et de l'apprentissage profond Vous pouvez contacter Yann sur LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X. La musique du générique vous plaît ? C'est à Morgan Prudhomme que je la dois ! Contactez-le sur : https://studio-module.com. Vous souhaitez sponsoriser Génération Do It Yourself ou nous proposer un partenariat ? Contactez mon label Orso Media via ce formulaire.

In this episode we dive into issues of human-machine teaming, with human factors engineer Jan Maarten Schraagen. Having edited the recently released book, Responsible Use of AI in Military Systems, Jan Maarten is an expert on how brittle technologies influence joint cognitive system performance. In this episode, in addition to exploring the book, we explore the outcomes of the 2023 REAIM Summit and what we can hope for from the 2024 Summit;  talk about multidisciplinarity in the responsible military AI debate; and how we should be thinking about capability envelope of military AI - that is, how it can or should be restricted in the conditions under which it can operate. Jan Maarten Schraagen is a cognitive systems engineer at TNO, and studies how brittle technologies influence joint cognitive system performance. He is a human factors specialist with broad experience in optimizing work processes and teamwork design. He is particularly interested in making work safe, productive and healthy, and improving resilience in sociotechnical work systems.Additional resources:Jan Maarten Schraagen (ed), Responsible Use of AI in Military Systems, CRC Press, 2024Ekelhof, M.A.C. (2018). Lifting the Fog of Targeting: “Autonomous Weapons” and Human Control through the Lens of Military Targeting. Naval War College Review, 71(3), 61-94.Ekelhof, M.A.C. (2019). Moving beyond semantics on autonomous weapons: Meaningful human control in operation. Global Policy, 10(3), 343-348.Endsley, M.R. (2017). From here to autonomy: Lessons learned from human-automation research. Human Factors, 59(1), 5-27.Taddeo, M., & Blanchard, A. (2022). A comparative analysis of the definitions of autonomous weapons systems. Science and Engineering Ethics, 28, 37-59.Herbert Simon, Bounded Rationality, Utility and Probability, NPA, 1990Peeters, M.M.M., van Diggelen, J., van den Bosch, K., Bronkhorst, A., Neerincx, M.A., Schraagen, J.M., Raaijmakers, S. (2021). Hybrid collective intelligence in a human–AI society. AI and Society, 36(1), 217-238.Schraagen, J.M.C., Barnhoorn, J.S., Van Schendel, J., & Van Vught, W. (2022). Supporting teamwork in hybrid multi-team systems. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 23(2), 199-220.Van der Kleij, R., Schraagen, J.M.C., Cadet, B., & Young, H.J. (2022). Developing decision support for cybersecurity threat and incident managers. Computers & Security, 113, 102535.Schraagen, J.M.C. (2023). Responsible use of AI in military systems: Prospects and challenges. Ergonomics, 66(11), 1719 – 1729.

Na era da informação e da tecnologia, a atenção humana se tornou um recurso escasso e valioso, que passou a ser vendido. Daí vem o termo “economia da atenção”, cunhado em 1970 pelo economista, psicólogo e cientista político Herbert Simon. Para falar como as empresas estão cada vez mais preocupadas em chamar e manter nossa atenção, eu recebo hoje aqui no Podcast Canaltech a Veronica Magarinos é head da Hyper Island. Este é o Podcast Canaltech, publicado de terça a sábado, às 7h da manhã no nosso site e nos agregadores de podcast. Conheça o Porta 101. Entre nas redes sociais do Canaltech buscando por @Canaltech nelas todas. Entre em contato pelo nosso e-mail: podcast@canaltech.com.br Entre no Canaltech Ofertas. Este episódio foi roteirizado e apresentado por Gustavo Minari. O programa também contou com reportagens de André Lourenti Magalhães, Ricardo Syozi, Paulo Amaral e Felipe Demartini. Edição por Yuri Souza. A revisão de áudio é do Wallace Moté. A trilha sonora é uma criação de Guilherme Zomer e a capa deste programa é feita por Erick Teixeira.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this conversation with @DrAlanBarnard, we explore how the principles of the Theory of Constraints (originally created by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt) can be used to not only drive significant business results but also to help us make high stake decisions as leaders. In this freewheeling conversation, we explore Dr Barnard's story about how he met with Dr. Goldratt and his famous motto. We explore who is a true expert He shares how he got into an argument with Dr. Goldratt and how he then formed a life long connection with Dr. Goldratt. He shares his most important lessons from all his interaction with Dr. Goldratt What is a Life Goal? The definition of a Life goal is a "Dream taken seriously - Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt I will not sacrifice my goal for anyone and I will not sacrifice anyone for my goal Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt He also introduces the concept of Theory of Constraint then, shares what is a constraint and the different kinds of constraints that we might face in any given system (Market/demand (external), Capacity (internal), Supply (external), Cash (Internal), Management Attention (internal) and probably the most crucial in any business. He also shares two ways to improve a constraint and therefore significantly improve your impact. He shares the importance of "Flow" or "Throughput" in any given system and how "Flow" is two-dimensional. He also shared the importance of understanding and increasing flow (time and velocity). He also shares different Ways to improve any given system. He also shares the story of how Tata Steel UK went from 1 Million Pound loss per day to 1 Million pound profit per day using Theory of constraints We constantly see good people make bad decisions. He explains why this happens and how to avoid them. He talks about what he calls as the agency equation. We then move into the realm of individuals and he shares how to identify what constrains our belief systems? Really? The power of questions - Really or unless. He also shares insights about how our minds work? He talks about the importance of learning prompt engineering to engage not just chatGPT but ourselves as well. He also shares insight on how to ask good questions as a leader and the 2 steps to make a breakthrough in any field. He also shares insight on how to measure people's performance and its impact on the business. Dr. Goldratt had started a movement called "Viable Vision". He shares more information about this viable vision and how can one go about achieving the same in their business. We then understand his own learning process and the key people he learns from - Herbert Simon and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. What is so obvious to him that all of us miss? We don't usually learn from experience but from Experiments Dr. Alan Barnard In Summary: We need to remember the 4F's - Flow, Focus, Finish and Fast Feedback to become influential and impactful leaders. More information about the resources we mentioned in the conversation: 1. Goldratt Research Labs: https://goldrattresearchlabs.com 2. Dr. Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag:   / dr-efrat-goldratt-ashlag-44046212a   3. My interview with Dr. Efrat:    • Delivering Projects on time, on budge...   Books discussed in the video: Goldratt's Rules of Flow by Dr. Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag: https://amzn.to/3FrAa25 The Goal by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt: https://amzn.to/3Q0iXSe Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: https://amzn.to/3s0ieIK Blackswan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: https://amzn.to/40d9ewz Apps mentioned by Dr. Alan Barnard: https://harmonyapps.com/apps/harmony-... Dr. Alan Barnard's podcast - https://dralanbarnard.com/category/im...

Why do we get overwhelmed when we have too many choices? Should we make our own decisions or copy other people's? And how can Angela manage her sock inventory? SOURCES:Arie Kruglanski, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park.Katy Milkman, professor of operations, information, and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania.Sylvia Plath, 20th-century American novelist and poet.Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College.Herbert Simon, professor of computer science and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.Will Smith, actor and film producer. RESOURCES:"Choice Deprivation, Choice Overload, and Satisfaction with Choices Across Six Nations," by Elena Reutskaja, Nathan N. Cheek, Barry Schwartz, et al. (Journal of International Marketing, 2021).Will, by Will Smith with Mark Manson (2021)."Can't Decide What to Stream? Netflix's New Feature Will Choose for You," by Katie Deighton (The Wall Street Journal, 2021).The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz (2004)."The Tyranny of Choice," by Barry Schwartz (Scientific American, 2004)."Maximizing Versus Satisficing: Happiness Is a Matter of Choice," by Barry Schwartz, Andrew Ward, John Monterosso, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Katherine White, and Darrin R. Lehman (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002)."Self-Determination: The Tyranny of Freedom," by Barry Schwartz (American Psychologist, 2000)."To 'Do the Right Thing' or to 'Just Do It': Locomotion and Assessment as Distinct Self-Regulatory Imperatives," by Arie Kruglanski, Erik P. Thompson, E. Tory Higgins, M. Nadir Atash, Antonio Pierro, James Y. Shah, and Scott Spiegel (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000)."Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment," by Herbert Simon (Psychological Review, 1956).Administrative Behavior, by Herbert Simon (1947). EXTRA:"Do You Mind if I Borrow Your Personality?" by No Stupid Questions (2022)."How Much Should We Be Able to Customize Our World?" by No Stupid Questions (2021)."Are You a Maximizer or a Satisficer?" by No Stupid Questions (2020).Cars.com Superbowl Ad (2009).

Economics model human behavior within the construct of rationality, but what is rational behavior? In this episode we meet Herbert Simon who shows that instrumental rationality is likely not as smart as bounded rationality, at least from a modeling point of view. He also shows that organizations matter for what is to be considered rational behavior. From here we move to Gary Becker the great proponent of the use of rational choice to almost all areas of the human experience, including the family and crime. We end wth Mirless who shows us that lack of information can lead to moral hazard even without opportunistic intent. In season 1 (Danish) we reviewed the history of economic thought before WWII. The coming seasons are dedicated to the Nobel Prize in Economics, and I am joined by economist Otto Brøns-Petersen. The Nobel prize is a good benchmark for how the field and profession of economics developed after WWII. We will focus both on the scientific contributions and on the people behind them. These are all star economists and worthy of your time and attention. Some will mainly feature in one episode, others in several. We therefore advice that you listen in the thematic order we propose – but it is up to you. Rest assured, we will cover all… Eventually.ReferencesBecker, Gary S. – Prize Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Tue. 4 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker/lecture/Becker, Gary S. – Banquet speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Tue. 4 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker/speech/Krueger, Anne O. “The Economics of Discrimination.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 71, no. 5, 1963, pp. 481–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1829018.Mirrlees, James A. – Prize Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Tue. 4 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1996/mirrlees/lecture/Simon, Herbert A. – Prize Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Tue. 4 Jul 2023. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1978/simon/lecture/

Diante dos avanços recentes das inteligências artificiais generativas, muitos estão se perguntando: será que designers vão perder seu trabalho? De fato, as ferramentas de design agora estão mas acessíveis para leigos mas, por outro, aumenta a demanda por designers de máquinas de projetar para leigos, os metadesigners e os infradesigners.Vídeo Slides Download dos slides em PDF Áudio Gravação realizada no Meetup de Produto da Coproduto. Veja a gravação completa e a peça de teatro mencionada. Inteligência artificial e o trabalho de design MP3 7 minutos Transcrição feita com Whisper + ChatGPT Vamos falar sobre inteligência artificial (IA) e o trabalho de design, trazendo uma reflexão rápida sobre as mudanças que a IA tem proposto para os profissionais desta área. Em primeiro lugar, é importante ressaltar que isso não é uma novidade. Na verdade, a inteligência artificial tem suas origens na área acadêmica, mais especificamente na pesquisa acadêmica sobre design. Quando os primeiros pesquisadores da área de IA começaram a explorar as possibilidades de um algoritmo de solução de problemas genérico, considerado o primeiro algoritmo de inteligência artificial, houve um grande interesse pela área de design. O caso de Herbert Simon, que trabalhou com Newell nessa publicação, é emblemático. Simon escreveu um livro clássico, a "Ciências do Artificial", e ajudou a fundamentar, junto com outros trabalhos, a pesquisa sobre o pensamento projetual. Deste ponto em diante, vários pesquisadores começaram a experimentar a implementação de máquinas que tentavam pensar como designers. O conceito de pensamento projetual, mais conhecido hoje como design thinking, foi popularizado por consultorias de inovação como a IDO e universidades como Stanford, a D.School. Suas origens estão nessa pesquisa sobre IA. Tudo que fazemos hoje no design, que é fortemente influenciado pelo conceito de design thinking, tem sua origem nas pesquisas de inteligência artificial. Naquela época, quando essas primeiras máquinas de projetar foram criadas, a grande questão era se os designers perderiam seus empregos para essas máquinas. A preocupação era que essas máquinas tornariam desnecessária a contratação de designers profissionais. O resultado, no entanto, foi negativo. Nos anos 70, a qualidade dos designs gerados por estas máquinas era muito baixa e elas não sabiam como lidar com conflitos comuns no processo de design. A partir disso, a pesquisa em design se focou na construção de ferramentas de design que possuíam um grau de inteligência artificial. Ferramentas de CAD e CAM são exemplos disso, e foram evoluindo ao longo do tempo. O foco era no computador ajudando no design, não substituindo o designer. Mais recentemente, vimos a disseminação de inteligências artificiais generativas capazes de sintetizar imagens originais a partir de um prompt de texto. Isso despertou o interesse dos leigos, pessoas que não são designers profissionais, e trouxe de volta a pergunta: essas IAs vão tornar obsoleto o trabalho do designer? Atualmente, as IAs estão sendo integradas a ferramentas profissionais como Adobe Firefly e outras, trazendo benefícios para os profissionais de design. Acredito que o caminho a ser seguido é esse. As ferramentas voltadas para leigos provavelmente se tornarão obsoletas rapidamente, pois não conseguem oferecer o controle necessário para produzir as imagens desejadas no projeto. Este fato se torna mais evidente quando começamos a conectar diferentes IAs. Por exemplo, ao utilizar uma IA como o GPT para planejar uma pesquisa de experiências, que é uma atividade de metadesign, e conectá-la com uma ferramenta de síntese de imagem, temos uma visão ampla do potencial da integração entre diferentes IAs. No entanto, fica a dúvida: os designers perderão seus trabalhos e todas as imagens serão geradas por este tipo de integração de IAs? Acredito que a principal questão não é tanto a perda de empregos, mas a qualidade do trabalho. Com a velocidade e a pressão crescentes, há o risco de que a IA precarize o trabalho. Esta é uma das áreas que temos investigado em nossa pesquisa. Tentamos comunicar essa realidade aos novos estudantes através de uma narrativa teatral que envolvia personagens fictícios. Nessa história, um cliente solicita a uma IA que crie o logo da sua empresa, enquanto um designer, em uma situação precária de trabalho, cria a logo como se fosse a IA. Ainda não vemos essa realidade no design, mas estamos especulando sobre esse futuro através do que chamamos de design prospectivo. Acreditamos que o futuro da profissão está no metadesign, ou seja, o design de IAs. Para finalizar, gostaria de dizer que acredito que os designers continuarão tendo muito trabalho se eles conseguirem projetar o próprio pensamento projetual, em vez de reproduzir metodologias de design thinking importadas com viéses coloniais que nem sempre atendem aos nossos clientes e usuários. Precisamos projetar nossas próprias metodologias, nossas próprias ferramentas e nossas próprias inteligências artificiais. Isso é estudado em duas áreas acadêmicas que chamamos de metadesign e infradesign. Esse é o futuro da profissão.Comente este post

Artificial intelligence is awesome -- but should we fear it? How can we stay in charge? Sam Bowman joins Vasant Dhar in episode 58 of Brave New World to discuss the Control Problem -- and more.   Also check out: 1. Sam Bowman at NYU Courant, LinkedIn,Twitter and Google Scholar. 2.  Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models -- Samuel R Bowman et al. 3. Herbert Simon, Harry Pople and Norbert Wiener. 4. Language Models as Agent Models -- Jacob Andreas. 5.  The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values — Brian Christian. 6. Human Compatible — Stuart Russell. 7. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman. 8. ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks --Alex Krizhevsky et al. Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. Subscription is free!

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT have been making headlines recently, leading to speculation about the future of AI. In this special episode, we hear from computer scientists about their hopes for the next ten, twenty, and fifty years of the field. Joseph Newcomer, Tom Mitchell, Manuela Veloso, José Moura, Roger Dannenberg, James Morris, Pamela McCorduck, and Alex Waibel—all well-known for their research in AI—discuss the potential of the field and the ethical, sociopolitical, and environmental impacts we may see in the coming years.    Artificial intelligence has deep roots at Carnegie Mellon University—it was home to founders Herbert Simon and Allen Newell—and the university continues to be at the center of its development. In some versions of the future, your alarm clock app will be able to adjust itself based on the weather. In others, chatbots will read, answer, and manage overflowing email inboxes, and an AI singer might form an AI band to make AI music. As this technology becomes more ubiquitous, it will continue impacting our world in ways we cannot always predict.

Welcome! Church Online is a community of people all over the experiencing God and connecting with one another like never before in history. Introduce yourself in the chat and let us know when you're from! Get Connected Check us out on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram Find a Small Group www.southpoint4u.com/groups Learn more about SouthPoint at Growth Track www.southpoint4u.com/growthtrack Find out more at www.southpoint4u.com Notes Happy-Sad Bored-Excited Peaceful-Angry Loyalty-Infatuated Desire-Envy Pleasure-Shame Unmanaged feelings will lead to unwise decisions Feelings are indicators not dictators – Lysa TerKeurst All of us have fallen for crazy because it disguises itself as pleasure with no price-tag. Everyone has…Crazy thoughts, Crazy Feelings, Crazy Opportunities, Crazy Influences Feelings are real but not always right. Unmanaged feelings will lead to unwise decisions. When we make decisions, we're not always in charge. You don't have to be a neuroscientist to see how the emotional brain can badly distort judgement. - Harvard Business Review The brain's desire for rewards is a principal source of bad judgement, in teenagers and adults alike. - Harvard Business Review …your emotions serve as a cueing system—But it is also not a very smart system because it has many false alarms. There are emotional misfires. Thus, you need to evaluate your response to see if it is appropriate. - Psychology Today …emotions influence, skew or sometimes completely determine the outcome of a large number of decisions we are confronted with in a day. - Herbert Simon, American Nobel Laureate Scientist Awareness that there is a constant and complex dance between emotions and feelings could significantly improve your emotional intelligence, including your decision-making ability. - Herbert Simon, American Nobel Laureate Scientist What you think is the right road may lead to death. Proverbs 23:7 They went to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and Jesus said, “Sit here while I go and pray.” He took Peter, James, and John with him, and he became deeply troubled and distressed. Mark 14:32-35 He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Mark 14:32-35 He went on a little farther and fell to the ground. He prayed that, if it were possible, the awful hour awaiting him might pass him by. Mark 14:32-35 There's a…time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. Ecclesiastes 3:3-4 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—all the more as you see the day approaching. Hebrews 10:24-25 Jesus modeled that connection grounds us in a truth greater than our crazy “feelings” Connection with Christ, Connection with closest, Connection with common Unmanaged feelings will lead to unwise decisions Authentic connection grounds us to a truth greater than our feelings

In recent decades behavioural economics has emerged as a significant field in its own right. With a history going back almost a century and incorporating insights from Nobel prize winners such as Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, behavioural economics seems to promise a meaningful alternative to the assumptions of rational human behaviour which underpin classical economics. Yet what really is behavioural economics? And more importantly what are the challenges which now appear likely to undermine behavioural economics seemingly inexorable progress rise to the top of the academic standings? To discuss this I am delighted to be joined by Dr Jason Collins of University of Technology Sydney. Dr Jason Collins is a Senior Lecturer in the Economics Discipline Group at University of Technology Sydney and Program Director for the Graduate Certificate and Master of Behavioural Economics. Jason joined UTS in January 2022 following a career in industry and government. Jason co-founded and led PwC Australia's behavioural economics practice, and built and led data science and consumer insights teams at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). He has also worked as a lawyer, environmental campaigner, and an economic policy adviser with the Australian Treasury Jason holds a Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia in which his research focussed on the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology. Jason blogs regularly at Jason https://www.jasoncollins.blog/ and you can find out more about his thoughts on biases and behavioural economics in this article: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/biases-the-wrong-model/

MentionedOne of Glenn's talks on engineering.The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good.Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, 2010David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It", 1986. The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting Intellectual Property by removing a whole talk that uses a short clip is far more important than Mr. Ford's ideas.Glenn's other recommendations:What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter VincentiEngineering and the Mind's Eye, by Eugene S. FergusonDefinition of the Engineering Method, by Billy Vaughn KoenA number of Henry Petroski's books shed valuable light on the actual practice of engineering:To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful DesignInvention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to ThingDesign Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in EngineeringSuccess through Failure: The Paradox of DesignTo Forgive Design: Understanding FailureEngineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (this is quite different from the others, but by telling the real, non-idealized tale of how so many great bridges were built — including several disastrous failures and many other near failures — this book was instrumental in helping me understand how inaccurate the common stereotype of engineering really is)CreditsImage of double effect distillation chemical plant via Wikimedia Commons. User:Luigi Chiesa, CC BY 3.0. Cropped by Brian Marick.

