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05059

05159

• laziness does not exist; but unseen barriers do
  devon price 2018
  medium.com/@devonprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01

  • “they’re already doing the best they can”

05259

• cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility
  mark r. leary, kate j. diebels, erin k. davisson, katrina p. jongman-sereno, jennifer c. isherwood, kaitlin t. raimi, samantha a. deffler, and rick h. hoyle 2017
  dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167217697695

  • Four studies examined intellectual humility—the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs might be wrong. Using a new Intellectual Humility (IH) Scale, Study 1 showed that intellectual humility was associated with variables related to openness, curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity, and low dogmatism. Study 2 revealed that participants high in intellectual humility were less certain that their beliefs about religion were correct and judged people less on the basis of their religious opinions. In Study 3, participants high in intellectual humility were less inclined to think that politicians who changed their attitudes were “flip-flopping,” and Study 4 showed that people high in intellectual humility were more attuned to the strength of persuasive arguments than those who were low. In addition to extending our understanding of intellectual humility, this research demonstrates that the IH Scale is a valid measure of the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs are fallible.

05359

• the problem with facts
  tim harford 2017
  timharford.com/2017/03/the-problem-with-facts/

05459

• preverbal infants affirm third-party interventions that protect victims from aggressors
  yasuhiro kanakogi et al. 2017
  dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0037

  • Protective interventions by a third party on the behalf of others are generally admired, and as such are associated with our notions of morality, justice and heroism 1,​2,​3,​4 . Indeed, stories involving such third-party interventions have pervaded popular culture throughout recorded human history, in myths, books and movies. The current developmental picture is that we begin to engage in this type of intervention by preschool age. For instance, 3-year-old children intervene in harmful interactions to protect victims from bullies 5 , and furthermore, not only punish wrongdoers but also give priority to helping the victim 6 . It remains unknown, however, when we begin to affirm such interventions performed by others. Here we reveal these developmental origins in 6- and 10-month old infants (N = 132). After watching aggressive interactions involving a third-party agent who either interfered or did not, 6-month-old infants preferred the former. Subsequent experiments confirmed the psychological processes underlying such choices: 6-month-olds regarded the interfering agent to be protecting the victim from the aggressor, but only older infants affirmed such an intervention after considering the intentions of the interfering agent. These findings shed light upon the developmental trajectory of perceiving, understanding and performing protective third-party interventions, suggesting that our admiration for and emphasis upon such acts — so prevalent in thousands of stories across human cultures — is rooted within the preverbal infant’s mind.

05559

• how to fly a horse: the secret history of creation, invention, and discovery
  kevin ashton 2015

  • story of helicobacter pylori stops at discovery of helicobacter and does not progress to microbiome

    • may cause ulcers, protect against esophegal cancer, asthma, diarrhoea, ms in females
    • disappearing microbiota: helicobacter pylori protection against esophageal adenocarcinoma
      martin j. blaser 2008
      http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/1940-6207.CAPR-08-0170
      Link: dx.doi.org/10.1158/1940-6207.CAPR-08-0170

  • the final step of expertise is the first step to beginner’s mind: knowing what you assume, why, and when to suspend your assumptions.

  • "The Getzels-Jackson effect is not restricted to schools, and it persists into adulthood. Decision makers and authority figures in business, science, and government all say they value creation, but when tested, they do not value creators.
    Why? Because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favor familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex."

    26% in 'How to Fly a Horse' by Kevin Ashton

  • truth tellers

    • "The fact that Galambos eventually turned out to be right is beside the point. Organizations are not supposed to work this way. Brilliant, innovative thinking is meant to be encouraged. Galambos and his idea should and could have made a beachhead on a whole new continent of fertile research opportunities. Instead, important discoveries about glia and the brain were delayed for decades. We are learning things today that we could have found out in the 1970s. So why would a distinguished scientist like David Rioch be provoked to anger by an idea proposed by an equally distinguished scientist like Robert Galambos?
      The problem was not Rioch. Robert Galambos’s story is typical—it happens in almost every organization almost all the time. Kelly Johnson’s is not. Both men are examples of what management scholars Larry Downes and Paul Nunes call “truth-tellers”:
      Truth-tellers are genuinely passionate about solving big problems. They harangue you with their vision, and as a result they rarely stay in one company for very long. They are not model employees—their true loyalty is to the future, not next quarter’s profits. They can tell you what’s coming, but not necessarily when or how. Truth-tellers are often eccentric and difficult to manage. They speak a strange language, one that isn’t focused on incremental change and polite business-speak. Learning to find them is hard. Learning to understand them, and appreciate their value, is even harder.
      "