"La alta creatividad es cuando uno es capaz de hacerse preguntas que nunca nadie antes ha hecho." - Carlos Osorio ( 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Maps and Blueprint; the Two Sides of the Alignment Equation, published by Nora Ammann on October 25, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. Tl;dr In this post, I will introduce two conceptual tools I found useful when thinking about (or introducing people to) AI alignment. Namely, I introduce the distinction between Maps and Blueprints (part 1), describe (what I call) the Two Sides of the “Alignment Equation” (part 2), and discuss how all these things relate to each other (part 3). Part 1: Map and Blueprint Most people reading this will already be familiar with the Map–Territory distinction. In this metaphor, the territory represents reality and the map represents your current best understanding of reality. The corollaries: “the map is not the territory”; “maps are never true, but they can be more or less useful”, etc. I want to introduce one more idea into this picture: the blueprint. If the map is what we construct from investigating the word, a blueprint is what allows us to render a (new) bit of territory (e.g., building some artefact). Roughly speaking, map-making is closer to what science is trying to do, while blueprint-making is closer to what engineering is about. While maps are causally posterior to the territory (they are drawn based on what we know about existing territory by looking at it), blueprints are causally prior (they are used to create new bits of territory). In other words, the red arrows in the diagram below depict the authorial relationship between these concepts. Figure 1: The relationship between territory, maps, and blueprints; arrows represent an authorial relationship. (There is an interesting question as to what sort of epistemic object blueprints are (e.g., compared to maps). For those curious, I can recommend Herbert Simon's "The Sciences of the Artificial" which discusses how (if at all) we can make "the artificial"/design/blueprints our subject of study. Part 2: Two sides of the “Alignment Equation” Here is a simple model that intends to capture the basic structure of the AI alignment problem. I will call it the “Alignment Equation”: Let us assume there are two (intelligent) agents that stand in relationship R to one another. Ri can take different shapes, among which is Raligned, which is a relationship that guarantees alignment between the two agents. Let us name our two agents O and S, referring to the object and subject of this alignment endeavour, respectively. Specifically, we're trying to align O with S, i.e., Raligned, OS. Figure 2: The “alignment equation”, with the object of alignment on one side and the subject of alignment on the other. In other words, when we talk about AI alignment, we talk about how we want one agent—in this case, the AI system(s), i.e., the object of alignment—to stand in a particular relationship to the subject of alignment (e.g., human intents, human values, etc.)—namely, an aligned relationship. Of course, this wee toy model fails to capture a lot of relevant nuance. And yet, it lets us point at and talk about some critical subparts of the problem in fairly simple terms. For example: 1. Finding the right specification for O and S In the toy model, O and S are placeholders. For example, O might represent a single centralised AI system, or multiple centralised AI systems, or a distributed network of AI services, etc. S might represent the intents or preferences of an individual human, or the (~aggregate) values of a collective of humans, or of sentient beings more generally, or something else yet. Finding the right ways to fill in the placeholders matters, and is itself subject to disagreement and study. 2. Finding mechanisms that can shape R Different mechanisms can define or shape the relationship R. We can understand work on AI alignment as exploring what different mechanisms we have at hand and how to a...

Allan Fleming (1929 – 1977) was a Canadian graphic designer best known for having created the Canadian National Railway logo, for designing the 1967 book Canada: A Year of the Land and for "revolutionizing" the look of scholarly publishing in North America in the 1970s with his work at University of Toronto Press.   In 1953 Allan moved to England to work as a graphic designer, and to learn about the practice from eminent English designers and design historians such as Stanley Morison, Oliver Simon, Herbert Simon, and Beatrice Warde. In 1955 he returned to Toronto where he pulled down a job as director of creative services at the typographic firm Cooper and Beatty Ltd. In 1962 he was appointed art director at Maclean's magazine. From 1963 to 1968 he was director of creative services at MacLaren Advertising and from 1968 to1976 he was chief book designer at the University of Toronto Press.     Throughout his career, Allan designed or consulted on the creation of many iconic Canadian images for clients including Canada Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Liberal Party of Canada, the Hudson Bay Company, Ontario Hydro, and the Canada Council.   His daughter Martha Fleming,  a museum professional and academic, wrote and edited two issues of The Devil's Artisan in 2008 which were devoted to Allan. We met via Zoom to discuss them and the many achievements of this extraordinary Canadian.   

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you'll find the audio version of two recent posts: “The Pathologies of the Attention Economy” and “Impoverished Emotional Lives.” I've not combined audio from two separate installments before, but the second is a short “Is this anything?” post, so I thought it would be fine to include it here. (By the way, I realized after the fact that I thoughtlessly mispronounced Herbert Simon's name as Simone. I'm not, however, sufficiently embarrassed to go back and re-record or edit the audio. So there you have it.)If you've been reading over the past few months, you know that I've gone back and forth on how best to deliver the audio version of the essays. I've settled for now on this method, which is to send out a supplement to the text version of the essay. Because not all of you listen to the audio version, I'll include some additional materials (links, resources, etc.) so that this email is not without potential value to those who do not listen to the audio. Farewell Real LifeI noted in a footnote recently that Real Life Magazine had lost its funding and would be shutting down. This is a shame. Real Life consistently published smart and thoughtful essays exploring various dimensions of internet culture. I had the pleasure of writing three pieces for the magazine between 2018 and 2019: ”The Easy Way Out,” “Always On,” and “Personal Panopticons.” I was also pleasantly surprised to encounter essays in the past year or two drawing on the work of Ivan Illich: “Labors of Love” and “Appropriate Measures,” each co-authored by Jackie Brown and Philippe Mesly, as well as “Doctor's Orders” by Aimee Walleston. And at any given time I've usually had a handful of Real Life essays open in tabs waiting to be read or shared. Here are some more recent pieces that are worth your time: “Our Friend the Atom The aesthetics of the Atomic Age helped whitewash the threat of nuclear disaster,” “Hard to See How trauma became synonymous with authenticity,” and “Life's a Glitch The non-apocalypse of Y2K obscures the lessons it has for the present.” LinksThe latest installment in Jon Askonas's ongoing series in The New Atlantis is out from behind the paywall today. In “How Stewart Made Tucker,” Askonas weaves a compelling account of how Jon Stewart prepared the way for Tucker Carlson and others: In his quest to turn real news from the exception into the norm, he pioneered a business model that made it nearly impossible. It's a model of content production and audience catering perfectly suited to monetize alternate realities delivered to fragmented audiences. It tells us what we want to hear and leaves us with the sense that “they” have departed for fantasy worlds while “we” have our heads on straight. Americans finally have what they didn't before. The phony theatrics have been destroyed — and replaced not by an earnest new above-the-fray centrism but a more authentic fanaticism.You can find earlier installments in the series here: Reality — A post-mortem. Reading through the essay, I was struck again and again by how foreign and distant the world of late 90s and early aughts. In any case, the Jon's work in this series is worth your time. Kashmir Hill spent a lot of time in Meta's Horizons to tell us about life in the metaverse: My goal was to visit at every hour of the day and night, all 24 of them at least once, to learn the ebbs and flows of Horizon and to meet the metaverse's earliest adopters. I gave up television, books and a lot of sleep over the past few months to spend dozens of hours as an animated, floating, legless version of myself.I wanted to understand who was currently there and why, and whether the rest of us would ever want to join them. Ian Bogost on smart thermostats and the claims made on their behalf: After looking into the matter, I'm less confused but more distressed: Smart heating and cooling is even more knotted up than I thought. Ultimately, your smart thermostat isn't made to help you. It's there to help others—for reasons that might or might not benefit you directly, or ever.Sun-ha Hong's paper on predictions without futures. From the abstract: … the growing emphasis on prediction as AI's skeleton key to all social problems constitutes what religious studies calls cosmograms: universalizing models that govern how facts and values relate to each other, providing a common and normative point of reference. In a predictive paradigm, social problems are made conceivable only as objects of calculative control—control that can never be fulfilled but that persists as an eternally deferred and recycled horizon. I show how this technofuture is maintained not so much by producing literally accurate predictions of future events but through ritualized demonstrations of predictive time.MiscellanyAs I wrote about the possibility that the structure of online experience might impoverish our emotional lives, I recalled the opening paragraph of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages. I can't say that I have a straightforward connection to make between “the passionate intensity of life” Huizinga describes and my own speculations the affective consequences of digital media, but I think there may be something worth getting at. When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every even, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of a tight, invariable life style. The great events of human life—birth, marriage, death—by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of divine mystery. But even the lesser events—a journey, labor, a visit—were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions. From the perspective of media ecology, the shift to print as the dominant cultural medium is interpreted as having the effect of tempering the emotional intensity of oral culture and tending instead toward an ironizing effect as it generates a distance between an emotion and its experssion. Digital media curiously scrambles these dynamics by generating an instantaneity of delivery that mimics the immediacy of physical presence. In 2019, I wrote in The New Atlantis about how digital media scrambles the pscyhodynamics (Walter Ong's phrase) of orality and literacy in often unhelpful ways: “The Inescapable Town Square.” Here's a bit from that piece: The result is that we combine the weaknesses of each medium while losing their strengths. We are thrust once more into a live, immediate, and active communicative context — the moment regains its heat — but we remain without the non-verbal cues that sustain meaning-making in such contexts. We lose whatever moderating influence the full presence of another human being before us might cast on the passions the moment engendered. This not-altogether-present and not-altogether-absent audience encourages a kind of performative pugilism.To my knowledge, Ivan Illich never met nor corresponded with Hannah Arendt. However, in my efforts to “break bread with the dead,” as Auden once put it, they're often seated together at the table. In a similarly convivial spirit, here is an excerpt from a recent book by Alissa Wilkinson: I learn from Hannah Arendt that a feast is only possible among friends, or people whose hearts are open to becoming friends. Or you could put it another way: any meal can become a feast when shared with friends engaged in the activity of thinking their way through the world and loving it together. A mere meal is a necessity for life, a fact of being human. But it is transformed into something much more important, something vital to the life of the world, when the people who share the table are engaging in the practices of love and of thinking.Finally, here's a paragraph from Jacques Ellul's Propaganda recently highlighted by Jeffrey Bilbro: In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, man himself is the master of his life; in individualist reality each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not at all master of his own life. As long as solidly constituted groups exist, those who are integrated into them are subject to them. But at the same time they are protected by them against such external influences as propaganda. An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups. Because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life, they are not easily penetrated by propaganda.Cheers! Hope you are all well, Michael Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

D.J. talks about his thesis, the Nodes project, Welcome to Design, Typography, Research Methods, and a potential pathway for research. Other mentions: Arturo Escobar, Chile, John Heskett, Herbert Simon, Simon Veil, and Visible Language. Contact D.J.: trischdj@ucmail.uc.edu

Alicia Juarrero is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George's Community College and the author of Dynamics in Action, a text that many consider to have laid the foundation for how we think about complexity in our society. So Alicia is a philosopher for this moment in human history.Show Notes:Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (03:31)Live the questionsDuino ElegiesUser Friendly by Cliff Kuang (11:50)Herbert Simon and the importance of information diet (12:50)The Self-Organizing Universe by Erich Jantsch (15:00)Dave Snowden Cynefin Framework (20:00)Dave on OriginsAristotelian four causes (22:30)Emergence (27:40)Network thinking (28:20)Barabási Albert-LászlóSteven StrogatzMereology (31:00)Order Out of Chaos by Prigogine, Stengers, and Toffler (32:15)Complicated vs complex (38:00)John Holland "fail safe and safe fail" (40:00)Graceful Extensibilityby David Woods (41:20)Vector Analytica (43:20)Healthy relationality (54:00)Trust (59:15)Danielle Allen (01:01:00)Flourishing Commons newsletter (01:02:00)Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom Lightning round (01:03:20)Book: Order Out of ChaosPassion: reading broadlyHeart sing: how design creates context that also creates affordancesThe Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman User Friendly by Cliff KuangScrewed up: attention to ideas over people-orientated application of those ideasFind Alicia online:Website'Five-Cut Fridays' five-song music playlist series  Alicia's playlist

Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books, and music. Why is this happening?My guest today is Nick Seaver, who is a cultural anthropologist at Tufts University. And for the last decade or so, Nick has studied the social processes underlying the creation of music recommender systems, which form the algorithmic basis for companies like Spotify and Pandora. I've admired Nick's work for a long time. And as an anthropologist, he is interested not necessarily in the nitty gritty details of how these algorithms are constructed, but rather in who is constructing them and what these people believe they are doing when they make decisions about how the algorithms ought to work.The core of Nick's work centers around taste, and how these companies and their algorithms subtly shape not only what we consume, but what we like. When Nick started this line of work in the early 2010s, it really wasn't clear how big of an impact these recommender systems would have on our society. Now, his expertise gives an evermore incisive look at the central themes of many large societal conversations around the content we consume and our everyday digital existence. But I came into this conversation with Mastroianni's question at the top of my mind, and I think Nick's research can give a crucial insight, at least into one piece of the puzzle.One of Nick's papers relates an ethnographic study of music recommender system engineers. In the interest of protecting the identity of his informants, he gives the company a fictional name, but it bears conspicuous resemblance to Spotify. As a naive observer, one might think that the way these engineers think about their audience is in terms of demography: this kind of person likes this kind of music. If they can figure out the kind of person you are, they can recommend music that you'll probably like. But that turns out not to be the dimension of largest variance.Instead, Nick introduces the concept of “avidity.” Essentially, how much effort is a listener willing to put in to find new music? This turns out to be the first distinction that these engineers make between listeners. And it forms a pyramid. On the bottom you have what one of his informants called the “musically indifferent.” This makes up the majority of listeners. Their ideal listening experience is “lean-back.” They want to press play, then leave the whole thing alone. It is a passive listening experience — no skipping songs, no wondering what other tracks might be on the album. From there, it goes from “casual” and “engaged” listeners to the top of the pyramid, which is “musical savant.” These are “lean-in” listeners who are taking an active role in discovering new and different kinds of music.“The challenge,” Nick writes, “is that all of these listeners wanted different things out of a recommender system.” Quoting one of his informants, codename Peter, he says: “in any of these four sectors, it's a different ball game in how you want to engage them.” As Nick summarizes it: “what worked for one group might fail for another.”Nick continues here: "as Peter explained to me, lean-back listeners represented the bulk of the potential market for music recommendation in spite of their relatively low status in the pyramid. There were more of them. They were more in need of the kind of assistance recommenders could offer and successfully capturing them could make 'the big bucks' for a company."Nick relates the slightly more forthcoming perspective of another engineer, codename Oliver: "it's hard to recommend shitty music to people who want shitty music," he said, expressing the burden of a music recommendation developer caught between two competing evaluative schemes: his own idea about what makes good music and what he recognizes as the proper criteria for evaluating a recommender system.In the course of our conversation, Nick and I cover not only his studies of music recommender systems, but also his more recent studies taking an anthropological approach to attention. We tend to think of attention as this highly individualized process. For example, of gazing into the screen of your phone or turning your head to identify the source of an unexpected noise. But attention is also a social and cultural process. We attend collectively to certain stories, certain memes, certain ideas. What exactly the connection is between these two forms of attention is not obvious. And Nick's current line of work is an attempt to draw it out.But the larger theme here is that music recommender systems are one battle in the larger war for our collective attention. What Spotify, Netflix, and Twitter all have in common is that their success is proportional to the extent to which they can dominate our attention. This is known in Silicon Valley as the idea of "persuasive technology." And one way to begin to understand the origins of cultural oligopolies starts with Nick's observation about avidity. The vast majority of listeners or viewers tend to go with the default option with which they're presented. Another way of putting it is that their preferred mode is habitual autopilot.While recommender systems make up just one part of this content ecosystem. This principle remains stable across its many different layers. The more we go with our habitual default options, the more control these platforms have over us. The more we rely on these companies to define our tastes for us, the more homogenous our tastes will become.Nick's forthcoming book is “Computing Taste.” It comes out in December 2022. Keep an eye out for it. And if you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe to my Substack newsletter at againsthabit.com or leave a five star review on iTunes.Thank you for listening. Here is Nick Seaver.Cody: One of your current areas of interest is attention. And while I think this is a topic that is a pillar of how we understand our own modern lives and definitely has a long history of study in fields like psychology, it's not really something that anthropologists have covered as much in a direct way. So I'm curious to get your current perspective on why people talk about attention so much, what this word might really mean, and what an anthropological take on it might show us.[00:07:46] Nick: Yeah. My interest in attention stemmed from the earlier work that I did, sort of my PhD dissertation project and first book, which was about the developers of music recommender systems. And one of the things you realize if you, you know, study recommender systems at all, is that people are really interested in attention.They're interested in ways that you measure — how you measure if someone is listening to some music, what they like on the basis of their listening habits, your interest in trying to encourage them to listen more, to do all this stuff with their attention. And that was going to lurking in the background for me for a long time.So when I had a chance to design a new seminar to teach at Tufts for our anthropology undergraduates I thought, you know, okay, I want to learn more about attention and try to find stuff about it. So I proposed a course, which I called "how to pay attention," uh, which was a little bit of a click baity title. We don't really do attention hacks or anything. And it was a chance for me to read really broadly across media studies about across history, across psychology, cognitive science, uh, and some anthropology art history and so on to think about like, what is this thing? Like, what's this, this concept that seems so important for the way that people describe anything in the world now.And as an anthropologist, I was, uh, struck by that because, you know, when you find a concept that does so much work for people, it's — I would argue it's hard to find one that is doing more work in the present moment than attention — you know you've got something culturally rich. But a lot of the ways we talk about attention in public, the kind of popular discourse around attention is very narrow. It's very individualizing. It's very sort of a thing that happens in individual brains.So the line I like to give, uh, is that, you know, the question is: what would it look like to take an anthropological approach to attention? Well, it would look like putting attention in a social context and in a cultural context.And my thumbnail definitions of those are, you know, society is this sort of world of relationships and roles in which people live. It's where you have bosses and spouses and professors and students and pets and doctors and sheriffs and all these other kinds of roles that people occupy. And we clearly pay attention within those social structures, right? We pay attention to the same things as each other. If I'm sitting in a classroom with students, they're paying attention to me and each other in certain ways that are governed by our social roles and relationships. And we also pay attention in a cultural context, which means we pay attention in a world where we value certain things, sort of arbitrarily where we make associations between certain kinds of entities and other entities.So we might say, oh, let's, you know, focus our attention over here. And we talk about our attention as though it's a kind of lens or an optical instrument, or we'll talk about attention as being like a filter, right? We have information overload because there's not enough filtering happening between information and the world in our heads.So these are all cultural phenomenon. There's nothing intrinsically attention-like about them. And to my mind studying how people make sense of attention in the present moment in these cultural contexts, uh, is just a fascinating question. So that's the sort of how I got into it and where I think an anthropological approach is different from the sort of stereotypical psychological approach.Not that all psychologists are like this, um, but you know, the stereotypical psychology approach would be, let's do experiments with reaction times and individual people, you know, in a lab setting. And that's not really what I'm interested in. I'm really interested in the fact that people talk about attention all the time and they use it to explain all sorts of things and they think that it's really important.[00:11:12] Cody: There's definitely a trope in psychology that whatever you are studying. Whether it's memory or visual search or whatever it is, you can kind of at always some point just boil it down to, you know, some explanation: Oh, well this is what the person is attending to. This is, this is what their attention is focused on. But it's not actually — it's often kind of just a hand-waving way of, of saying, oh, well, yeah, it's what they're concentrating on without having, having any specific idea of what that really means. So I'm kind of curious what, what does putting the idea of attention in a social and cultural context — what do you think we've misunderstood about attention by individualizing and overlooking those social and cultural contexts?[00:12:01] Nick: I would say one thing is to note that there are lots of folks working in the sort of intersection of philosophy and cognitive science who are very interested in that kind of circularity of, uh, of explanation that you just described. Right. That are like: wait a minute, what does attention mean then? One of the ones that I am familiar with her work — Carolyn Dicey Jennings is one such philosopher who works in close collaboration with cognitive scientists and is sort of interested in offering a philosophically rigorous account of attention that isn't just like the thing that you point to when you've given up on giving explanations.But one reason I love reading and cognitive science around this is that you've started to realize that it seems really obvious what attention is. And of course, the famous line that everyone has to quote in all of their articles and books seems to be from William James, the godfather of American psychology who says everyone knows what attention is.And then gives you the sort of basic definition of, you know, it's when you, uh, focus on something and sort of don't focus on other things. But of course, when you push on attention, it's not really clear what it is. And it's sort of a grab bag concept that pulls together all sorts of stuff, right? It includes your ability to focus for a long time or so your sort of endurance. It includes vigilance, right? It includes the sheer sort of, uh, arousal state. Like if you're really sleepy, you're maybe not as attentive. It also includes that basic filtering capacity, the ability to, you know, in a crowded room, to listen to the person who's talking to me, instead of hearing all of the other stuff that's happening. There's all these things that you may not necessarily want to, or need to combine into a single concept.But there's not really internal coherence there. But while that's sort of a problem for psychologists, they right. They say we want to be studying one thing. We don't want to be accidentally mixing a bunch of different references. It's really normal in a cultural context, right? For any given symbol, say attention as a symbol here, to mean lots of different things and to be specifically a way to sort of draw together a bunch of different discourses in one place.So to my mind, that got me thinking, well, you know, attention just is a cultural phenomenon, just like as a defined thing. Like the fact that we think of, uh, you know, a first grader's ability to sit in their chair in the classroom for a long time, we think of that as being the same thing as my ability to, you know, listen to you and not just have my mind wander off to some other thing, while we're talking — those don't have to be the same as each other. And yet we think of them as being totally connected to each other.Another example I like to give often to talk about the sort of various layers at which attention works — in the way that, you know, in sort of common usage — has to do with Donald Trump, which is not the most fun example but there was a lot of attentional discourse around Trump, which ranged from when he was elected this sense of like, oh, you know, the press was not paying attention to the right people. This was a surprise to some people because there was not collective attention to the right parts of society. There was not an awareness that was happening.So there's an attention that's not an individual's attention, right? That's like everybody's attention. But what is that? That's not the same thing as what happens in the brain.All of those things tangled together through this weirdo concept that nobody seems to really question. We really take it for granted as like an obvious, important thing.[00:15:10] Cody: You mentioned in one of your papers, this metaphor that I'm really interested in. And it's that the way we usually talk about attention is in terms of "paying" attention, which is based in an economic metaphor. and certainly I hear a lot of people talking about like, "okay, well your most valuable asset is your time. No, no, no. Actually wait, that's just the convention. Really, your most valuable asset is your attention, which is kind of this cycle, psychological function of time." But anyway, that's kind of how we normally talk about attention, but you propose this idea that actually the sort of verb there should be "doing" attention as in some sort of action forward notion of what it means to attend.So can you say a little bit more about what that means?[00:16:00] Nick: Clearly the economic metaphor is in many ways the dominant attentional metaphor at the moment. Of course, there's a sense of paying attention. And there's also this idea that we live in an attention economy, right. And the classic explanation for what that means is from Herbert Simon, who is a sort of cognitive scientist, political scientist, economist, et cetera, working in the sort of late post-war period in the United States where he says, you know, you might say we live in an information economy. But that's not really true because we have tons of information. Information is not scarce, but information consumes attention. And therefore attention is the scarce resource. And if economics is the study of how to allocate scarce resources, that means that attention is the thing that is being economized.That's not an argument we have to agree with necessarily, but that's the sort of groundwork for thinking about how attention itself might be an economic kind of thing and how it's become really, really natural I think for lots of people across all sorts of political orientations and disciplinary affiliations to think of their attention as being really like naturally economic, right? We might question all sorts of applications of economic logics to other domains, but attention is a hard nut to crack. It really feels like, you know, sure, we don't like this way that people like try to economize every last part of our lives, but attention isn't that just, you know, you have a limited amount of it. You have a limited amount of time. What else can you, can you have? And so I think one of the things you're pointing to in your, in your question, is this history in the social sciences have a real skepticism around the role of money in society.So the classic spot for this is Georg Simmel, the sociologist writing around the turn of the 20th century, who gives what my PhD advisor used to call the money as acid hypothesis, which was this argument that when you introduce sort of money and, and, you know, uh, assigning prices to things into domains where it didn't exist before, it tends to reduce everything to the monetary as like a lowest common denominator. Right?You start to think of everything in terms of how much it's worth. And that feels not great in a lot of domains. It allows some people to do some things very strategically. Um, but generally we, we take that as a sort of sad, sad thing that money has to sort of dissolve some of the richness of social interaction.Um, and it becomes sort of the, you know, the basis for everything. It's the source of the phrase, you know, time is money, right? This idea of time is money. That's why it's important. But when you're pointing at is now we've got a kind of shift in the way that that discourse happens, right? It's not really the case that time is money. It's more, that money lets you buy time. And some people are suggesting that the basic thing, the sort of most fundamental value thing is your time or maybe your attention.And that is so interesting to me because now we've got the attention as acid hypothesis, which is that attention and this sort of an accountant, any kind of social life in terms of how much attention we're paying to what, um, it becomes the, the framework in which basically anything, uh, can be, can be expressed — in an almost, it feels more fundamental than money to some people, right? It feels more essential. If money is an arbitrary and position, attention is just the real thing.And as anthropologist, my interest is not so much in deciding whether that's true or not. But in cataloging and noting the way that that works, the way that people talk about it, because it's something that's pretty emergent at the moment. But it's not quite obvious to folks like what, what it's going to mean. Like what's going to happen, as people take this more and more seriously.[00:19:32] Cody: So, as you alluded to at the beginning, attention is kind of this big, big topic that we all understand is this governing force in our lives. We're not really sure what it is in either a colloquial sense or a professional academic sense. But it's definitely, whatever it is, it's critical to whatever we're doing over here in psychology.And you began to understand that through your research in music recommender systems. And that has been your main area of study for the past 10 years or so the kind of recommender systems and algorithms used by platforms like Spotify and Pandora and all that sort of stuff. So you've done a series of in-depth ethnographic studies, which will come together in your book, Computing Taste, which I'm really looking forward to reading when it's out this December. Um, but I want to get into some of that material now.[00:20:28] Nick: Sure.[00:20:29] Cody: So one of my favorite papers of yours is called "Seeing Like an Infrastructure: avidity and difference in algorithmic recommendation." So can you tell me a little bit about this concept of avidity and how it plays out in the way engineers think about musical recommenders systems.[00:20:48] Nick: So that piece, seeing like an infrastructure, came about — it's going to be partly in this book, but the basic gist of it was this: I wanted to know how the people building recommender systems for music in particular thought about their users. This is sort of basic stuff. But it's very important, right?The way you build your technology, uh, is going to be shaped by the people that you think use it. Um, a side question that sort of rose to great public prominence during the time that I was working on this project, you know, over the past, like you said, 10 or 12 years was the question of diversity within these fields.So it is, you know, a well-known problem, certainly by now, um, that there is a lot of demographic homogeneity in tech companies and among the people who build these software systems. And many people suggest that the shortcomings are some of the shortcomings of these systems, um, or, you know, biased outputs, some of the racist outcomes we get from some machine learning systems, maybe directly traceable to that lack of diversity on the teams of the people who, who build them.Uh, so aside question here for me was how did the people building these systems understand diversity, uh, because there's more than one way to think about what diversity means and what kind of effect it might have on the technologies that you build. So one of the things I realized was that when people talked about music listeners, as you know, developers of recommender systems, they were very well aware that the people who used a recommender system were not really like the people who built the recommender system.And that's a kind of realization that doesn't always happen. It's been the subject of critique in lots of domains. Some people call the absence of that the iMethodology, which is what we use to say, you know, someone builds a system because it meets their own needs and they assume that they are, uh, like their users.So you get this class of startup ideas, you know, like, um, laundry delivery, uh, which is because, you know, you've got a bunch of dudes who have just graduated from college and they don't want to do their own laundry, and they're trying to solve their own problems, right. This kind of sector and, uh, style of development.But the people working on music recommendation seems pretty aware, uh, that they, they're not like the people who are using this. So the question then is in how — and well, the main thing that people would talk about when they talked about how they were different from their users and in how their users might be different from each other was what I ended up calling avidity, which is sort of my term, um, for a collection of ideas that you could sum up basically as how into music are people, right?How, how avidly do they seek out new music? How much do they care about music? How much should they want to listen to music? You know, how much work do they want to put into, uh, finding things to listen to and a recommender system, as you might guess, uh, is generally, uh, geared, especially these days toward less avid listeners, right? They're intended for people who don't really want to put that much effort into deciding what to listen to. If you knew what you wanted to listen to, you would not need an algorithmic recommendation.But on the other hand, the people who worked in these companies, they generally were very, very enthusiastic about music. And so when they were building recommender systems, they understood themselves as having to build those for someone that was not like them, which poses this question: how do you know what your users are like then? If they're not like you, what are you going to do?And so in short, the argument and the pieces that they come to understand their users primarily through the infrastructures that they build. So they learn things about their users, through the data collection apparatus or through the infrastructure that they create. An infrastructure is designed to capture things like how much you listen, at where you click, you know, the frequency of your listening to certain artists and so on. And in that data collection, what's most obvious? Avidity.How much you listen, how much clicking you do, because here's a database that's, you know, full of click events, listening events and so on. And so I argue in that piece that avidity is both a kind of cultural theory about how people are different from each other, but also something that's very closely tied to the specific infrastructure that they work on.So they want to try to be rational. They want to try to be objective. They don't want to try to build from their own personal experience. They're aware of that shortcoming. But the solution for that is in this sort of circular solution of using the actual data collection infrastructure that they've been building on. So they kind of reinforce this vision of avidity at the center, in the place of, you know, other kinds of variety that some of their critics might care about such as, uh, demographic homogeneity and so on.[00:25:22] Cody: Yeah, so that to me is such a fascinating insight. It's like, okay, if you're someone who doesn't have any preconceptions about what this might be like, you might come in and think, okay, well, if I were going to segment people up to recommend music to them, I would look for demographic qualities. I might look for things that I think would correspond to interest in certain genres, all of that, all of that sort of thing. But, based off of what you're saying, this dominant way of understanding people is through the amount of effort they're willing to put in to find something that they do not already know about.And you give an account from one of your informants who says they kind of have this pyramid : at the bottom is the musically indifferent than you have casual and engaged listeners and then musical savant at the top. And then in each of these four sectors, you have a totally different way of how you're trying to engage them and what it might mean to have a successful recommendation for them. And that to me just seems, uh, like a very interesting way of conceptualizing what it means to, to be engaged with music and to understand the different kinds of, of ways in which people are listening to a combination of what they like and what they might potentially like.[00:26:43] Nick: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, uh, maybe one thing that will help put us in some context is to think a bit about the history of algorithmic recommendation. Because you might think, yeah, like you said, that, uh, the first place you would go to sort of segment listeners to music would be demography because that's of course in the dominant mode of, of segmenting audiences for music, uh, ever since, you know, the origin of the recorded music industry. It's been a very, very dominant frame in the production of certain genres, you know, radio stations, stores, labels, charts, all the rest of it.There's a bunch of rich history of essentially race, uh, in the categorizing of, of music. And I'm talking here specifically at the United States, but you have similar dynamics globally. Um, but a very central sort of point of concern within the overall recommender systems world — and this includes things beyond music — is that using demographic categories for personalization is bad, right? That it's biased at best, that it's racist at worst. And that what recommender systems do — and this is an argument people are making in this field from its very origins in the mid 1990s — is provide a way for people to sort of escape from the bounds of demographic profiling. So it's very important to people in this field that they don't use demography, uh, the sort of recommender systems as the anti demographic thing are — it's a trope that's through, you know, it exists all the way through this, through this field from, from back then until, until the present.Um, what's striking about it, of course, is that, uh, in a world where people have race and they have gender and they have class. Those features do emerge in sort of proxy form in the data, right? So you, it is not always hard to guess someone's demographic qualities, uh, from what they listen to. You know, it's not deterministic relationship, but there's certainly a correlation there.So it is possible for demographics to re-emerge in this data, right. For them to think, oh, you know, they, these look like sort of feminine listening habits and so on. Um, there's a lot of work in, in, in how those categories emerge and how they can shift around over time. Um, but it's very important that people are working in this field that they don't take demography into account.In part because they're worried about doing what they describe as racial profiling. But even if that would be a sensible way to start, right — to think, well, there is certainly a racial pattern in production of music and, and listening patterns. They really hold that off limits intentionally.[00:29:11] Cody: One of the things that I've heard you talk about before in other podcasts interviews is that your job as an anthropologist is not simply to infiltrate these companies and collect secret facts about how the algorithms work. Your job is something closer to trying to describe the cultural processes, underlying their creation and figure out how the people who build these recommender systems understand what it is they're doing.So as you say, the more detailed you get on describing the algorithm itself, the more transient data information is. for example, how Facebook is, is weighting one aspect of the newsfeed on any given day — that could change tomorrow, but the underlying cultural and social constructs are more stable and in a way more fundamental to what it means for our society in our, in a larger sense.So I kind of want to bring in another paper that you've written in this sort of line, which is "Captivating Algorithms: recommender systems as traps" in which you compare the way Silicon valley engineers talk about their products and anthropological studies of literal animal traps. And so most tellingly, you have this quote, which I love, it's from a paper from near 1900 by an anthropologist named Otis Mason, I believe, which reads: the trap itself is an invention in which are embodied most careful studies in animal mentation and habits. The hunter must know for each species it's food it's likes and dislikes its weaknesses and foibles. A trap in this connection is an ambuscade, a temptation, irresistible, allurement. It is a strategy."So he's describing how the people he's studied think" about trapping animals. And in a sense, uh, you know, you're saying that you're leveraging the animal's own psychology against itself.Your point in this paper is that this is essentially the same language, or at least a very similar language, to what many people use in describing the quote "persuasive technologies" being built today. So can you expand on that idea a little bit and say what the anthropologist's perspective on studying these kinds of technologies looks like?[00:31:29] Nick: I love that line from, from Mason. I think it's very rich, uh, in helping us think about what we might be doing with technology from an anthropological point of view. Like I've been talking about one of the central concerns I have is how the people building these systems think about the, the, their users, uh, and one of the common things that they do then when they talk about what they're, what they're up to, is they talk about trying to capture them, right.They try to talk about capturing their attention, to bring attention back in. They talk about capturing market share. There's all of these captivation metaphors. And of course they don't literally mean that they're trying to, you know, cat trap you in a box or drop you in a hole through a layer of leaves or something like that.But one of the things that anthropologists get to do, which is fun and I think useful, uh, is draw broader comparisons in the people that we are talking to and talking about than they draw, to sort of put things in comparison, across cultural contexts. And so comparing these, you know, machine learning systems that are imagined to be high tech, the reason for the high valuation of all of these big tech companies, uh, thinking about them, not as being some brand new thing, that's never been seen before and requires a whole new theory of technology to understand, but thinking of them as being part of a continuum of technologies, that includes digging a hole in the ground and putting some sharp sticks in it. That I find really, uh, enticing, because it's going to help us think about these systems as just technologies, right? They're ordinary in a lot of ways, despite some of their weird qualities. So the basic argument of the traps paper is that we have this anthropology of trapping that suggests, okay, well, what is a trap? It's a weird kind of technology that really foregrounds, uh, the psychological, uh, involvement of the entities that's trying to trap, right? A mouse trap doesn't work. If the mouse doesn't do what it's supposed to do, uh, in the same way that your, you know, iPhone won't work, if you don't use the iPhone in the way you're supposed to. And this is in some ways a now classic argument within science and technology studies that you really have to configure a user for a technology in order for technology to work. There's no such thing as a technology that just works in isolation from a context of use. And so reminding ourselves of that fact, uh, is really handy in this domain because there's a lot of work on algorithms and AI that falls prey to this idea that, you know, oh, they're brand new, we never used to, we didn't want to go to technologies as being, you know, really determining of our situations and of advancing according to their own, their own logics before, but now it's true. Now algorithms are truly autonomous. And that's not really true, right. There are people who work on them who build them, who changed them over time. And they're doing that with a model of prey in mind.So I'm drawing on a little bit of an expansion of that anthropology of trapping tradition by an anthropologist named Alfred Gell, who has a very famous article in anthropology, where he talks about artwork as being a kind of trap. Also a similar, you know, the idea of like a good, a good work of art is going to produce a psychological effect on its viewers.But it's going to do that using technical means, right? So, and, uh, really intricately carved statue could cause someone to sort of stand still and look at it. And we don't want to forget that that statue, in addition to being quote unquote, art, uh, is also technology, right? It's also an artifact that's been created by people using tools.And it is in some sense, a tool in its own right for producing an effect in a viewer. And so I like to use this anthropology of trapping literature to think a little bit more expansively about questions that have really been coming up lately around ethics and persuasion in digital media. So we have documentaries, organizations, and so on, like I'm thinking "The Social Dilemma" from the center for humane technology is the sort of most prominent one, that suggests that, you know, Facebook is like a slot machine. It is trying to get you addicted to it and is trying to produce bad effects in your mind. YouTube is doing this as well.They're incentivizing people to make outrageous content because they're trying to maximize the amount of time that people spend on their sites. Now, these are all stories about digital technology that really fairly explicitly figure them as trap-like in the sense that I've been describing . Facebook is designed to make you do things against your will, uh, which are also against your best interest. So they have the trick you using them. And so we see that kind of trap metaphor out in the wild there, um, in critiques that people will make of these systems. So it was really striking to me to see that in both critiques, but also just in the self descriptions of people working in this space.It was not weird for people working in music in particular to say: yeah, of course, I want to get people addicted to listening to music. And it maybe didn't even seem that bad. But is it really bad if you listen to more music than you used to listen to, is that worthy of being called an addiction? Is that really a problem?But thinking about trapping in this sort of broad anthropological way, I hope, um, steps us back from this binary question. You know, are these things harmful? Are they coercive or not? And into a gray or a space where we say, you know, sort of all technologies have a bit of persuasion and coercion mixed into them.They all sort of demand certain things of their users, but they can't really demand them entirely. And so if we step back, we can start to think of, um, technologies as existing, within a broader field of psychological effects of people trying to get other people to do what they want them to do. And it sort of field of persuasion, um, where we don't have to say, okay, well, you know what the problem is, recommender systems is they really, you know, deny you agency, which they can't. They can't ultimately deny you agency entirely. But they do depend on you playing a certain role in relation to them.[00:37:22] Cody: Cody here. Thanks for listening to the show. I'd love to get your thoughts on this episode. One of the challenges, as you might imagine, as a writer and podcast producer, is that it's hard to get direct feedback from your readers and listeners, what they like or don't like what's working well or needs to be rethought.You can tell a little bit about this from metrics like views or downloads, but it isn't very nuanced. So I've created an avenue for getting that kind of feedback: a listener survey available with every podcast episode. If you have feedback on what you found most interesting or what you thought could be improved, I'd love to hear it.You can find the link in the show notes or at survey.Againsthabit.com. That's survey.againsthabit.com. Now back to the show.What do you think the role of habits are in everything that we're talking about here? Because it seems largely that the psychology that engineers are relying on when they're building their products, when they're thinking about persuasive technologies, when they're trying to trap a user, it's largely the psychology of habits and habit formation.So I don't know. What do you, what do you make of that? And, you know, what's what does that sort of suggest to you about how we should think about these technologies and the way they're exploiting our habitual psychology?