      "Truth-tellers are a bit like the glia of organizations: long overlooked, yet essential for regeneration. They may not be popular. The truth is often awkward and unwelcome, and so are the people who tell it.
      As we have seen in our discussions of rejection, confrontations about ideas are hardwired into human nature. The hallmark of a creative organization is that it is much more receptive to new thinking than the world in general. A creative organization does not resent conflicts over concepts; it resolves them. But most organizations are not like Lockheed—they are like Walter Reed. So most truth-tellers are not treated like Kelly Johnson—they are treated like Robert Galambos. We do not walk in a welcoming world when we are given the gift of great thoughts. Great thoughts are great threats.
      "

      57% in 'How to Fly a Horse' by Kevin Ashton

  • expectations

    • You cannot control the future. Being too rigid about making things happen the way you planned stops you from reacting to emerging problems and causes you to miss unexpected opportunities. Have high expectations about what and few expectations about how. This is the opposite of the way most organizations operate.

05659

• clientearth law
  theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/10/my-job-is-to-clean-up-the-environment-china-really-wants-to-do-that

05759

• ecocide law

05859

• decide: a decision-making model for more effective decision making by health care managers
  guo, kristina l 2008
  https://doi.org/10.1097%2f01.hcm.0000285046.27290.90

  • define the problem
    establish or enumerate all the criteria (constraints)
    consider or collect all the alternatives
    identify the best alternative
    develop and implement a plan of action
    evaluate and monitor the solution and examine feedback when necessary

• modular structure within groups causes information loss but can improve decision accuracy
  albert b. kao, iain d. couzin 2019
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0378

  • simulate the information-sharing patterns of animals that prefer to interact with certain individuals over others. The authors' modeling of such animal groups upends previously held assumptions about internal group structure and improves upon our understanding of the influence of group organization and environment on both the collective decision-making process and its accuracy.

    Modular -- or cliquey -- group structure isolates the flow of communication between individuals, so that only certain animals are privy to certain pieces of information. "A feature of modular structure is that there's always information loss," says Kao, "but the effect of that information loss on accuracy depends on the environment."

    In simple environments, the impact of these modular groups is detrimental to accuracy, but when animals face many different sources of information, the effect is actually the opposite. "Surprisingly," says Kao, "in complex environments, the information loss even helps accuracy in a lot of situations." More information, in this case, is not necessarily better.

    "Modular structure can have a profound -- and unexpected -- impact on the collective intelligence of groups," says Couzin. "This may indeed be one of the reasons that we see internal structure in so many group-living species, from schooling fish and flocking birds to wild primate groups."

  • abstract Many animal groups exhibit signatures of persistent internal modular structure, whereby individuals consistently interact with certain groupmates more than others. In such groups, information relevant to a collective decision may spread unevenly through the group, but how this impacts the quality of the resulting decision is not well understood. Here, we explicitly model modularity within animal groups and examine how it affects the amount of information represented in collective decisions, as well as the accuracy of those decisions. We find that modular structure necessarily causes a loss of information, effectively silencing the input from a fraction of the group. However, the effect of this information loss on collective accuracy depends on the informational environment in which the decision is made. In simple environments, the information loss is detrimental to collective accuracy. By contrast, in complex environments, modularity tends to improve accuracy. This is because small group sizes typically maximize collective accuracy in such environments, and modular structure allows a large group to behave like a smaller group (in terms of its decision-making). These results suggest that in naturalistic environments containing correlated information, large animal groups may be able to exploit modular structure to improve decision accuracy while retaining other benefits of large group size.

05959

• beliefs about bad people are volatile
  jenifer z. siegel et al. 2018
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0425-1

  • People form moral impressions rapidly, effortlessly and from a remarkably young age1,2,3,4,5. Putatively ‘bad’ agents command more attention and are identified more quickly and accurately than benign or friendly agents5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. Such vigilance is adaptive, but can also be costly in environments where people sometimes make mistakes, because incorrectly attributing bad character to good people damages existing relationships and discourages forming new relationships13,14,15,16. The ability to accurately infer the moral character of others is critical for healthy social functioning, but the computational processes that support this ability are not well understood. Here, we show that moral inference is explained by an asymmetric Bayesian updating mechanism in which beliefs about the morality of bad agents are more uncertain (and therefore more volatile) than beliefs about the morality of good agents. This asymmetry seems to be a property of learning about immoral agents in general, as we also find greater uncertainty for beliefs about the non-moral traits of bad agents. Our model and data reveal a cognitive mechanism that permits flexible updating of beliefs about potentially threatening others, a mechanism that could facilitate forgiveness when initial bad impressions turn out to be inaccurate. Our findings suggest that negative moral impressions destabilize beliefs about others, promoting cognitive flexibility in the service of cooperative but cautious behaviour.

• the computational and neural substrates of moral strategies in social decision-making
  jeroen m. van baar et al. 2019
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09161-6

  • "In everyday life, we may not notice that our morals are context-dependent since our contexts tend to stay the same daily. However, under new circumstances, we may find that the moral rules we thought we'd always follow are actually quite malleable," explained co-author Luke J. Chang, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of the Computational Social Affective Neuroscience Laboratory (Cosan Lab) at Dartmouth. "This has tremendous ramifications if one considers how our moral behavior could change under new contexts, such as during war," he added.

    To examine moral decision-making within the context of reciprocity, the researchers designed a modified trust game called the Hidden Multiplier Trust Game, which allowed them to classify decisions in reciprocating trust as a function of an individual's moral strategy. With this method, the team could determine which type of moral strategy a study participant was using: inequity aversion (where people reciprocate because they want to seek fairness in outcomes), guilt aversion (where people reciprocate because they want to avoid feeling guilty), greed, or moral opportunism (a new strategy that the team identified, where people switch between inequity aversion and guilt aversion depending on what will serve their interests best). The researchers also developed a computational, moral strategy model that could be used to explain how people behave in the game and examined the brain activity patterns associated with the moral strategies.

    The findings reveal for the first time that unique patterns of brain activity underlie the inequity aversion and guilt aversion strategies, even when the strategies yield the same behavior. For the participants that were morally opportunistic, the researchers observed that their brain patterns switched between the two moral strategies across different contexts. "Our results demonstrate that people may use different moral principles to make their decisions, and that some people are much more flexible and will apply different principles depending on the situation," explained Chang. "This may explain why people that we like and respect occasionally do things that we find morally objectionable."

  • abstract Individuals employ different moral principles to guide their social decision-making, thus expressing a specific ‘moral strategy’. Which computations characterize different moral strategies, and how might they be instantiated in the brain? Here, we tackle these questions in the context of decisions about reciprocity using a modified Trust Game. We show that different participants spontaneously and consistently employ different moral strategies. By mapping an integrative computational model of reciprocity decisions onto brain activity using inter-subject representational similarity analysis of fMRI data, we find markedly different neural substrates for the strategies of ‘guilt aversion’ and ‘inequity aversion’, even under conditions where the two strategies produce the same choices. We also identify a new strategy, ‘moral opportunism’, in which participants adaptively switch between guilt and inequity aversion, with a corresponding switch observed in their neural activation patterns. These findings provide a valuable view into understanding how different individuals may utilize different moral principles.

06059

• association of primary care clinic appointment time with clinician ordering and patient completion of breast and colorectal cancer screening
  esther y. hsiang et al. 2019
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.3403

  • downward trend of ordering may be the result of 'decision fatigue,' where people may be less inclined to consider a new decision after they've been making them all day. It may also stem from overloaded clinicians getting behind as the day progresses."

    The researchers found that, among eligible patients, primary care doctors ordered breast cancer screening more often for patients seen in the 8 a.m. hour (64 percent) as compared to those with appointments at 5 p.m. (48 percent). Similarly, for colon cancer screening, tests were also ordered more frequently for 8 a.m. patients (37 percent) compared to those coming in later in the day (23 percent).

    Examining data from 2014 through 2016 across 33 Pennsylvania and New Jersey primary care practices, the researchers found that ordering rates had far-reaching effects. When looking at the entire population eligible for screenings at these practices (roughly 19,000 for breast cancer and 33,000 for colorectal cancer), the researchers tracked whether the patients completed a screening within a year of their appointment. The data showed that the downward trend associated with the timing of the appointments carried over.