[00:38:47] Nick: That's a very nice connection. There is a historian of science named Henry Cowell who is working on some of this history of the psychology of habit in relation to attention , which might be interesting. But from my point of view, in sort of anthropology side of things, when I think of habit, I think of what we often talk about in the social sciences as a, as habitus, which sounds a fancy way of saying the sort of collection of habits that you acquire as part of becoming an inculturated person.So as you grow up, you learn a bunch of habitual things. It's not the sort of small-scale habits of like, you know, self-help books where they say, oh, if you remember to, uh, you know, put your toothbrush out in a certain spot in the morning, it'll trigger you to brush your teeth on time, but rather it's something broader than that, right? Which is that we have a bunch of tendencies in the ways that we behave in the ways that we respond to the outside world and the way we use our bodies that are those, those are all solidified in us over time. And so if you ever have the experience of culture shock of going to a place where people don't have quite the same habits as you do, it becomes very obvious that what seems totally natural and comfortable and regular to you, it doesn't seem that way to, to other people.And so technologies are part of that broader field of habits or habitus in that a lot of the kind of habits that we have are sort of organized around technological implements, right? So very explicitly people working in this field, um, folks like Nir Eyal who's book, Hooked, is plainly about this, about how companies can learn to sort of incite habits and their users, they suggest that, you know, what, what you want to do, if you want your company to become really successful is you want to make users use it habitually. Something like, you know, users will open up Facebook, um, before they've even consciously thought about what they're doing. And I'm sure plenty of people have had the same experience of, you know, being on Twitter or on Facebook, closing the window on their browser, opening a new window on their browser and going immediately back to that website before realizing, wait, what am I doing?That kind of unthinking habitual behavior is where that intersection of persuasion and coercion sort of happens. Right. If someone's making me do that, um, that's probably not quite what I want. It takes place within the sort of broader field of overall habits. And arguably, and this is something that people in the social sciences have argued for a while now, your taste is also part of this, right? So you learn to like certain things. It's very easy for people to learn, to, you know, uh, to dislike a style of music, for instance, such that when it comes on the radio, you'll turn the radio off immediately and be like, that's horrible. You know, I can't imagine that anyone else would like this, but of course other people do like it. Which just gives lie to the idea that there's something objective going on under there.But technology and recommender systems in particular and the way that I try to think about them in my book and through my, uh, articles, uh, I want to try to think about recommender systems as really occupying that in-between space between technology and taste, or as you know, the title of my book, computing and taste. Cause we often talk about those domains as though they're really separate from each other, right? Computers are rational, they're quantitative, they're logical. Whereas taste is subjective. It's individual, it's expressive, it's inexpressible through numbers. Those two ideas, you know, we think of them as being really opposed. There's no accounting for taste and so on.And yet they come together in recommender systems, uh, in a way that some people fault because they think that you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't cross the streams from these two, these two different domains. Um, but which I think of as not being that weird, if we think of taste as being a sort of set of habits as being part of this kind of, you know, apparatus through which we live our lives, and we think of technology as also being part of this broader scene of habits and habituation, right? Technologies are not, uh, separate from, from the human world. Computers did not invent themselves and they do not program themselves. So actually all of this is getting played with together, uh, in a way that's not that weird if you think about it. Now, it may be done in ways that we don't like, and it may have effects that we don't want. But it's important. It was important for me to try to give an anthropological account of recommenders systems that didn't start from the premise that, oh, this is impossible. Like you can't do this. Everybody knows that human expression and feeling cannot be worked on through the computer. Because it's pretty clear that it can be worked on through the computer. What's not clear is what that means for how we understand computers and for how we understand taste.[00:43:24] Cody: Okay. Here is an easy question then. What is your theory of taste?[00:43:32] Nick: Ooh. Okay. This is a fun question. So my theory of taste, I have to start with the, with the, the sort of default social science theory of taste. The default social science theory of taste is what we would call the homology thesis, which is that there is a homology or a sort of structural similarity between class and taste. So fancy people like fancy things and less fancy people like less fancy things. If you like the opera, or if you like country music that tells me something about who you are. That's the sort of canonical, a social scientific argument.And in that case taste is really not the thing that most people think it is where it's like, oh, this is just my personal preferences. It's actually something that sort of determined by your social status. Now that's a fairly vulgar account of that theory, but I think it's fairly widely shared among lots of people that taste is effectively arbitrary. And at the end of the day, it really just reflects your sort of social position, maybe also, you know, your race. But certainly essentially like how fancy you are in a sort of class based system.My thinking on taste is largely informed by a tradition in sociology that is usually called the pragmatics of taste, which suggests that sure, maybe that happens, that homology thing. But the problem with that homology thesis is that it doesn't tell you how or why fancy people come to like fancy things or why people in any social group come to acquire the tastes that are associated with that group. And so what these folks do, um, usually through fairly rich ethnographic observation, which is maybe why I like them, um, is they try to describe all of the conditions by which people come to acquire taste. And so they have these studies of, you know, uh, opera fans. There's a book by Claudio Benzecry about how opera fans learn to become opera fans, um, or how, you know, people who listen to, uh, vinyl records set up their little listening stations in their home. There's a lot of stuff that people do to try to, uh, instrument their taste, to, to orchestrate encounters with music in particular.And so I'm really invested in that idea of taste as something that you do rather than something that you just sort of have. Uh, and as something that's very much entangled with technology, a favorite example of mine is, you know, we have a sense of what it means to have taste right now, right? What music do you pick on Spotify or something like that. But if we go back, you know, 50 years, uh, what it meant to have tasted in music might have to do with what radio stations you listen to, uh, what records you bought at the record store records. You know, they're all the same shape. They're all the same color. Basically the more or less cost the same so when you're picking among them all you're doing is expressing yourself, right? You're just making a cultural claim. But what it meant to have tasted that moment was really entangled with technologies, the radio, the LP. Go back a hundred years before that you don't have recorded music. So can anyone have a taste in music then? Certainly not in the way we can now. At the very least taste would mean something different. And so I'm really interested in the idea that what tastes even is is totally entangled with these techniques by which we come to acquire and encounter, uh, cultural objects.So that is a very long-winded way of saying that I think of taste as being this kind of emergent thing that people do in particular settings with particular tools. And one of the tools that they use nowadays is recommender systems.[00:46:47] Cody: One of the things I'm interested in along this line is whether or not our tastes are becoming more monolithic. So my colleague, Adam Mastroianni has a recent essay on this. He puts together these data showing that through the year 2000, about 25% of a year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. But now, uh, closer to 2020, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. And he has similar data for TV shows, books, and music as well.So what role do you think recommender systems might be playing in this and in particular, are platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and the like funneling us into these kind of genre enclaves, where they find it legitimately difficult to point us towards something that is at the same time, both new and something that we'll like. What do you make of that, and is that a function of recommender systems as you've come to understand them?[00:47:51] Nick: Well, it's a great question because you're pointing out that the basic tension at the heart of recommender systems . Which is that they're about helping people find a music that they don't know about yet. So there's an assumption that you're, that you like more than, you know. but they're based on this idea that you won't like everything, right?So it has something to do with what you are already know. There's this tension between the constraints, profiling someone and saying, okay, what do you like? And that idea that what you might do with that profiling is broaden people's horizons. And that's a real tension. It's something that I think a lot of critics don't appreciate, that there is a commitment to broadening horizons in this field. Whether or not they achieve them is another question.But that's something that people in the field are really concerned with and trying to figure out: wait a minute, we're sort of pigeonholing people, but we don't want to pigeon hole them. We want to help them. And forever, we've always been saying that recommender systems are about, you know, like, like we were talking about earlier about, you know, cracking you out of a given categories to help you find new things. Or they used to say, you know, 20 years ago that recommender systems would help you go down the "long tail." They would help you find more obscure things that you would never find otherwise, because there were too many things, you just wouldn't have a way to know about these less popular objects.Of course, now we have a lot of concern — this is not a new concern — but the continuing concern about monoculture, about a kind of similarity. And algorithms have emerged as one of the kinds of entities we might blame for why that is, of course, because you know, oh, you like that, you want more like that. There's this kind of valorization of the similar in recommender systems that maybe seems like a cause for this problem more globally.I think it's certainly part of an overall apparatus of cultural production, which is very risk averse now. So one of the things you see in this context of, you know, every movie occurring within the Marvel cinematic universe or whatever. I think you can't really say a recommender system did that. Because certainly a recommender system didn't get to decide what was happening there. But you do have, you know, industries that are organized around trying to maximize their, their successes, and clearly are finding, you know, success, uh, in doing what they're doing and doing what, uh, Mastroianni calls that oligopoly of production.So I think one thing that points us to is the importance of looking at the overall system, you know, recommender systems are a more and more prominent part of cultural circulation now, but they're not everything. And so we don't want to say, oh, it was the algorithm. So it points us to that. But it also points us to this other really interesting, like philosophical question, is you mentioned this idea of genre enclaves, which is a lovely way to put what other people would describe as like filter bubbles. And one funny thing about recommender systems is that if I know enough to recognize a filter bubble, to put you into one, to recognize similarities, such that I can put you there, that means that I have enough data, if I'm a recommender system, to take you out of it. I know what similar is. That means that I know what different is also. And so within that very same system, in theory, I should be able to use the recommender system in a different way, not to give you exactly the same thing, but rather to very on-purpose, um, give you something else to give you something that is different. That's already entailed in the idea that I know enough to put you in a filter bubble in the first place.So in some sense, the, the problem may not be with the technology itself, but with this particular style of implementation, right. We could be implementing recommender systems that more aggressively are about spreading people away from the similar, and that's something you would do with more or less the same system you have now just tuned in a, in a slightly different way.Why is it not tuned in a different way? Well, that's not an algorithm thing, right? That's a business decision. Uh, the algorithm could go either way. It doesn't really care.[00:51:34] Cody: That seems like it comes back to the distinction that your engineering interviewee was talking about where you have the pyramid, with the sort of least engaged, they want to, as he says, lean back, put the music on and then just not really have to do anything to have to make any decisions, find new stuff, skip songs.And then you have the lean in musical savant and more engaged listeners. And clearly the vast majority of listeners and our viewers are going to be in that bottom chunk of the pyramid. And you have the highest probability of reaching the largest number of people by catering to that listener or viewer as your default option, rather than saying, oh, I'm going to try and shape the musical tastes of the youth in a way that exposes them to the meritorious histories of, of jazz and the, you know, unexpected sides of hip hop and all that sort of stuff. So it seems to me like that's a big current in all that's happening here.[00:52:38] Nick: Yeah, I would say one of the sort of stories that emerges over the course of my whole book is this transformation of music recommendation from the sort of first contemporary recommender system named as such in the mid 1990s, um, to the present. Where in the beginning, those early recommender systems were designed around the idea that the user was a really enthusiastic or avid listener, right? You were like really into music. You were going to put in some effort, you were going to open up a recommender system and try to use it specifically to find new stuff, right? You are almost by definition, a kind of crate digger, uh, in that context. Cause it was like more work to use a recommender system than to just turn on the radio. So you already had a way to not put a lot of effort. And uh, so you were in. You know, contemporary industry terms would, would put it, uh, you were a lean forward listener, right? You were someone who was sort of, uh, enthusiastically pursuing a new music.And then over time, since then, just what you described has happened, right? This sort of default assumption of what a user for these systems should be like, um, became something different, right? It became this lean-back listener. It became this person who like, eh, they might not even listen to music at all. So we need to find some way to, you know, entice them into doing it. And a recommended system was maybe a way of doing that. So you open up your Spotify or whatever, and you see, as long as you see something that you're like, sure, I'll listen to that. Then that would catch that person who otherwise may not listen at all. And that's a big change and it comes along alongside a change in data practices, to sort of loop back to this, uh, seeing like an infrastructure question, because those early recommender systems, what data did they have? They had data that you proactively gave them about what you liked, right? You would have to go in and explicitly rate artists, or if it was movies, uh, you know, you know, five stars on Netflix or whatever. And over time, those explicit ratings really get mostly replaced by what they would call implicit ratings. So the idea that listening to a song means that you like it a little bit. You listen to it a lot that becomes more of a sign that you like it. And this is the kind of logic we're very familiar with now in this sort of big data moment, right? This is what big data is all about. This idea that these behavioral traces are, uh, more real. They're easier for people to do. I don't have to explicitly rate something you to sort of know on the basis of what I'm doing. Or you think, you know, uh, what I like, and you might suggest that's a better account of what I like, you know. I might go on Netflix and, you know, give five stars to all of the fancy, classy people movies, but I never watched them. And if you kept recommending them to me, I wouldn't really use Netflix as much, but what I really want is, you know, 1990s action movies. And if you saw what I actually watched, you would know that that's a common argument that they'll make. So we have that transition in sort of three different things at the same time. The change in the kind of data that's available to recommender systems, right? This sort of like trace data of user behavior. We have this change in the economics of, uh, the online media industry right where everything's sort of become streaming and it's not, you know, Netflix used to be a DVD rental company, and then now it becomes something else, right, where they want you to spend more time on it. And that will feed back into getting more data. And then the third thing that comes around is this changing how we know things are, how the people building these systems, know things about their users, which are all entangled together in this sort of emergence of, uh, sort of modern data collection apparatus. And they're all mutually reinforcing cycles.So that's a really big change, I think in the way those, those systems work. And if people are looking for ways out of it, I think that one way that an anthropology of this can be useful is to really foreground and describe what exactly the situation is that we're in.And so one thing I tend to argue is that if we want to get out of some of this really aggressive data collection situation, which happens obviously in domains beyond music and in many other domains where it's much more significant. One thing we might want to think about then is how to intervene in these imaginations of users, right? In the vision of the user, as someone who doesn't really want to get involved, who we sort of tricked into listening, and therefore we have to capture as much data about them as possible because they're not going to give the data to us on purpose. If we change that model, if we change the way that we think about people, then I think that's a key part of the overall edifice of data collection and why data is seen as so valuable now.[00:57:08] Cody: I see that as, as tying into what we were talking about earlier with the model of the individual that the engineers are using is based off of basically the psychology of habits. And so data are most valuable in understanding how to exploit habitual systems and how to essentially, to go back to your metaphor use products as traps for habits and attention, whatever attention may be.And so it seems like part of what you're saying or another, a rephrasing of, of what you're saying an implication may be, is that the more we're able to put in to achieve that higher effort level of avidity, to engage more in a direct and meaningful and thoughtful way with whatever content we're consuming, the less we rely on habit, the less we can be exploited by an understanding of what we habitually do. And the more we can kind of be liberated from the cycle of collect data, exploit it, go further down the rabbit hole of social media and digital content consuming our attention and our lifestyles.[00:58:31] Nick: Yeah. And I think just to like loop back to what we talked about earlier this is one reason why I think having a kind of cultural understanding of the logics behind these systems and how people think is really useful, because a lot of the critiques of these systems we've seen now are couched in the sort of same habits science, behaviorist framework as the systems they're criticizing. So people who say, oh, you know, Facebook's a slot machine or whatever really believe that the best way to model human behavior is still that same behaviorist habit model, that same, you know, press a lever, give you a treat, rat in a cage kind of model. And I think that that model is really constraining in what kinds of futures we can imagine for what humans are going to do. And it really limits us to a certain narrow set of technical interventions. And so by trying to name that by trying to step back and say, what is this, what is this model of the human that's involved in these systems? I want to try, and this is something I'm trying to do with in my newer work on attention, to think about the sort of arbitrariness of those models, and how, if we want to imagine different futures, we might need to think about some of these foundational assumptions differently as well. I'm not sure that we're going to lever press our way out of a sort of behaviorist hellscape that we find ourselves in now.[00:59:54] Cody: Nick. It's been a great pleasure to talk, and I appreciate your perspective on all these things. I could probably go on asking you questions about this space of topics for the next two hours, but you've been really generous with your time. So thanks for taking the time to talk.[01:00:09] Nick: Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.[01:00:11] Cody: That was my conversation with Nick Seaver.I hope you enjoyed it. One of the topics that we didn't get around to is the connection between avidity and anthropological field work itself. It's a topic I know Nick has thought about in his work on attention, and it is also one of the things that I personally most admire about anthropology.My own field, psychology suffers from a historical lack of attention dedicated toward Western people. We study American college students. We assume that whatever we find there will apply to the rest of the world. The field has started to correct this in recent years, but I believe it's an assumption that's built into the psychological worldview in ways that are important and difficult to eradicate.But the premise of the field of anthropology, starting with historical figures like Tylor and Malinowski, is that attending to what other people are up to is actually a lot of work. It's not just enough to be vaguely interested in what other people are doing, especially far away people, but you actively have to search out the best possible vantage from which to observe and make sense of their behavior. To me, that's an application of this basic idea of attention as effort.So in this case, avidity — the amount of effort we're willing to put into acquire new information or seek new experiences — is not only crucial when it comes to the kind of content we consume, but crucial to our ability to understand people with different perspectives.This nods toward one of the foundations of our polarized society. We tend to be, especially as Americans, intuitive psychologists. We assume that the minds of people far away from us mostly look like the minds of people who are in our immediate vicinity. Then we're shocked to find that people who don't occupy our same cultural milieu think in a way that's totally foreign to us.Maybe we need to operate less in our default mode as intuitive psychologists and instead explore what it might mean to operate as intuitive anthropologists.I'd love to know what you thought of this episode. If you want to give me some feedback, you can go to survey.againsthabit.com. If you'd like to subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more content, you can go straight to againsthabit.com.This episode was edited and produced by Emily Chen. I'm Cody Kommers, and thanks for listening to Against Habit. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Hello Interactors,Beauty may be in eye of the beholder, but it’s also in the brain. We all seem to be drawn to balance, order, and predictable patterns which rulers, T-squares, protractors, and compasses have readily provided. It’s the stuff maps are made of. They’ve brought progress and good fortune to many over the centuries, but have they also lead to our decay?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…HIGH FASHIONI can’t deny it. I’m a sucker for grids. I’m drawn to music, art, and designs that are balanced, orderly, and intelligible. Give me a ruler, a protractor, a compass, and a pencil and I’d happily make art and designs all day. Growing up I’d handcraft lettering on cards using my Dad’s plastic flowchart stencils. What can I say, I’m a product of modernity. A neat and tidy aesthete.But that attraction was called into question last week as I was watching The Hobbit. The movie’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, lives in an organically shaped earthen home carved into the side of hill. There’s not a Cartesian grid or plane anywhere to be found. Every wall is curved as if bored into the hillside by a giant gopher. I was so smitten that I murmured out loud to my family, “I could definitely live in that house.” Has my planar proclivity passed me by, or has the curving complexity of nature caught my eye?Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that we humans, perhaps other animals as well, tend ‘like’ and/or ‘want’ aesthetic order and balance. Evidence of elements in oddities ordered by humans abounds in centuries of found paintings, carvings, jewelry, and even cities.But firm empirical conclusions of this gray-matter matter remain elusive. Although, neuroscientists do agree on one thing: there is no single ‘beauty center’ in our brain. When hooked up to brain imaging machines, scientists observe “activity in the frontal pole, left dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, motor cortex, parietal cortex, ventral stratum, and occipital cortex, among others.” And there is ongoing work trying to tease out the order in which these activities unfold betwixt the vast network of synapsis in a brain containing as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. A task seemingly more complex than the identification of the regions themselves.If aesthetically pleasing ordered intelligibility is indeed a universal mammalian trait, getting to that cognitive state is complex – understanding it even more so. Some scientists believe another reason concrete evidence is elusive is because the visual stimuli used across studies varies considerably.Designing and administering cognitive research requires rationalizing inputs across studies to achieve more predictable outcomes. This ‘streamlining’ of the scientific method is not only applied to studies, but to the design and manufacturing of products, and the planning, mapping, and administration of our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states.Political scientist and legal anthropologist James C. Scott once alluded to the similarities between designing observational studies and the design of our modern urban environments writing,“The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, is critical of what he calls High Modernism which is an over-reliance on Cartesian principles, the scientific method, and unfaltering faith in technology. While he admits these advances improved – and continue to improve – the human condition, he believes blind adherence to these aesthetic, bureaucratic, and technocratic principles may have also put us on a path toward what we now see as potential human extinction.The list of ‘High Modernists’ in art, science, design, and politics is long, but Scott created a “Hall of Fame” of geo-political modernists like former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Cold War strategist Robert McNamara known for his ‘scientific management’ style, New York commissioner-cum-urban planner and power broker Robert Moses, founding head of Soviet Russia and dictator of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin, the Shah-of-Iran who sought to modernize and nationalize his entire country and industry, and the influential architect and urban designer Le Corbusier who advocated for standardized inhumane design and erasure of historical and cultural tradition – especially in the aftermath of war.Scott’s full list includes people of not any one political persuasion. He reveals how both conservatives and progressives are capable of “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” He notes they all use “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” And he observes the public really has no recourse, nor often the desire, to resist it. He says,“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”That ‘desire’, as it were, I suspect is partially driven by the aesthetics found in the uniformity, balance, and order of ‘High Modernists.’ Parsimony, the reductive removal of redundancy, is what persuades people to purchase overpriced but simplified products like Prada. It’s what spurred Tom Wolfe to observe in his book From Bauhaus to Our House that elite modernists want to fill cities with “row after row of Mies van der Rohe.” The German architect was known for his stark rectilinear buildings made of what he called ‘skin and bone.’In addition to fashion and architecture, modernist desire was (and still is) embodied in many elements of society and popular culture from literature, to industry, to transportation. Much of this progress occurred during the Industrial Age of the 19th century. I can imagine the exhilaration of high speed movement through space over time on a bike, car, or train surely began with fright but ended in delight. Even desirable.As Scott points out, the state provided the means for this desire to manifest. He invites us to,“imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly what designers of locomotives had in mind with ‘streamlining.’ Rather than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.”FROM CRAWLING TO SPRAWLINGIt was locomotives that brought many colonizers to my home town, Norwalk, Iowa in the late 1800s. But the first was Samuel Snyder in 1852. He built a log cabin near an area called Pyra. He was likely on the land of the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je) people, or as neighboring tribes called them ayuhwa “sleepy ones” otherwise known as Iowa. Pyra was a few miles south of the state capital, Des Moines (Hartford of the West) that was incorporated just one year earlier.By 1856, four years later, Pyra had a post office and a new resident, George Swan, who made his presence known by “putting up a pretentious edifice, to be used as a hotel.” Swan was a politician and newspaper publisher who moved from Norwalk, Ohio but was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He became postmaster in part to change the name of the town from Pyra to Norwalk.The renaming of Indigenous place names to Western names is another common act of the ‘High Modernist’, as is laying out a town in your vision. Which was the next thing Swan did.The county and the township had already been gridded and platted as part of Thomas Jefferson’s squaring of a nation, but it was Swan’s ‘authoritarian’ vision that allowed for the ‘social engineering’ of the town I grew up in. He was aided by a handful of settlers including Jesse Huff and Mary Huff. One of my best friends came from the Huff family, his uncle was our baseball coach, and his grandpa was the long time Norwalk city manager. That’s three generations of city administration aided by the modern state’s ‘means of acting on the desire’ to ‘level terrain’ so they may build their ‘utopia.’It took until the 1950s and 60s before Norwalk become a true suburb of Des Moines – an expansion beyond what Swan could ever have imagined. Its population sputtered growing modestly between 1900 and 1950 from 287 to 435, but then grew 205% between 1950 and 1960 to 1,328. The town didn’t expand beyond Swan’s initial footprint until 1969 and it’s been sprawling ever since. It’s now hard to discern the border between Des Moines and Norwalk. When I lived there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s corn and soybean fields provided a visible gap.Despite these well-intentioned ‘High Modernists’ sprawling attempts around the world at carefully planned and engineered social utopias, scholarly literature reveals what Scott suspects. Research across economists, geographers, and planners suggests this general consensus:“urban sprawl as a multidimensional phenomenon [is] typified by an unplanned and uneven pattern of urban development that is driven by a multitude of processes and which leads to the inefficient utilisation of land resources. Urban sprawl is observed globally, though its characteristics and impacts vary.”The words ‘uneven’ and ‘multitude of processes’ and ‘inefficient utilization’ resulting in ‘varying impacts’ don’t fit the exacting premise promised by enlightened ‘High Modernists.’ This study I’m quoting was done in reaction to the fact that despite the populations of European cities declining, their footprints have continued to sprawl since the 1970s. They say, “There is no sign that this trend is slowing down and, as a result, the demand for land around cities is becoming a critical issue in many areas.” This is the essence of urban sprawl.The ordinal origins of sprawl are synonymous with their historic modernist and economic origins – the Central Business District. The shape and pattern of the impending sprawl in the United States and Europe is like a spider spinning it’s web from the center out. Causes are often oversimplified by a focus on the economic trade-off between housing prices and commuting costs. Importantly, this economic function is a result of the modern state’s role in ‘providing the means of acting on the desire’ of select individuals to live ‘elsewhere.’There are other factors that determine the shape, resolution, and scale of sprawl. A 2006 study determined that“sprawl in the USA between 1976 and 1992 was positively related to groundwater availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralised employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth and the low impact of public service financing on local taxpayers.”Other studies include another big factor in the United States, ethnicity: that same 2006 study found “that increases in the percentage of ethnic minority populations within cities and rising city centre crime rates both led to a growth in urban sprawl.” Curiously, a similar study focused on Europe “confirmed the positive impact of higher crime rates on sprawl, but observed the opposite effect for the impact of ethnic minority populations.”I HAVE A CITY IN MINDSprawl isn’t just happening in the U.S. and Europe, but in developing countries as well. Since opening up in 1979, China has seen unprecedented sprawl in conjunction with their rise in socioeconomic development. Urbanization increased “17.92% in 1978 to 59.60% in 2018, and scholars predict it will reach 70% in 2035 and 75% in 2050.”As is the case in the United States and Europe, “the expansion of urban land mainly sacrifices rural land, especially cropland, which produces negative effects such as ecological degradation, water and land loss, and soil pollution.” This study concludes that “urban land expansion has garnered much attention, and studies have focused on land transition monitoring, effects analysis, and mechanism identification. However, discussions on suburban development and its subsequent effects remain insufficient.”These researchers draw attention to three commonly used dimensions in studying sprawl:Administrative - Administrative boundaries such as towns close to a city.Spatial - Location, Density, and Spatial Activity adjacent and within commuting distance of the city.Social - Attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.A primary thrust of ‘High Modernism’ are found in those first two dimensions. ‘High Modernists’ seek to ease the ‘administrative’ costs through the reduction of ‘spatial’ complexity. There’s actually nothing modern about that, really. Unless you consider the 5th century BC Greek polymath Hippodamus ‘modern’. He is considered the ‘father of European urban planning’ beginning with his grid plan of the Greek port city Piraeus that remains today. But being a mathematician, he no doubt was seeking spatial parsimony for city administrators.The economist Herbert Simon (who studied decision making in large organizations) describes the ‘administrative man’ this way:“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.”Simon elucidates how the first two dimensions of the effects of ‘High Modernist’ urban sprawl, – ‘administrative boundaries’ and remote measures of ‘spatiality’ – are ‘gross simplifications’ of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.’ This ‘real world’ may be better evidenced in the third dimension of measures, ‘social attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.’But even these attributes can remain removed the real world if viewed from a map or table of data. We need only look at Redlining as an example of how ‘social’ dimensions can be used to negate, subjugate, frustrate, dictate, alienate, arbitrate, automate, and attempt to eliminate certain classes, races, and ethnicities through actuated, calculated tax rates, interest rates, and loan rates through a slate of mandates from magistrates of the city-state, state-state, and nation-state.The French Philosopher, Michel de Certeau, observes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life how Walking in the City, despite its gridded plans, results in people defiantly deploying practical and tactical shortcuts despite attempts by centuries of ‘High Modernism’ to control them. He writes that ‘the City’,“provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.”But he also wonders if this concept of the city is decaying. He reflects on the strength, resiliency, and tenacity of humanity despite the potential erosion of ‘High Modernism’ and asks,“Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well?”He invites us to not turn our “bewilderment” of ‘High Modernism’ in ‘catastrophes’” of its undoing but instead,“analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay…”As much as I like the ordered, gridded aesthetic, I’ve come to better appreciate the beauty in our ‘microbe-like’ natural world. Modernity may be defined by the analytical geometry of Descartes, but I can’t help but wonder if the work of another 17th century mathematician may come to shape our future.His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who invented, perhaps along with Isaac Newton, calculus. Leibniz is also credited with discovering self-similarity which forms the bases for Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Mandelbrot’s geometry, his ‘Art of Roughness’, describes the mathematics behind branching systems found in fern leaves, cauliflower, trees, and coastlines as well as our circulatory system, nervous system, bronchial system, and maybe even Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit home in the hill. If it wasn’t for the fractal-like nature of the gray-matter of our brain, it wouldn’t be able fold upon itself to fit within the small cavity of our cranium. Even its network of neurons, and the synaptic patterns they form as we fawn over beauty, follow the mathematical laws of Leibniz and Mandelbrot. Our world may not need be ordained by Cartesian order because it’s already organized. We just need to understand it and follow its lead.As neuroscientists continue to map the brain in search of what draws us to order and balance in objects as well as cities, perhaps they could consider the conjecture of British physicist and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West when he writes:“…because the geometry of white and gray matter in our brains, which forms the neural circuitry responsible for all of our cognitive functions, is itself a fractal-like hierarchical network, this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks……In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Would you like to receive a daily, random quote by email from my Little Box of Quotes? https://constantine.name/lboq A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms. I kept them on the first version of my web site, where they were displayed randomly. But as time went on, I realized I wanted them where I would see them. Eventually I copied the fledgeling collection onto 3×5 cards and put them in a small box. As I find new ones, I add cards. Today, there are more than 1,000 quotes and the collection continues to grow. Hello, I'm Craig Constantine