    Breast cancer screening -- which included mammograms -- stood at a 33 percent one-year completion rate for the entire eligible population who had their appointment in the 8 a.m. hour. But for those who had clinic visits at 5 p.m. or later, just 18 percent completed screenings. For colorectal cancer, screenings such as colonoscopies, sigmoidoscopies, and fecal occult blood tests were completed by 28 percent of the patients with appointments in the 8 a.m. hour. That number dropped to 18 percent for patients who saw the doctor at 5 p.m. or later.

    The one-year completion results cast long shadows. While doctors may simply be deferring discussions about screening to future appointments, it assumes that the decision will be made the next time. Additionally, these types of cancer screenings also require coordination with a different department and another visit on the part of the patient, which provide several opportunities for further lapses in screening.

    Researchers also observed that although order rates fell as the day progressed, there was a brief spike in screening orders for breast and colon cancers when patients saw their clinician around noon. For example, breast cancer screening orders dropped to 48.7 percent at 11 a.m. but increased to 56.2 percent around noon, before gradually falling off again. This trend held true for one-year completion rates, as well. The study team suggest that this may be due to lunch breaks that give clinicians and opportunity to catch up and start fresh.

    A downward trend in outcomes by hour was noted in a study in 2018 examining the rates of flu vaccinations by the time of day when patients saw a clinician. In that study, a "nudge" was built into the system that prompted doctors to accept or decline an influenza vaccine order, which helped spur an increase of vaccinations by nearly 20 percent, as compared to patients with doctors who weren't nudged.

    "Our new study adds to the growing evidence that time of day and decision fatigue impacts patient care," said Mitesh Patel, MD, MBA, director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit and an assistant professor of Medicine. "In past work, we've found that nudges in the electronic health record can be used to address these types of gaps in care, which we suspect will be the case here. Future research could evaluate how nudges may be implemented in order to improve cancer screening."

  • abstract Importance  As the clinic day progresses, clinicians may fall behind schedule and experience decision fatigue. However, the association of time of day with cancer screening rates is unknown.

    Objective  To evaluate the association of primary care clinic appointment time with clinician ordering and patient completion of breast and colorectal cancer screening.

    Design, Setting, and Participants  Retrospective, quality improvement study of 33 primary care practices in Pennsylvania and New Jersey from September 1, 2014, to August 31, 2016. Participants included adults eligible for breast or colorectal cancer screening. Data analysis was conducted from April 24, 2018, to November 8, 2018.

    Exposures  Clinic appointment time during each patient’s first primary care physician visit in the study period.

    Main Outcomes and Measures  Primary outcome was clinician ordering of the screening test during the visit. Secondary outcome was patient completion of the tests within 1 year of the visit.

    Results  Among the 19 254 patients eligible for breast cancer screening, the mean (SD) age was 60.2 (6.9) years; 19 254 (100%) were female, 11 682 (60.7%) were white, and 5495 (28.5%) were black. Screening test order rates were highest at 8 am at 63.7%, decreased throughout the morning to 48.7% at 11 am, increased to 56.2% at noon, and then decreased to 47.8% at 5 pm (adjusted odds ratio [OR] for overall trend, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.93-0.96; P < .001). Trends in screening test completion rates were similar beginning at 33.2% at 8 am and decreasing to 17.8% at 5 pm (adjusted OR, 0.95; 95% CI, 0.94-0.97; P < .001). Among the 33 468 patients eligible for colorectal cancer screening, the mean (SD) age was 59.6 (7.4) years; 18 672 (55.8%) were female, 22 157 (66.2%) were white, and 7296 (21.8%) were black. Screening test order rates were 36.5% at 8 am, decreased to 31.3% by 11 am, increased at noon to 34.4%, and then decreased to 23.4% at 5 pm (adjusted OR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.93-0.95; P < .001). Trends in screening test completion rates were similar beginning at 28.0% at 8 am and decreasing to 17.8% at 5 pm (adjusted OR, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.96-0.98; P < .001).

    Conclusions and Relevance  Clinician ordering of cancer screening tests significantly decreased as the clinic day progressed. Patient completion of cancer screening tests within 1 year of the visit was also lower as the primary care appointment time was later in the day. Future interventions targeting improvements in cancer screening should consider how time of day may influence these behaviors.