Would you like to receive a daily, random quote by email from my Little Box of Quotes?https://constantine.name/lboqA long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms. I kept them on the first version of my web site, where they were displayed randomly. But as time went on, I realized I wanted them where I would see them. Eventually I copied the fledgeling collection onto 3×5 cards and put them in a small box. As I find new ones, I add cards. Today, there are nearly 1,000 quotes and the collection continues to grow.My mission is creating better conversations to spread understanding and compassion. This podcast is a small part of what I do. Drop by https://constantine.name for my weekly email, podcasts, writing and more.

In this episode the crew covers topics that range from standup comedy, funny videos, jokes, hecklers, the entertainment business, and much more. We wrap the episode up with quotes from Herbert Simon & Adam Sandler. Big thanks to the Producer: Gabe Rivera, beat by TeiMoney & Executive Producer Jimmylee Velez.

Sport: Herbert Simon zur Zusammenarbeit von East Belgian Rallye und Legend Boucles

Collège de France Informatique et sciences numériques (chaire annuelle 2021-2022) Wendy Mackay Année 2021-2022 Les sciences de la nature comme la physique ou la biologie s'appuient sur la méthode scientifique pour explorer et comprendre les phénomènes naturels. Cependant, l'informatique est ce que Herbert Simon appelle une science de l'artificiel, où les chercheurs créent les phénomènes qu'ils étudient. Cette leçon décrit le rôle de la triangulation entre différentes méthodes, et est illustrée par des méthodes d'évaluation qualitatives et quantitatives qui peuvent être utilisées dans les différentes phases du processus de conception.

Collège de France Informatique et sciences numériques (chaire annuelle 2021-2022) Wendy Mackay Année 2021-2022 Les sciences de la nature comme la physique ou la biologie s'appuient sur la méthode scientifique pour explorer et comprendre les phénomènes naturels. Cependant, l'informatique est ce que Herbert Simon appelle une science de l'artificiel, où les chercheurs créent les phénomènes qu'ils étudient. Cette leçon décrit le rôle de la triangulation entre différentes méthodes, et est illustrée par des méthodes d'évaluation qualitatives et quantitatives qui peuvent être utilisées dans les différentes phases du processus de conception.

Collège de FranceInformatique et sciences numériques (chaire annuelle 2021-2022)Wendy MackayAnnée 2021-2022Les sciences de la nature comme la physique ou la biologie s'appuient sur la méthode scientifique pour explorer et comprendre les phénomènes naturels. Cependant, l'informatique est ce que Herbert Simon appelle une science de l'artificiel, où les chercheurs créent les phénomènes qu'ils étudient. Cette leçon décrit le rôle de la triangulation entre différentes méthodes, et est illustrée par des méthodes d'évaluation qualitatives et quantitatives qui peuvent être utilisées dans les différentes phases du processus de conception.

This is a teaser for Episode 85, on James March and Herbert Simon's 1958 book "Organizations." It is one of the most-cited texts in organization studies, but apart from the ideas of bounded rationality and satisficing, much of the book is overlooked. In our next episode of the Talking About Organizations Podcast, we will tackle the full text and all of its propositions, many of which still ring true and deserve attention from researchers.

In this episode, we discuss the second edition of James March and Herbert Simon's classic text Organizations. In addition to the well-known concepts such as bounded rationality and satisficing, the book introduces an important critique of the mechanistic view that “classic” organization theory to that point approached organizations and its members. How do decisions get made? What causes individuals or join, stay in, or leave organizations? What about the causes and effects of conflict? We explore all this and more.

In this episode, I excerpt from and comment on Allen Newell's and Herbert Simon's 1975 ACM Turing Award Lecture.

Die 40. Folge des Podcasts Fipsi, der als erster seiner Art den Dialog zwischen Philosophie und Psychologie anstrebt. In dieser Episode stellen Hannes Wendler und Alexander Wendt die Forschungsart des Kognitivismus vor. Dabei kommen sie auf Ulric Neisser und Herbert Simon zu sprechen..Auf YouTube finden Sie alle Episoden von Fipsi unter https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpIT6jK3mKTiQcXbinapKRbf39mLEpKWmAuf Spotify finden Sie Fipsi unter https://open.spotify.com/show/0il832RRDoPZPaNlC7vams?si=5KbdEcF1TImSHexKYGccfw&dl_branch=1Die Website der Arbeitsgemeinschaft: https://www.phi-psy.deMelden Sie sich mit Rückmeldungen und Anmerkungen gerne unter fipsi@phi-psy.deDiskutieren Sie mit uns auf Telegram: https://t.me/FipsiPPP oder https://t.me/PhiundPsyFür das Intro bedanken wir uns bei Estella und Peter: https://www.instagram.com/elpetera

En medio de un mundo colmado de información, distracciones, estímulos, cosas por hacer, planes, pendientes, responsabilidades... encontrar un espacio de quietud y perspectiva puede ser todo un logro. Paradójicamente, es lo que hace aún más necesaria esta práctica. Como lo dijo Herbert Simon, economista, politólogo y psicólogo cognitivo: "una gran cantidad de información crea una pobreza de atención". ----------- Recuerda que la mejor forma en la que puedes apoyar a todomente es compartiendo las sesiones con amigos o familiares y suscribiéndote al canal. También tenemos una comunidad privada a través de la cual puedes convertirte en patrocinador eligiendo el aporte que prefieras. Puedes convertirte en patrocinador a través de YouTube, Patreon o todomente.org/patrocinio. Tu patrocinio es para que podamos seguir compartiendo sesiones gratuitas con todo el mundo a través de nuestros diferentes canales y así poder tener un sustento en el tiempo. De ante mano, gracias por tu apoyo. Como patrocinador también tendrás acceso a sesiones exclusivas de meditación, cursos, programas, y series temáticas completas, y la opción de compartir algunas sesiones en vivo. ----------- Es un honor para mí estar construyendo una comunidad de personas que valoran lo que ofrezco aquí en todomente. Tu apoyo hace posible que esta iniciativa siga creciendo y llegando a más personas. Mi propuesta es que juntos, como comunidad, financiemos esta iniciativa, de manera que sea autosuficiente y sostenible en el tiempo. Quiero seguir compartiendo la práctica con más personas y cuento con tu apoyo para hacerlo. ----------- Encuentra a @todomente en YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Podimo, Anchor y en todomente.org. #todomente #mindfulness #meditation

In the attention economy, we are all competing for attention. According to economist Herbert Simon, attention is a scarce resource with immense value, not unlike food, water or oil. And the value of attention has only grown due to Covid-19, with online interaction becoming the norm for many. “Good” PR means competing with others for the attention of a given audience, attracting people's eyeballs and clicks. Whether your target audience is a local city council or the millennial generation at large, you want your audience to find you. This goes hand in hand with your personal brand. In a sense, your personal brand is how you are found by others. It is your personal promise of value, based on identifying your superpower(s) and sharing what makes you unique with the outside world. Curating a strong personal brand is like being a magnet — it attracts people who belong in your life and repels those who do not. Continue reading here.   The article read in this episode originally appeared on the Forbes Agency Council CommunityVoice™ in April 2021.   Activate The PR Maven® Flash Briefing on your Alexa Device.  Join The PR Maven® Facebook group page.  Sign up for email notifications for when new episodes are released. Take one of The PR Maven® Online Courses.