06159

• the lessons of effective altruism
  jennifer rubenstein 2016 ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2016/the-lessons-of-effective-altruism

  • Effective Altruism’s “Hidden Curriculum”
    My own deepest worries about EA pertain not to the interventions that it supports, but rather to the self-understandings and sensibilities that it cultivates in its members via its “hidden curriculum.” A hidden curriculum is the set of “unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons, values, and perspectives” that are taught alongside an explicit official curriculum.18 EA teaches a hidden curriculum to its members through its arguments and images, the emotions it evokes, and the relationships that it fosters and discourages. As I discuss below, EA’s hidden curriculum includes at least four lessons: (1) Effective Altruists are heroic rescuers; (2) doing good is largely an individualistic project; (3) doing the most good does not require listening to those affected by the issues one is trying to address; and (4) anger is not an appropriate response to severe poverty. I am not suggesting that Effective Altruists consciously believe these lessons or teach them explicitly; nor can I offer here evidence about the extent to which they have been taken up. But I do think that EA conveys them. Moreover, these lessons are not mere window-dressing; they serve important functions in helping EA attract and retain members. Let us look at them more closely.
    Lesson 1: Effective Altruists are heroic rescuers. EA’s hidden curriculum teaches people in wealthy countries to think of themselves as heroes and rescuers. In the opening paragraph of his book, Singer recounts a realization that one of his students had that led him to adopt an EA lifestyle: “Suppose you see a burning building and you run through the flames and kick a door open, and let one hundred people out. That would be the greatest moment in your life. And I could do as much good as that!” (p. 3). Singer tries to motivate his readers to become Effective Altruists by encouraging them to adopt this same outlook—to see that they, too, can easily rescue many people. MacAskill does the same thing: “You pass a burning building, kick the door down, rush through the smoke and flames, and drag a young child to safety. . . . If you saved several people’s lives [in this way] . . . you’d be a hero.” And then he adds, “But we can do far more than that” (pp. 53–54).
    This kind of high-drama emergency rescue scenario is powerfully motivating (which might be why Singer consistently invokes such scenarios in his work).19 However, it might also encourage aspiring Effective Altruists to think of themselves as rescuers, and the people they wish to assist as helpless victims more generally.20 This conception of “self and other” can have several negative and distorting effects. It can make it harder for the self-described rescuer to notice the ways in which she has contributed to and/or benefited from the problems she seeks to address, and it can lead her to discount the insights of the “victims.” The desire to have personally made a quantifiable difference can contribute to a bias in favor of interventions, such as public health interventions, that can be plausibly parceled out in ways that give credit to individual donors (for example, “Your donation will save ten lives!”).
    An obvious response to this criticism is that EA should simply use different tactics to motivate its members. While I agree that this is a good idea, a central strength of EA is that it eschews several other motivational strategies that are equally or more objectionable—for example, showing images of pitiful-looking “identifiable victims.” While some form of political solidarity is likely preferable, the fact that EA focuses on doing the most good means that Effective Altruists have to be ready to cut bait if a particular organization or cause ceases to do the most good, which significantly complicates political solidarity as a motivational strategy.
    Lesson 2: Doing good is a largely individualistic project. A second lesson in EA’s hidden curriculum is that doing good is an individualistic project. Of course, heroes are lone figures, so this lesson overlaps with the previous one. But here I emphasize that EA assimilates the role of donor to two other individualistic roles. One is the savvy customer: MacAskill notes that donors in rich countries can provide “100x” more benefit by donating to the most cost-effective charities than to other ones. This, MacAskill exclaims, “might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in your life” (p. 23). The other role is the virtuous self-improver: This idea— that Effective Altruists ought to be engaged in a continual process of self-conscious self-improvement—emerges out of the developmental story that both MacAskill and Singer tell, discussed above. As Singer puts it, Effective Altruists are people who “like to challenge themselves, to do a little better this year than last year” (p. viii).
    All three of these aspirational figures—the hero, the savvy consumer, and the virtuous self-improver—direct the donor’s focus back toward herself, and away from collective practices of joint action with others. I worry that if doing good is conceived of as not only the most important project but also as akin to heroism, bargain-hunting, and self-improvement, then more solidaristic modes of action— which have historically undergirded many projects that have significantly improved the human condition, such as struggles for civil rights—will cease to be easily imaginable.