A few months ago, in episode 162 you got to hear from Leidy Klotz about his fantastic new book Subtract, which is based on this question of why we humans look to add first when often subtracting can be a better option. It is a little bit of minimalism/essentialism and a really great episode to help people overcome loss aversion and see that, as he says, “less is not a loss,” such a cool insight. Anyway, while he and I were doing our pre and post-interview chat, he mentioned that his friend and colleague Eric Johnson had a book coming out soon called The Elements of Choice and that I should talk with him about it, so here we are. Dr. Johnson is not a newbie to the space by any means, as you will hear in the interview. He has had the opportunity to work and train with some of the most notable names in the field, including Herbert Simon, Amos Tversky, as well as his friends Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. He is the Norman Eig Professor of Business and the Director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School. He has been the president of both the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the Society for Neuroeconomics. He has decades of experience and definitely knows his stuff, which is one of the many reasons I was so honored to chat with him and share the conversation with you.  Show Notes: [00:07] In today's episode I'm introducing you to Dr. Eric J. Johnson, author of the brand new book, The Elements of Choice. [03:57] Eric shares his background and how he got into the field. His research has always been about helping people make choices and how the way we present information to them affects their choices.  [05:40] He was fascinated with the choices he observed people making.  [07:06] Eric shares research from a former student of his. She implemented the health records systems at a major New York hospital.  [09:18] Memory played an important role in the doctor's behavior in her research. [11:31] When you put in the time to plan the architecture upfront, the actual intention itself can be very small. Designers often have more influence than they realize. [12:42] He shares his research about taking different doors at the Copenhagen airport. [14:06] Little bits of effort at the beginning of the decision have an influence throughout the course of the decision. Choice architecture usually works by favoring one path over another.  [16:10] If I know exactly what you want I would give you just one option, but the person making the choice knows a lot about themselves so they often know more about what they want.   [18:10] There is a trade-off between how much you are asking of people (in terms of deciding) and how much variety you need to give them so they can find the option that is best for them.  [20:45] Choice is not determined by myself and my preferences alone.  [21:38] We are all designers all the time.  [23:14] Order will have an influence depending on your medium. There are many other things as a designer to think about also.  [24:50] Defaults are powerful. Eric and Dan Goldstein researched defaults in organ donations.  [27:07] Not all situations are the same, so you really need to look across all the studies and understand your own situation and context.  [28:44] Our preferences aren't written in stone. We have many preferences. Depending on what comes to mind, I might make different choices.  [29:36] Eric shares one of his favorite studies where they ask people about climate change and would they pay a carbon tax (or carbon offset) to fight climate change.  [32:26] One study is not enough to actually build a science. We need to do cross studies. [35:16] Eric shares how choice architecture can affect COVID vaccinations.  [38:00] Defaults work because they endow you with the option. You think less about the disadvantages. [39:26] The decisions of our privacy and cookies are decisions we make multiple times a day.  [40:32] Choice architecture and designers have amazing influence. Hopefully, people will design in ways they want to be designed to.  [41:46] Melina shares a study about trying to influence people to take the stairs instead of riding the elevator.  [43:31] Defaults are everywhere. They save us effort by not having to make a decision every time.   [46:16] Melina shares her closing thoughts. [47:44] The more you know about someone, the fewer choices you can provide to them. When you have no idea who your customer is – what they like, what the context is of them finding you, why they are there, what needs they are looking to fill or problems they need to solve, you then have to present a whole bunch of choices, which can make it harder for them to make a decision. [50:33] Melina's award-winning first book, What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You is available on Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, and Booktopia. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Android. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and share what you liked about the show.  I hope you love everything recommended via The Brainy Business! Everything was independently reviewed and selected by me, Melina Palmer. So you know, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That means if you decide to shop from the links on this page (via Amazon or others), The Brainy Business may collect a share of sales or other compensation. Let's connect: Melina@TheBrainyBusiness.com The Brainy Business® on Facebook The Brainy Business on Twitter The Brainy Business on Instagram The Brainy Business on LinkedIn Melina on LinkedIn The Brainy Business on Youtube Join the BE Thoughtful Revolution – our free behavioral economics community, and keep the conversation going! More from The Brainy Business:

On today's episode of Speaking of Bitcoin, correspondent George Frankly explores the expertise paradox through the lens of two very different historical figures.TRANSCRIPTHello there- I'm George Frankly and I'm going to take a look at how even the best and brightest people can make truly stupid decisions and terrible predictions- and what we can learn from them. This is Dare to be Stupid.This time on Dare to be Stupid, “The Expert Incentive,” or “God Save the King of Kong.”I'm not looking forward to this. I loathe misinformation. I loathe innumeracy. And before anybody asks what the word innumeracy means let me say I also loathe illiteracy. The world needs experts and experienced professionals in positions of power, now more than ever- I firmly believe that.So it honestly sucks that I've decided to sit here today and tell you that expertise is dangerous. Experts are a complicated concept, and despite agreeing on the broad strokes of the word we all have granular disagreements in what being an “expert” actually means. I want to get into the nitty-gritty of where expertise goes right and wrong by talking about two sides of the same coin- two closely-intertwined experts in their respective fields: 18th century Hungarian scientist and medical physician Ignaz Semmelweis, and 20th century professional Donkey Kong player and Hot Sauce Entrepreneur Billy J. Mitchell. I absolutely cannot tell the story of one without the other.As a dedicated fan of both men, it's hard to know where to begin. Semmelweis was an expert that pioneered the earliest concepts of germ theory, and Mitchell is an expert that cheats at the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong for money.The key difference is that Semmelweis's fellow experts insisted he was a fraud, and Mitchell's contemporaries insisted for years that he wasn't.Ignaz Semmelweis studied law, science, and medicine at the University of Vienna and made his mark on history working at the obstetrics clinic in Vienna General Hospital. There, he was frustrated by the high rates of maternal mortality in the clinic. The death of mothers by post-childbirth fever was uncomfortably common, and he wanted answers. Infection and germ theory were not yet understood concepts, so all he had was deductive reasoning and experimental design- that thing your middle school teachers called “the scientific method.”The immediate observation that spurred him forward was the most confusing one. The mortality rate for new mothers was as high as 15% in the practicing doctors' ward… but in the next ward over, which was staffed by traditional midwives instead of university-educated doctors… the average mortality rate was under 5%. The rate of contracting fatal childbed fever was three times higher in the clinic run by the elite doctors than in the clinic run by the supposedly-unprofessional midwives. He was certain that if he could isolate the cause of the lower rates, he could adapt it into the other clinic and save lives. I'll give you a hint: he was right. But we'll get to that.Billy Mitchell is an icon. An icon of what varies from person to person, but he is nonetheless iconic. For over 25 years he's rarely been seen without a sharp suit, loud American flag necktie, and a magnificently coiffed, flowing mane of hair. He was one of the earliest faces of video game world records- a massive hobbyist sport of competing for the fastest times and highest scores in arcade and home video games.Mitchell rose to fame with his record of the world's first perfect Pac-Man score in 1999 and further for his world record high score in Donkey Kong. The 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters chronicled his dramatic victory and cemented his public image as a fierce competitor… and a bit of a cinematic villain. His personal ties to the company that officiated and validated the scores allowed him to skirt a lot of the scrutiny that other competitors faced. Whereas most world records had to be achieved in a public exhibition on inspected hardware… Mitchell was able to turn in a fuzzy VHS tape of his record Donkey Kong run at home and had it accepted on the spot. The suspicion soon boiled over, and by 2018 multiple detailed technical analyses found that Billy Mitchell… had cheated.170 years previously, Dr. Semmelweis had catalogued several differences and tested their correlations over many long months. Midwives delivered with women on their sides- he had doctors move women to their sides. No effect. Patients in the doctors' ward were regularly visited by Priests with loud bell-ringing attendants. He had them ditch the bells. No effect. But then, inspiration struck. One of his coworkers died. Wait, that sounds terrible. No wait, it is terrible. But, grim or not, it gave him a lead: a fellow research doctor had accidentally lacerated his own hand while performing an autopsy, and succumbed to rising temperature and death identical to the stages of childbed fever. The link to the autopsy was a bit circumstantial, but Semmelweis noted that nearly all of the Doctors in his ward did routine autopsy research- the midwives never handled cadavers. He had a frankly absurd theory. He suspected there were “fine cadaverous particles” (in his words) being transmitted to vulnerable women and causing the illness. Midwives were rarely exposed to corpses and routinely rinsed their hands with hot water and soap, so he adopted a similar process: doctors in his ward would regularly rinse their hands and tools in a chlorinated lime solution- weak bleach, essentially. He guessed- very luckily- that the chlorine solution's ability to cleanse strong odors meant it might remove his mystery particles. He had discovered germs and then disinfectants- long before either could be fully explained.The maternal mortality rate in his ward eventually dropped under 2%- and at a few points even went entire months with no deaths. He brought his method to his next hospital posting, where rates dropped from 10% to less than 1%. He soon wrote a paper about his findings and began to distribute it across the region. It was widely and aggressively rejected. Semmelweis's core thesis of “please wash your goddamn hands” went against all of the expert consensus. His insinuation that it was Doctors- academics and experts every one of them- Doctors that were spreading childbed fever was considered insulting, hostile, and an affront to their authority. His hand-washing solution was seen as little more than magical thinking without scientific merit, and the medical establishment shunned him. He eventually died in a mental institution of complications from a hand injury- the exact same fever he had railed against. It wasn't until decades later that he would be vindicated by Louis Pasteur's seminal work on germ theory, and the history books have proven kinder to him than… well, kinder than history itself was.In the 21st century, Billy Mitchell faced the opposite problem. A small but vocal group of analysts and programming experts had found ultra-fine discrepancies in his world record video. At first, coding experts found that Mitchell's luck was supernaturally high- the random elements of the game were suspiciously generous during the recording. Soon they found that split-second variations in how the ladders and girders of Donkey Kong's stages loaded onscreen didn't match the display of real arcade hardware; in fact it perfectly matched the behavior of PC emulator software. Mitchell had essentially pulled off his miracle run on a home computer simulation of the game, with access to limitless modifications and instant do-overs. But Billy Mitchell was unbowed. The highly-technical evidence struck many as unconvincing. More than that, Mitchell and his fans touted a bigger point: he wouldn't need to cheat. Billy Mitchell had numerous public performances of extremely good Donkey Kong runs. He knew all the ins and outs of the game. Billy Mitchell was, indisputably, an expert at the game of Donkey Kong. Why would an expert bother to cheat?Ignaz Semmelweis was called a fraud because he defied the experts. Billy Mitchell was called the real deal because he was an expert. By most definitions, all these experts are experts. Why did expertise choose the wrong side of history both times?That's easy. They're all people. And being an expert doesn't cure you of common reasoning errors- in fact, it can teach you all-new ones.The doctors weren't just guided by simple egotism, although that was definitely a factor. No, they fell into something that sociologists have begun to call “the expertise paradox.” Specialists in a field- including the very best in their fields- inevitably develop tunnel vision. Hyper-specialization in a field or an industry begins to close them off to outside knowledge. To a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail: to a man with a prestigious medical degree in 1830, microbiology looks like magical bullshit. Innovation rarely grows from within a rigid institution, much less its tenured experts: hell, Donkey Kong, a groundbreaking arcade game that revitalized and revolutionized video games, didn't come from the established pioneers at Atari. It was made by upstart toy company Nintendo, and wasn't even designed by a professional coder- it was created by Shigeru Miyamoto, an aspiring cartoonist. In all trades, in all workplaces, and at every age, cross-training and cross-disciplinary learning is vital. The best discoveries come from those who are hungry to learn, not those who sit soaking in what they have learned.Hunger to learn versus hunger to be learned can be seen in every technical field- if you went to college for a specialized subject you've seen it. There are the masters who can recite every equation, muscle group, and atomic mass- the rote learners. And then there are the masters who dig into comprehension and mechanisms- the ones that can derive the equations, visualize the function of each muscle group, and see how the atomic weight informs the material properties. Expert decision-making can easily degenerate into fast-thinking repetition from muscle memory. The chess master Herbert Simon criticized the glorification of expert intuition when he said: QUOTE “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” END QUOTESemmelweis wanted more than memorizing and reciting answers: he wanted to understand. He experimented and extrapolated and went wherever it took him. At the end of the day he was a scientist first and a doctor second- and many of his colleagues were barely doctors at all.So what of Billy Mitchell's grand defense? Why would an expert cheat?Because experts are the most effective cheaters. In any competitive arena, the most successful cheats and cons are inevitably done by the ones that best know the craft. Gaming speed-runner and historian Karl Jobst put it best;QUOTE “You might think that having the talent to achieve a world record would make someone less susceptible to cheating, but it often works against them.” “They feel like they deserve the world record, and when the game they play doesn't give them the luck they need, they become increasingly frustrated. On top of this, having talent and deep knowledge of a game makes you a better cheater. You know what tools to use and how to hide your edits. You understand what does or doesn't make sense, what is or isn't possible, and what's believable. When top players cheat, it's almost always detected by other top players looking much deeper than a normal spectator might.”“The fact that better players make better cheaters means that arguments such as ‘he's such a good player, he has no reason to cheat' are fundamentally flawed.” END QUOTEThe incentive to prove and protect your expertise can undermine it in an instant. Billy Mitchell was routinely within spitting distance of the world record, so he employed his expertise to just take it. The fact that he could have theoretically done it for real was all the justification he needed. Semmelweis' peers worked too hard to get where they were to let an upstart with wild ideas make them feel inferior. They were doctors- to think they were making people ill was an insult to their entire identities. Experts are hugely important- vital, even, to all of society. But their self-perception and public perception can lead them down dangerous paths: experts are not inherently geniuses, and, like any human being, they are not perfect or infallible. The best experts are constantly looking to expand their understanding, and the worst are constantly trying to prove their worth. Both kinds will make mistakes, but only the former will admit to them and learn from them. Every human being has a range of their own expertise and must govern themselves similarly: respect the limits of your own knowledge, be grateful to those who can fill in the gaps, and don't put anyone on a pedestal… especially yourself.Thanks for listening. As usual I'd like to remind you that all of my illustrious job titles come with the prefix “armchair”; if you're an expert, and you're hearing me get it wrong, I'd like to hear from you.-This episode was written, performed and edited by George Frankly with additional production support by Adam B. Levine. Our theme song comes courtesy of Jared Rubens and this episodes album art features a photograph provided by Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash, modified by Speaking of Bitcoin. Have any questions or comments? Send Adam an email at adam@speakingofbitcoin.showSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 1991, the American economist, political scientist and cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon published "Organizations and Markets" in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. It provides a critique of neoclassical and new institutional economic assumptions of organizational behavior. "Research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" won him the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1978. Simon provides a theory of organizations in economic systems in both capitalist and non-capitalist economies in this paper.This article was read by Luce Nguyen, who is on Twitter at @NguyenLuce. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 1986, the American economist, political scientist and cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon published "Rationality in Psychology and Economics" in the Journal of Business. Continuing with Simon's critique of neoclassical assumptions of economic behavior, Simon asserts that the standard of rationality used in neoclassical economic analysis is insufficient to analyze the real world. In particular, he critiques the over-use of assumptions in the works of Gary Becker and others, that he contends makes economic science unreplicable and ascientific. "Research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" won Simon the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1978.This article was read by Luce Nguyen, who is on Twitter at @NguyenLuce. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we talk to Leidy Klotz about his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.Leidy Klotz is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in the Schools of Engineering, Architecture, and Business. His wide-ranging, prolific, and highly-awarded research is filling in unexplored overlaps between design and behavioral science. Nationally recognized as one of 40-under-40 professors who inspire, Leidy has taught thousands of students, including 21 Ph.D. advisees, whose designing and teaching shapes the world. He founded and directs the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, which brings together scholars, funders, media, and practitioners to advance behavioral science for design.We discuss the human cognitive bias to try and solve a problem by adding new elements rather than by subtracting pieces from the problem; how deeply-rooted and pernicious this is in both our evolution and our economics, and how it has contributed to the complex and compounding crises in which we find ourselves today; the implications of subtraction thinking for civil engineering, governance and collective behavior; how to communicate a subtraction strategy as a net positive without setting off people's loss aversion alarms; whether it's possible to “subtract” systemic racism and other structural inequalities; and in what ways the evolution of the technosphere will make for future humans both more and less than we are…https://www.leidyklotz.com/If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! Patrons can gain access to two extra episodes a month, our monthly book club, new art and music, and other wondrous things.• Join the Future Fossils Discord Server and/or Facebook Group• Buy the books we talk about while supporting local booksellers and the podcastRelated Reading & Notes:Edward Tufte - PowerPoint is Evilhttps://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HO_SNOW_2014_PowerPoint-Is-Evil.pdfNPR - To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Overhttps://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/11/729314248/to-save-the-science-poster-researchers-want-to-kill-it-and-start-overMartin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent A. A. Jansen - The evolution of syntactic communicationhttps://www.nature.com/articles/35006635Things:optimizationsatisficingcomplex systemstrafficcognitioninteroperabilitydaylightingscience communicationpersuasionParkinson's LawJevons' ParadoxhoardingdeclutteringpollutionThe Anthropoceneurban designlandscape architectureentropydefund the policeinformation designthe non-euclidean curved attention landscapePeople:Joseph LeidyAndrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New WorldGeorge Lakoff & Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live byBrian Eno / The Long Now FoundationDaniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and SlowSystems researcher Tim ClancyKate Orff's Toward an Urban Ecology: SCAPE / LandscapeMarie KondoTyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The WorldRajiv Sethi & Brendan Flaherty's Shadow of DoubtHunter MaatsAnn BlairHerbert SimonKirell BenziRichard Doyle's Darwin's PharmacyChris Ryan's Civilized To DeathPierre Teilhard de ChardinMihaly Csikszentmihalyi's FlowMichael PhillipsAffiliate Links:I transcribe this show with help from Podscribe.ai — which I highly recommend to other podcasters. (If you'd like to help me edit transcripts for my upcoming Future Fossils book project, please let me know! I'm @michaelgarfield on Twitter & Instagram.)BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me restore the face I had before 15 months of COVID-19 burnout.If you're looking for new ways to help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, let me recommend the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and appreciate it so much I decided to join their affiliate program. The science is solid.And for musicians in the audience, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine and you can hear it all over my new single.When you're ready to switch it up, here are my music and listening recommendations on Spotify.Program Info:Episode mostly edited by my amazing wife, Nicole Taylor.Theme music by Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder.  Intro bed music by Michael Garfield.Cover Image c/o Jad Limcaco/Unsplash.Support this show financially:• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• Patreon: patreon.com/michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0xfD2BC66586FA4FBA189992E9B0037CD5cb9673EF• NFTs: Rarible | Foundation Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode is the second half of a discussion between Paul Craven & Gerald Ashley. If you haven't listened to the first half (

Today’s guest is Jabe Bloom, in conversation with Simone and Emanuele Quintarelli, Boundaryless’ EEEO Micro Enterprise Lead.    With Jabe, we look into how, increasingly in an age of technologically powered organizations, thriving means the ability to enable “the three economies” of differentiation, scale and scope at the same time. The key question is: what’s the role of platforms and ecosystems in this shift?    During the chat we explore topics such as managing organizational commons, ensuring continuity between the organization and its ecosystem, decentralizing information, sympoietic versus autopoietic systems, maneuver warfare theory, cosmopolitan localism, the role of social practice and methodologies in institutional innovation and so much more. We focus on the interplay between these trends and organizational development.   Jabe Bloom is part of Red Hat’s Global Transformation Office, where he services as a senior director. He has been working to explore the complex interactions between design, innovation, development, and operational excellence in organizations for more than 20 years. Jabe is currently writing his dissertation in pursuit of a Ph.D. in Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon University (PA) – his research focuses on the field of Transition Design and informs an ongoing exploration of the practice of design and strategy with a select group of international clients.    Tune in to this informative conversation as we learn more about Jabe’s research, and his theories on organisational design and platform thinking.    Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our Medium publication: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/Podcast-S2E16-Jabe-Bloom      To find out more about Jabe’s work:   > Website: http://blog.jabebloom.com/  > Twitter: https://twitter.com/cyetain   > Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/en    Other references and mentions:   > Herbert Simon:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon  > Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration, 1968: https://www.amazon.com/Organization-Environment-Managing-Differentiation-Integration/dp/0875841295   > Bruno Latour: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/index-2.html > Elinor Ostrom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom  Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast   Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music   Recorded on 9 April 2021.

In IT, there is a tremendous amount of jargon.We are constantly using acronyms and abbreviations and obfuscating meaning.And, I have to admit, I have used terms without fully understanding their meaning, even though I thought I didSometimes, the same terms can have different meanings like the term SASE, which means Secure Access Services edge, and not the Self Addressed Stamped Envelope I would send off to people advertising in the backs of comic books when I was a kid.One term that is talked about a lot today is AI/ML, as if AI and ML are interchangeable concepts.But they aren’t.AI has been around for a long time at least since 1956 when the program “Logic Theorist” was conceived by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon to mimic human problem solving skills.By the 1980s experts systems started to show up and in 1997 Deep Blue defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov. Around that time, we started to see speech recognition systems hitting the market.All of these things were called AI at the time, but by today’s standards they are less than.So today when we look at the panoply of AI, we see it as an onion.AI is the outer ring, the general category.ML, or Machine learning is a ring inside the onion, which uses algorithms to parse data and make predictions.Deeper into the onion is DL or Deep Learning which utilizes neural networks to perform machine learning on large data sets.We have reached the age of reasoning machines, and we look down the road to Artificial General Intelligence and Self-Aware Systems.Perhaps someday, we will become one with the machine intelligence and reach Singularity and Transcendence, but for now we have machines, that one day will seem primitive when we look back, but are doing and discovering amazing things today. And for now we should take pause and try to understand what we have built, and what it means to society and to future generations, because whatever AI really is, it is inevitable.

This is a mixture of satisfy and suffice, and it is aiming to make decisions that are good enough, adequate, and serve their purpose. This stands in stark contrast to those who wish to maximize their decisions with "just in case" and "that sounds nice" extras. Those who maximize are looking to make a perfect choice. This doesn't exist, so they are usually just left waiting. https://bit.ly/mentalmodelshollins Show notes and/or episode transcripts are available at https://bit.ly/self-growth-home Peter Hollins is a bestselling author, human psychology researcher, and a dedicated student of the human condition. Visit https://bit.ly/peterhollins to pick up your FREE human nature cheat sheet: 7 surprising psychology studies that will change the way you think. For narration information visit Russell Newton at https://bit.ly/VoW-home For production information visit Newton Media Group LLC at https://bit.ly/newtonmg #DecisionMaking #HerbertSimon #LogicalAnalysis #NewtonMediaGroupLLC #PeterHollins #TheArtandScienceofSelf-Growth #RussellNewton #NewtonMG #satisficing #satisfiction #WiseJudgment #MentalModels Decision Making,Herbert Simon,Logical Analysis,Newton Media Group LLC,Peter Hollins,The Art and Science of Self-Growth,Russell Newton,NewtonMG,satisficing,satisfiction,Wise Judgment,Mental Models,

A Generation Zapped: Studies show that 40% of teens say the adults in their lives are chronically distracted. It's no surprise, addictive tech behaviors have become alarmingly evident. The first thing we reach out to when we can even perceive the slightest hint of boredom is our phone. The last thing we kiss goodnight is usually a deeply personal digital device. The first thing we check on in the morning is our smart phone's wellbeing and safety. Before we ingest the food on our plates, we must post it for strangers and friends miles and miles away to acknowledge and like it. We've more programs and content in our bucket list than we will be able to watch in our lifetime. When describing the poverty of attention, Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winner for Economics in 1978 says, “What information consumes is the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The point is, how can there be anything on the other side of the screen that's more important than what's happening in our real lives in real time? Are we not living as if our busyness is just a proxy for our productivity? It's in our hands to stop consuming everything that meets the eye, to take back the control and to stop living in the margins. How is our future sustainable this way? How long will we continue to be stay zapped under a technology spell? Forget all this. Here's one question I want you to ask yourself. “Is technology enhancing my personal human capital, or depreciating it?” Read More HERE: https://futurestrongacademy.com/ugh-why-is-my-smart-phone-so-addictive-well-here-is-the-lure-video/

The first episode of season two features SAE alumnus Stephen Simon. Tune in today for an honest conversation with the future owner of the Indiana Pacers on mistakes made, lessons learned, and keys to success (aka everything you won't learn in school). Foundation CEO, Steve Mitchell, interviewed Stephen over Zoom, and the two of them re-lived fond memories of their time at Indiana University. This episode is jam-packed with advice, wisdom, and of course, great stories. Stephen is the son of Herbert Simon, Founder of Simon Property Group and owner of the Indiana Pacers. Ever been to a mall? As the largest mall owner in the U.S., it's likely owned by Simon Property Group. Although he admits that he didn't have much direction as a young adult, Stephen is successful in his own right as the Founder and Managing Partner of Simon Equity Partners, a private equity firm based in California. In addition to SEP, Stephen is a director for the Herbert Simon Family Foundation and on the board of directors for the Pacer's Basketball Corporation, a team he will eventually inherit from his father. Stephen also serves on the boards of Central Indiana Land Trust, Conscious Alliance, and HeadCount. Stephen speaks to some of the common themes that we've seen throughout Foundation episodes; be curious, never stop learning, and do what you love. He also discusses what he attributes his success to, owning and learning from mistakes, and things he would change if he could go back in time. We also couldn't let him go without talking Pacer's basketball!

The average B2B buyer receives more than 100 email a day. They switch between tasks 300 times a day, and use 56 different apps or websites. Let's face it, we're overwhelmed with content. Economist and social scientist Herbert Simon put it best when he said, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Wise words for all of us content marketers. So how do we rise above the noise?  In a word: Context.

On what AI is or isn’t, and whether it’s between things.    Subscribe at: paid.retraice.com    Details: no one knows what AI is; six questions; AI is an ocean; Herbert Simon on `the artificial'; an interface; artifacts; a battery; goals and environments; goals connected to batteries; simple and complex artifacts; amendments, corrections; Schneier was not a physicist; we got the Dulles quote on conspiracy; Russell on the small mental gaps between creatures. Complete notes and video at: https://www.retraice.com/segments/re6   Air date: Sunday, 25th Oct. 2020, 07 : 20 PM Pacific/US.   Chapters: 00:00 no one knows what AI is; 00:46 six questions; 09:22 AI is an ocean; 12:14 Herbert Simon on `the artificial'; 13:08 an interface; 15:20 artifacts; 16:09 a battery; 19:08 goals and environments; 21:13 goals connected to batteries; 25:14 simple and complex artifacts; 25:38 amendments, corrections; 25:53 Schneier was not a physicist; 26:13 we got the Dulles quote on conspiracy; 28:43 Russell on the small mental gaps between creatures.   References:       Amdahl, K. (1991). There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings. Clearwater Publishing Company, Inc. ISBN: 0962781592. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0962781592 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0962781592 https://lccn.loc.gov/91203772      Margin (2020/10/22). Ma4: Assumptions (A Wrestling Match). retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/ma4 Retrieved 24th Oct. 2020.      Retraice (2020/09/07). Re1: Three Kinds of Intelligence. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re1 Retrieved 22nd Sep. 2020.      Retraice (2020/09/11). Re5: Hints From Inside. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re5 Retrieved 22nd Sep. 2020.      Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2020). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Pearson, 4th ed. ISBN: 978-0134610993. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0134610993 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0134610993 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047498      Simon, H. A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT, 3rd ed. ISBN: 0262691914. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0262691914 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0262691914 https://lccn.loc.gov/96012633 Previous editions available at: https://archive.org/search.php?query=The%20sciences%20of%20the%20artificial   Copyright: 2020 Retraice, Inc.  https://retraice.com

Håller valfriheten på att bli för stor? Vore det inte enklare om det bara fanns en sorts jeans att köpa? I takt med att mängden valmöjligheter växer kan det tyckas bli allt svårare att hitta rätt, men kanske handlar det bara om hur man letar? I detta avsnitt har vi samlat sju tips på hur man hanterar den växande valfriheten i vardagen. Vi avslutar med ett par boktips på samma tema.Länkar:Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-rich WorldHerbert Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality and Other Topics in Economics (vol3): Empirically Grounded Economic ReasonTyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday FoodiesMichael Bhaskar, Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mark Andrew Zwartynski, Chairman of the Mark Andrew Group is a veteran business development, public relations, communications, technology, management, marketing, finance, broadcast executive, and entrepreneur. Mark Andrew has many projects to his accomplishments such as the resurrection of the NBA Indiana Pacers (1982, under owner Herbert Simon) where he saved as Vice-President from 1982-1994. Mark also served as Senior Vice-President for the Dallas Mavericks from 1997-2000.

Keith Grint, researcher, Emeritus Professor at Warwick Business School and author of "Leadership. A Very Short Introduction", has taught leadership for 10+ years at the HEC-Oxford Executive Master « Consulting & Coaching for Change ». Herbert Simon, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for "his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations", is considered by many as the father of decision sciences. Simon's three stages in Rational Decision Making are Intelligence, Design, Choice. Decision-making was for him identifying and solving problems and he underlined that what is the most important and the most difficult isn’t "problem solving », which is the dominant mindset - but « problem finding ». And « problem finding » requires knowing how to identify and formulate problems. That's why I was so interested by Keith Grint research and asked him to speak to us about how to redecide problems using his critical, tame and wicked framework. During this phone interview with Keith, we addressed different questions - What are the key questions when redeciding which problem to solve ? - Could you explain the critical, tame and wicked problems framework ? - Why do people keep doing the same things when faced with new situations ? - How can we go beyond the mindset "Doing more of the same" when reframing problems ? - What happens when a wicked situation is "treated" as a critical or tame problem ? - When decision-makers think they face a critical or tame situation, but it is actually a wicked problem, what should they do ? - What are the new discoveries regarding your research on the importance of context in decision-making ?

Mark Andrew Zwartynski, Chairman of the Mark Andrew Group is a veteran business development, public relations, communications, technology, management, marketing, finance, broadcast executive, and entrepreneur. Mark Andrew has many projects to his accomplishments such as the resurrection of the NBA Indiana Pacers (1982, under owner Herbert Simon) where he saved as Vice-President from 1982-1994. Mark also served as Senior Vice-President for the Dallas Mavericks from 1997-2000.

Mark Andrew Zwartynski, Chairman of the Mark Andrew Group is a veteran business development, public relations, communications, technology, management, marketing, finance, broadcast executive and entrepreneur. Mark Andrew has many projects to his accomplishments such as the resurrection of the NBA Indiana Pacers (1982, under owner Herbert Simon) where he saved as Vice-President from 1982-1994. Mark also served as Senior Vice-President for the Dallas Mavericks from 1997-2000.

Satisfiicing Bias: How Better Becomes the Enemy of Best. Herbert Simon, Noble Prize Economist, introduced us to an idea of this challenge to innovation and theory of change. Carol Sanford, the positive contrarian, gives you the deep understanding behind this and way around it so you can kickstart and accelerate Innovation.

01:30 - James’ Superpower: Spending time chasing his daughter and her robots around. Helping with her robotics club at school. 02:37 - “Just Be Yourself” is Terrible Advice 03:50 - What Are You Trying to Accomplish in the Interview 06:00 - Be Authentic: Which Parts of Yourself to Show Be a Strong Communicator Be an Avid Learner Don’t be a Jerk 07:25 - Turn Your Interviewers into Your Advocates 12:42 - Technical Interviews Saying “I Don’t Know” is OK 16:00 Interviewee as the Interviewer Make Sure You Want to Work Here Answer Questions Honestly 18:53 - Prepare for Common Interview Questions Rephrasing Weakness 23:34 - Intrinsic Motivation Mastery by Robert Greene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_(book)) 29:29 - Storytelling in the Interview Being Confident in Your Accomplishments Interviewers Explain Why You Are Asking the Question 37:15 - Management Techniques Richard Cook (https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/richard-cook/) Herbert Simon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon) 45:00 - Why Technical Interviews are Challenging Cracking the Coding Interview (http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/) Reflections: John: Setting the context for being approachable as an interviewer is important. Rein: Some of this advice works all the time, and some of this advice only works when you have been able to develop a personal connection with the interviewer/interviewee. James: Think about if this is a place you want to work while interviewing. Avdi: Turning your interviewer into your advocate can help them also be able to tell you if this place will be a good fit for you. Jessica: It’s not just about being able to interview well as the interviewee, but we need to choose a company that can interview well too. Ask your personal contacts about what it is like to work at a certain company. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: James Edward Gray.

Jim Guszcza is the chief data scientist at Deloitte Analytics. His title paints a picture that he’s a total numbers geek. And that would be a fair, but single-dimensional assessment. What it doesn’t speak to is Jim’s passion for behavioral science and, more importantly, the collaboration of data science and behavioral science. He makes a case for the application of behavioral science simply with this analogy: if we need help to see, we get eyeglasses. In so doing, we are using science and technology to help correct our faulty vision. But when it comes to correcting for our biases, we don’t turn to science and technology and that might improve our decision making. But we could. That’s where the collaboration between data science (or Big Data) and behavioral science come together: applying science and technology to decision making. And THAT was fascinating.  In our discussion about music, we talked about Jim’s equal interest in a Dvorak string quartet as much as he is the in the soundtrack to “Wonder Boys” or a great jazz piano performance. He shared he has a penchant for small venues and small bands. He then shared some tips about how to apply behavioral science to your job and your life. He focused on reading books and listening to podcasts as ways to become more educated on the topic and to help you apply behavioral science principles. NOTE: Behavioral Grooves is celebrating our 100th episode in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 17, 2019 with authors Annie Duke and Jeff Kreisler. Our sponsors for the event include PeopleScience and Podbean and we want to thank them for helping us make this possible. If you’re unable to join us in person, we’ll be live streaming the event and we hope you’ll log in there!  Links Jim Guszcza: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/profiles/jguszcza.html “Moneyball” Michael Lewis: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1301.Moneyball “Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction” Paul Miele: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-21565-000 Richard Thaler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Thaler Cass Sunstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein Daniel Kahneman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman Imposter syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome Bounded Rationality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality Bounded Self-Control: https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Behavioural_economics/Bounded_rationality_and_self_control.html Craig Fox, UCLA: https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/management-and-organizations/faculty/fox Intention Action Gap: https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/behavioural-economics-the-intention-action-gap Mike Green, Deloitte: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/authors/g/michael-greene.html Cathy Neil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction Robert Cialdini, ASU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini “The Design of Everyday Things” Don Norman: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things Tom Malone, MIT: https://cci.mit.edu/malone/ “Rockonomics” Alan Krueger: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564519/rockonomics-by-alan-b-krueger/ “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” Shoshana Zuboff: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26195941-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism “Deep Medicine” Eric Topol: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/eric-topol/deep-medicine/9781541644649/ Stanford Human Centered AI: https://hai.stanford.edu/ Carnegie Mellon Social & Decision Sciences: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/ Behavioral Scientist Ethical Checklist: https://behavioralscientist.org/behavioral-scientists-ethics-checklist/  “Quiet” Susan Cain: https://www.quietrev.com/ “Thinking in Bets” Annie Duke: https://www.annieduke.com/ Herbert Simon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon   Kurt Nelson: @motivationguru Tim Houlihan: @thoulihan 100th Episode Event at Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Behavioral-Science-Meetup-Group/events/264495763/ 100th Episode Event at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/behavioral-grooves-100th-episode-event-tickets-73159537145 Behavioral Grooves: www.behavioralgrooves.com PeopleScience: https://peoplescience.maritz.com/ Podbean: https://www.podbean.com    Musical Links Bob Dylan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan Van Morrison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Morrison Leonard Cohen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen David MacDonald: https://www.msmnyc.edu/faculty/david-macdonald/ Arthur Schoenberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg Wigmore Hall: https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/ Dvorak String Quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxtAHpYIXdU Schumann String Quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO4UhZuw7gQ Vijay Iyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijay_Iyer Wonder Boys: https://www.discogs.com/Various-Wonder-Boys-Music-From-The-Motion-Picture/master/341271 Angus & Julia Stone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHdPyp8onSI Flora Cash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzjMmwki1Fs Echo and the Bunnymen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_%26_the_Bunnymen The Cure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure O.A.R.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.A.R.

AEMind.com | How Questions Affect Your Brain and Reality Free Better Memory Now Guide ▶ http://www.BetterMemoryGuide.com AE Mind with Luis Angel, Memory Coach ▶ http://www.aemind.com //Follow AE Mind// Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/aemind Podcast: https://www.aemind.com/podcast Like @ http://www.facebook.com/aemind1 Follow @ http://www.twitter.com/aemind IG: http://www.instagram.com/AE.Mind //Summary// Fast Company Article: https://goo.gl/iz7UqJ Want To Know What Your Brain Does When It Hears A Question? Questions hijack the brain. The moment you hear one, you literally can't think of anything else. And that can be a powerful tool. "Behavioral scientists have also found that just asking people about their future decisions significantly influences those decisions, a phenomenon known as the "mere measurement effect." Back in 1993, social scientists Vicki Morwitz, Eric Johnson, and David Schmittlein conducted a study with more than 40,000 participants that revealed that simply asking someone if people were going to purchase a new car within six months increased their purchase rates by 35%." "As neuroscientist John Medina puts it in his book Brain Rules, "Research shows that we can't multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously." Likewise, Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon has written that human beings consciously "operate largely in serial fashion. The more demanding the task, the more we are single-minded." At every personal development event that I've gone to, from NLP and Tony Robbins events to motivation based events, they always talk about asking the right questions. There is power in framing questions in a positive light in order to get positive answers. One of the parts of the brain that helps with this is called the Reticular Activating System. The RAS finds answers to those questions. Let me know a positive question that you're going to ask yourself to help you move your life into a positive direction? Stay Up! Keep Learning Keep Growing Achieve and Accelerated and Empowered Mind -Luis Angel Echeverria Your AE Mind Memory Coach Memory Master Champion Best Selling Author http://www.BetterMemoryBook.com Memory Training for Students, Professionals, Business People, Mental Athletes, and Everyone Else: http://www.aemind.com Song: Elektronomia - Sky High [NCS Release] Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds. Video Link: https://youtu.be/TW9d8vYrVFQ Download Link: https://NCS.lnk.to/SkyHigh

We often discuss the Intuitive and Rational System and how they work together to help customers make decisions. The Intuitive System is automatic and emotional, and the Rational System is deliberate and logical. What we don't usually share is that by academic standards, this concept is relatively new. An older theory also explains why we act the way we do as customers, and you need to know about it to promote customer success. This episode of The Intuitive Customer Podcast explores the concept of bounded rationality first introduced by Nobel-Prize winning professor Herbert Simon in the 1960s. We also discuss how this concept applies to your customers' behavior and your CX strategy.   People Make Decisions within Constraints Herbert Simon was a polymath, which means he was a genius in several fields. He contributed a lot to a lot of different areas. Simon was a city planner, a professor, a psychologist and one of the first computer science professors. In fact, many of the theories that we use today in computer programming are the brain-child of Simon. Simon's concept of bounded rationality is an essential concept in modern behavioral science. It means that people are rational, but they do not have infinite amounts of rationality. They are logical within constraints. The constraints that Simon refers to are common to all people. We have a limit to our attention span and memory capacity. We only have so much energy to devote to thinking. Often, we don't have all the information and cannot forecast future events with a ton of accuracy. However, if we were rational all the time, none of these limits or shortcomings would matter. To put it another way, people are not computers. They don't make rational decisions all the time, but they also don't make random decisions based on emotional whims either. We use rationality but within the boundaries of the circumstances of the decision-making environment. An example of bounded rationality influencing customer behavior could be opening an email from a retailer you like and seeing a special sale that is going to end in a short amount of time. When you are sorting through the details of the offer, which leave a little to be desired regarding clarity, your work calls to ask if you can come back to the office for an emergency. The decision-making environment you are experiencing, which includes a limited-time offer with murky details and a big crisis at the office that needs your immediate attention, will affect how you make a decision.   Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about how customers make decisions using bounded rationality.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.   If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization's marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

We often discuss the Intuitive and Rational System and how they work together to help customers make decisions. The Intuitive System is automatic and emotional, and the Rational System is deliberate and logical. What we don't usually share is that by academic standards, this concept is relatively new. An older theory also explains why we act the way we do as customers, and you need to know about it to promote customer success. This episode of The Intuitive Customer Podcast explores the concept of bounded rationality first introduced by Nobel-Prize winning professor Herbert Simon in the 1960s. We also discuss how this concept applies to your customers' behavior and your CX strategy.   People Make Decisions within Constraints Herbert Simon was a polymath, which means he was a genius in several fields. He contributed a lot to a lot of different areas. Simon was a city planner, a professor, a psychologist and one of the first computer science professors. In fact, many of the theories that we use today in computer programming are the brain-child of Simon. Simon's concept of bounded rationality is an essential concept in modern behavioral science. It means that people are rational, but they do not have infinite amounts of rationality. They are logical within constraints. The constraints that Simon refers to are common to all people. We have a limit to our attention span and memory capacity. We only have so much energy to devote to thinking. Often, we don't have all the information and cannot forecast future events with a ton of accuracy. However, if we were rational all the time, none of these limits or shortcomings would matter. To put it another way, people are not computers. They don't make rational decisions all the time, but they also don't make random decisions based on emotional whims either. We use rationality but within the boundaries of the circumstances of the decision-making environment. An example of bounded rationality influencing customer behavior could be opening an email from a retailer you like and seeing a special sale that is going to end in a short amount of time. When you are sorting through the details of the offer, which leave a little to be desired regarding clarity, your work calls to ask if you can come back to the office for an emergency. The decision-making environment you are experiencing, which includes a limited-time offer with murky details and a big crisis at the office that needs your immediate attention, will affect how you make a decision.   Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about how customers make decisions using bounded rationality.   The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.   If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization's marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com. To subscribe to The Intuitive Customer and never miss a podcast, please click here.

In this episode Mark and I talk about whether science is slowing down, the benefits of positive feedback loops, what the central task of analysts ought to be, how we create high reliability organizations, what's the role of history in weapon system projects, and much more. I also ask Mark about how some of the great thinkers of the 20th century should impact our thinking about acquisition. From Charles Perrow on high reliability organizations and Martin Landau on the benefits of social redundancy, to Friedrich Hayek on the uses of knowledge and Herbert Simon on, well, almost everything. But Mark's favorite philosopher of the 20th century is Karl Popper, who has much to teach us on falsification, the growth of knowledge, and the open society. I again can't recommend enough reading through some of his great papers, mostly online for free at independent.academia.edu, including the B-52 Development book, Systems Design and Project Management Principles, and Needs and Opportunities in US Naval History which we discuss on the program. His books are also available to buy on Amazon. This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. Soundtrack by urmymuse: "reflections of u". You can follow us on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at AcquisitionTalk.com.

Of the many barriers to a more robust presence for systems approaches in the academy, the relative scarcity of sufficient introductory textbooks in the field stands out as a particular irritant.  In the decades since the publication of von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory in 1968, a vast agglomeration of conceptual frameworks and methodological heuristics in the study of systemic phenomena has continued to accrue while the facilitation of entry points to the field combining both accessibility and thoroughness have largely failed to keep pace.  George E. Mobus and Michael C. Kalton have leapt bravely into that breach with their co-authored volume, Principles of Systems Science (Springer Verlag, 2015).  As the title indicates, Mobus and Kalton are firmly focused upon an approach to systems grounded in the traditional scientific method and, while by no means objective realists of any remotely naïve sort, their project most definitely leans towards more positivistic approaches to the study of systemic phenomena; clearly separating their work from the wider, and arguably “softer” field of Systems “Thinking”.  Leaning on Herbert Simon’s notion of the near-decomposability of hierarchical systems as well as the computational accounts of contemporary cognitive science, the book’s 700 plus pages are carefully and thoughtfully structured to guide the reader through an array of crucial systemic topics including notions of system boundary, dynamics, emergence, complexity and adaptation.  Of particular note is the thorough and rigorous treatment cybernetics receives within the overall scope of the systems sciences; something that makes this book something of a bridge builder between two fields with blurry boundaries between them that, too often, seem to jockey for the historical high-ground and supreme position of being “meta” to each other.  While clearly keeping cybernetics within the wider conceptual margins of Systems Science, the central role that it is given to the very notion of what constitutes a system is sure to satisfy many who straddle both sides of the debate but consider cybernetics their disciplinary, intellectual, and ethical home.  Carefully balancing scope with detail, this sweeping work of diligent scholarship does much to provide the kind of foundational textbook of which upper-level undergraduate and graduate students have long been in need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of the many barriers to a more robust presence for systems approaches in the academy, the relative scarcity of sufficient introductory textbooks in the field stands out as a particular irritant.  In the decades since the publication of von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory in 1968, a vast agglomeration of conceptual frameworks and methodological heuristics in the study of systemic phenomena has continued to accrue while the facilitation of entry points to the field combining both accessibility and thoroughness have largely failed to keep pace.  George E. Mobus and Michael C. Kalton have leapt bravely into that breach with their co-authored volume, Principles of Systems Science (Springer Verlag, 2015).  As the title indicates, Mobus and Kalton are firmly focused upon an approach to systems grounded in the traditional scientific method and, while by no means objective realists of any remotely naïve sort, their project most definitely leans towards more positivistic approaches to the study of systemic phenomena; clearly separating their work from the wider, and arguably “softer” field of Systems “Thinking”.  Leaning on Herbert Simon's notion of the near-decomposability of hierarchical systems as well as the computational accounts of contemporary cognitive science, the book's 700 plus pages are carefully and thoughtfully structured to guide the reader through an array of crucial systemic topics including notions of system boundary, dynamics, emergence, complexity and adaptation.  Of particular note is the thorough and rigorous treatment cybernetics receives within the overall scope of the systems sciences; something that makes this book something of a bridge builder between two fields with blurry boundaries between them that, too often, seem to jockey for the historical high-ground and supreme position of being “meta” to each other.  While clearly keeping cybernetics within the wider conceptual margins of Systems Science, the central role that it is given to the very notion of what constitutes a system is sure to satisfy many who straddle both sides of the debate but consider cybernetics their disciplinary, intellectual, and ethical home.  Carefully balancing scope with detail, this sweeping work of diligent scholarship does much to provide the kind of foundational textbook of which upper-level undergraduate and graduate students have long been in need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/systems-and-cybernetics

Of the many barriers to a more robust presence for systems approaches in the academy, the relative scarcity of sufficient introductory textbooks in the field stands out as a particular irritant.  In the decades since the publication of von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory in 1968, a vast agglomeration of conceptual frameworks and methodological heuristics in the study of systemic phenomena has continued to accrue while the facilitation of entry points to the field combining both accessibility and thoroughness have largely failed to keep pace.  George E. Mobus and Michael C. Kalton have leapt bravely into that breach with their co-authored volume, Principles of Systems Science (Springer Verlag, 2015).  As the title indicates, Mobus and Kalton are firmly focused upon an approach to systems grounded in the traditional scientific method and, while by no means objective realists of any remotely naïve sort, their project most definitely leans towards more positivistic approaches to the study of systemic phenomena; clearly separating their work from the wider, and arguably “softer” field of Systems “Thinking”.  Leaning on Herbert Simon’s notion of the near-decomposability of hierarchical systems as well as the computational accounts of contemporary cognitive science, the book’s 700 plus pages are carefully and thoughtfully structured to guide the reader through an array of crucial systemic topics including notions of system boundary, dynamics, emergence, complexity and adaptation.  Of particular note is the thorough and rigorous treatment cybernetics receives within the overall scope of the systems sciences; something that makes this book something of a bridge builder between two fields with blurry boundaries between them that, too often, seem to jockey for the historical high-ground and supreme position of being “meta” to each other.  While clearly keeping cybernetics within the wider conceptual margins of Systems Science, the central role that it is given to the very notion of what constitutes a system is sure to satisfy many who straddle both sides of the debate but consider cybernetics their disciplinary, intellectual, and ethical home.  Carefully balancing scope with detail, this sweeping work of diligent scholarship does much to provide the kind of foundational textbook of which upper-level undergraduate and graduate students have long been in need. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Business Second Opinion, Carol Sanford gives a business second opinion on Satisficing in the business world. Satisficing Bias: How Better Becomes the Enemy of Best. Herbert Simon, Noble Prize Economist, introduced us to an idea of this challenge to innovation and theory of change. Carol Sanford, the positive contrarian, gives you the deep understanding behind this and way around it so you can kickstart and accelerate Innovation. Find more at www.businesssecondopinion.com Harvard Business Review, Satisficing, Business, Better, Best, Innovation

Please join us for this very interesting conversation with the fascinating Denise Rousseau about Herbert Simon's JMS Classic - The Business School: A Problem in Organizational Design (1967). In this episode we touch upon the now pervasive issues of managerial education, the value of teaching administration, as well as the origins of how management became an institutionalized profession.Also, get to know Herbert Simon from anecdotes recounted by Denise, and hear what she has to say on these, and many other topics!

Cette année-là, les scientifiques Allen Newell (1927-1992) et le chercheur en sciences politiques Herbert Simon (1916-2001) entreprennent de modéliser sur … Lire la suite

Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after a thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon´s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition." Find out all you need to know about intuition in this exciting new podcast episode of Leadership XXL.

The buzz: “Machines will be capable in 20 years of doing any work a man can do” (1965, Dr. Herbert Simon). The manufacturing world is seeing innovation-driven trends and challenges across the Industrial Machinery and Components (IM&C) sector, with leading-edge companies already transforming their operations. The future will be defined by how quickly industry leaders address 3D-Printing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital Twins, and Hyper-Automation. The experts speak. Jeff Hojlo, IDC: “The difficulty is not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones” (Thomas A. Edison). Markus L. Rossmann, Capgemini: “Only the paranoid survive” (Andy Grove). Gary Nelson, SAP: “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else” (Tom Peters). Join us for Manufacturers: Time for 3D Printing, AI, Digital Twins, Hyper-Automation.

Kevin Kelly, I think, may be the smartest person in the world...and I am only half-joking. I have been deeply interested in his work, and his thinking has influenced mine. His 2010 book What Technology Wants changed my perspective on Information Technology in 2010; his book Cool Tools is a compendium of the best tools cultivated from his years of research. Among other resources I like is his blog post 1000 True Fans; his latest book just released this summer titled The Inevitable; and his podcast interviews on London Real, Tim Ferriss, Lewis Howes, and Chase Jarvis. I asked him to come onto the show to get into topics that I had not heard him dive into from the perspective that I was curious about... I know you will be too. Major take aways from this episode are: 1. If you were the leader of a 1000 person company, what would you ask your direct 5 reports to do? 2. What skills are needed to teach kids to handle this new future in regards to learning and failure? 3. How Kevin Kelly would handle ethics and governance as we program Artificial Intelligence. 4. How humans will become more ethical and moral training AI. 5. Kevin's AI philosophy is very unique and will help you understand the role of AI working with other AIs. 6. His opinion on the difference between AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. 7. The importance of being a newbie and an attitude of being a lifelong learner. 8. The difference between learning, how to learn versus finding how you learn that is unique to you. 9 . The skills enterprise leaders need to have in regards to how to fail. 10. The important skill of looking at the edges. 11. "In a world of abundance the only scarcity will be our attention," Herbert Simon. I have linked up all the show notes on redzonetech.net/podcast when you can get access to Kevin Kelly's books and publications. About Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control, a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord, an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools, and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010). His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable. Read full transcript here. How to get in touch with Kevin Kelly: Twitter Flickr YouTube Google Website Contact Page Website: kk.org Podcast: Cool Tools Podcast Blog: Cool Tools Blog Books: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future What Technology Wants Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities Full List of Published Books by Kevin Kelly Key Resources: Blog post 1000 True Fans TEDxTalk 12 Inevitable Forces That Will Shape Our Future Interview for London Real Interview with Tim Ferriss Interview with Lewis Howes Interview with Chase Jarvis This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard, a powerful tool that helps you communicate the status of your IT Security program visually in just a few minutes. Credits: * Outro music provided by Ben’s Sound Other Ways To Listen to the Podcast iTunes | Libsyn | Soundcloud | RSS | LinkedIn Leave a Review If you enjoyed this episode, then please consider leaving an iTunes review here Click here for instructions on how to leave an iTunes review if you're doing this for the first time. About Bill Murphy Bill Murphy is a world renowned IT Security Expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. Follow Bill on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Une série de 3 épisodes, encore une foi significativement plus long que les 12 minutes affichées (mais je me permet d’être plus long dès que j’ai un invité) suite de discussions avec Stanislas Jourdan autours du revenu de vie/de base. Vous pouvez retrouver Stanislas sur twitter ou sur son blog. Si vous voullez en savoir plus sur la question de l’inflation (liée au RDB) vous pouvez aussi consulter cet article de Stanislas Jourdan. Quelques liens pour en savoir davantage ou pour participer : Une interview de Yoland Bresson sur le revenu d’existance Une interview de Baptiste Mylondo sur rfi et son livre en vente sur eBay L’appel de Philippe Van Parijs pour une allocation universelle L’appel pour un revenue de vie Enfin la liste des prix nobel favorable à l’allocation universelle dont parlait Stanislas : James Meade, James Tobin, Jan Tinbergen, Milton Friedman et Herbert Simon. Vous pouvez me retrouver sur twitter (https://twitter.com/Xilrian) et vous abonner sur : notre flux RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/12minutesdeMP3), iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/12-minutes-de-.../id482495745), Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq_RSzto0rW5-Gg2693Jylw/videos) et soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/xilrian).

Une série de 3 épisodes, encore une foi significativement plus long que les 12 minutes affichées (mais je me permet d’être plus long dès que j’ai un invité) suite de discussions avec Stanislas Jourdan autours du revenu de vie/de base. Vous pouvez retrouver Stanislas sur twitter ou sur son blog. Si vous voullez en savoir plus sur la question de l’inflation (liée au RDB) vous pouvez aussi consulter cet article de Stanislas Jourdan. Quelques liens pour en savoir davantage ou pour participer : Une interview de Yoland Bresson sur le revenu d’existance Une interview de Baptiste Mylondo sur rfi et son livre en vente sur eBay L’appel de Philippe Van Parijs pour une allocation universelle L’appel pour un revenue de vie Enfin la liste des prix nobel favorable à l’allocation universelle dont parlait Stanislas : James Meade, James Tobin, Jan Tinbergen, Milton Friedman et Herbert Simon. Vous pouvez me retrouver sur twitter (https://twitter.com/Xilrian) et vous abonner sur : notre flux RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/12minutesdeMP3), iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/12-minutes-de-.../id482495745), Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq_RSzto0rW5-Gg2693Jylw/videos) et soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/xilrian).

Une série de 3 épisodes, encore une foi significativement plus long que les 12 minutes affichées (mais je me permet d’être plus long dès que j’ai un invité) suite de discussions avec Stanislas Jourdan autours du revenu de vie/de base. Vous pouvez retrouver Stanislas sur twitter ou sur son blog. Si vous voullez en savoir plus sur la question de l’inflation (liée au RDB) vous pouvez aussi consulter cet article de Stanislas Jourdan. Quelques liens pour en savoir davantage ou pour participer : Une interview de Yoland Bresson sur le revenu d’existance Une interview de Baptiste Mylondo sur rfi et son livre en vente sur eBay L’appel de Philippe Van Parijs pour une allocation universelle L’appel pour un revenue de vie Enfin la liste des prix nobel favorable à l’allocation universelle dont parlait Stanislas : James Meade, James Tobin, Jan Tinbergen, Milton Friedman et Herbert Simon. Vous pouvez me retrouver sur twitter (https://twitter.com/Xilrian) et vous abonner sur : notre flux RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/12minutesdeMP3), iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/12-minutes-de-.../id482495745), Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq_RSzto0rW5-Gg2693Jylw/videos) et soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/xilrian).

Une série de 3 épisodes, encore une foi significativement plus long que les 12 minutes affichées (mais je me permet d’être plus long dès que j’ai un invité) suite de discussions avec Stanislas Jourdan autours du revenu de vie/de base. Vous pouvez retrouver Stanislas sur twitter ou sur son blog. Si vous voullez en savoir plus sur la question de l’inflation (liée au RDB) vous pouvez aussi consulter cet article de Stanislas Jourdan. Quelques liens pour en savoir davantage ou pour participer : Une interview de Yoland Bresson sur le revenu d’existance Une interview de Baptiste Mylondo sur rfi et son livre en vente sur eBay L’appel de Philippe Van Parijs pour une allocation universelle L’appel pour un revenue de vie Enfin la liste des prix nobel favorable à l’allocation universelle dont parlait Stanislas : James Meade, James Tobin, Jan Tinbergen, Milton Friedman et Herbert Simon. Vous pouvez me retrouver sur twitter (https://twitter.com/Xilrian) et vous abonner sur : notre flux RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/12minutesdeMP3), iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/12-minutes-de-.../id482495745), Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq_RSzto0rW5-Gg2693Jylw/videos) et soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/xilrian).

Une série de 3 épisodes, encore une foi significativement plus long que les 12 minutes affichées (mais je me permet d’être plus long dès que j’ai un invité) suite de discussions avec Stanislas Jourdan autours du revenu de vie/de base. Vous pouvez retrouver Stanislas sur twitter ou sur son blog. Si vous voullez en savoir plus sur la question de l’inflation (liée au RDB) vous pouvez aussi consulter cet article de Stanislas Jourdan. Quelques liens pour en savoir davantage ou pour participer : Une interview de Yoland Bresson sur le revenu d’existance Une interview de Baptiste Mylondo sur rfi et son livre en vente sur eBay L’appel de Philippe Van Parijs pour une allocation universelle L’appel pour un revenue de vie Enfin la liste des prix nobel favorable à l’allocation universelle dont parlait Stanislas : James Meade, James Tobin, Jan Tinbergen, Milton Friedman et Herbert Simon. Vous pouvez me retrouver sur twitter (https://twitter.com/Xilrian) et vous abonner sur : notre flux RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/12minutesdeMP3), iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/12-minutes-de-.../id482495745), Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq_RSzto0rW5-Gg2693Jylw/videos) et soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/xilrian).

Une série de 3 épisodes, encore une foi significativement plus long que les 12 minutes affichées (mais je me permet d’être plus long dès que j’ai un invité) suite de discussions avec Stanislas Jourdan autours du revenu de vie/de base. Vous pouvez retrouver Stanislas sur twitter ou sur son blog. Si vous voullez en savoir plus sur la question de l’inflation (liée au RDB) vous pouvez aussi consulter cet article de Stanislas Jourdan. Quelques liens pour en savoir davantage ou pour participer : Une interview de Yoland Bresson sur le revenu d’existance Une interview de Baptiste Mylondo sur rfi et son livre en vente sur eBay L’appel de Philippe Van Parijs pour une allocation universelle L’appel pour un revenue de vie Enfin la liste des prix nobel favorable à l’allocation universelle dont parlait Stanislas : James Meade, James Tobin, Jan Tinbergen, Milton Friedman et Herbert Simon. Vous pouvez me retrouver sur twitter (https://twitter.com/Xilrian) et vous abonner sur : notre flux RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/12minutesdeMP3), iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/podcast/12-minutes-de-.../id482495745), Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq_RSzto0rW5-Gg2693Jylw/videos) et soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/xilrian).

Philosophy professor Tim Crane explains what he sees to be the main philosophical issues in the area of Artificial Intelligence

Transcript -- Philosophy professor Tim Crane explains what he sees to be the main philosophical issues in the area of Artificial Intelligence