    Lesson 3: Efforts to do the most good do not require listening to or working alongside those affected by the issues one is addressing. While EA is individualistic in some respects, it is also a “community” (MacAskill, p. 12). The EA meta-charity Giving What We Can intentionally fosters community among its members both to motivate them and to reduce the social burdens of an EA lifestyle (such as not going out to expensive restaurants). Yet unlike many other identity-based communities, the EA community systematically excludes the very people who are its central objects of concern. While alleviating severe poverty is a primary aim of EA, poor people generally do not have enough money or time to become Effective Altruists. Likewise, while there are exceptions, poor people and activists in poor countries often find themselves already enmeshed in the particular issues that affect their communities, such that one of EA’s central questions—Which of all of the issues and causes in the world should I support in order to do the most good? —is not salient for them.
    As a result, when members of the EA community discuss issues among themselves, they are not talking to poor people or to activists who work closely with them (as far as I have been able to discern). Nor does there seem to be any effort to put the EA community in contact with activists, civil society groups, or NGOs based in poor countries. I tend to think that this is objectionable in itself. But in addition, an important limitation of the methods that EA uses to evaluate different interventions, such as randomized control trials, is that they do a poor job of capturing long-term, diffuse, and subtle political and social effects—for example, on intergroup social relationships, state capacity, and civil society mobilization. Engagement with those affected and others with more direct experience of the issues that EA seeks to address would likely be extremely valuable in helping them account for these effects. While Effective Altruists have increasingly noticed the limitations of their formal models and the need to rely more on “intuition” and “reality checks,”21 they do not seem to have structures in place to take up experiential, anthropological, or humanistic modes of knowledge (a notable exception is the Open Philanthropy Project’s work on the history of philanthropy).22
    In addition to potentially undermining EA’s efforts to achieve its own goals, this sort of insularity can contribute to a more generalized myopia. For example, at a recent global conference on Effective Altruism an event organizer declared in an introductory session that he “really [does] believe that Effective Altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.”23 Given that EA has virtually no interest in, or capacity for, addressing issues of injustice, exploitation, and oppression, one wonders whether more time spent listening to people facing those issues might have led the speaker to a different conclusion.
    Lesson 4: Anger is not an appropriate response to the issues that EA addresses. While Effective Altruists are often accused of being cold rationalists, and while they do prioritize reason over emotion, they do in fact recognize a role for emotions (Singer, p. 83; see also pp. 85, 88, 92–93, 171, and MacAskill, pp. 5, 11). What is the emotional content of EA? Recall Singer’s student, noted above, who declared that saving lives “would be the greatest moment” in his life (see also p. 133). Singer also describes another Effective Altruist who gives “cheerfully” (p. 29). Singer adds that “effective altruists don’t see a lot of point in feeling guilty. They prefer to focus on the good they are doing. Some of them are content to know they are doing something significant to make the world a better place” (p. viii). Finally, Singer emphasizes that one can be an Effective Altruist without feeling grim and depressed about living on less money than one would otherwise (pp. 23–37, ch. 9). (Anecdotally, when I submitted a blog post to the Giving What We Can Blog, I received instructions for authors explaining that “because we are welcoming, we use photos of our members: smiley, happy people.”)
    There thus seems to be little room for emotions such as anger, guilt, and self-doubt in EA. While Singer and MacAskill do not say that these emotions are bad or illegitimate, they strongly emphasize the value and appropriateness of their opposites (MacAskill, p. 32). Of course, it is true that, as Martha Nussbaum argues, anger can direct energy to retribution rather than constructive efforts for change.24 However, as Nussbaum also writes, “Anger is sometimes justified and right. It is an appropriate response to injustice and serious wrongdoing.”25 On a cognitive view of emotions, being angry about an injustice can be partly constitutive of recognizing it as such. Likewise, guilt can be a part of acknowledging that one has wrongly contributed to suffering, and self-doubt can reflect humility and an understanding that one does not have all of the answers.
    Perhaps, then, EA could create a bit more space for these emotions? Among other things, recognizing the appropriateness of some kinds of anger would be consistent with a more politicized analysis of the issues that EA addresses: what looks like a regrettable misfortune when we focus only on individual welfare (a child gets malaria) becomes recognizable as an injustice (to which anger is an appropriate response) when we look at the underlying structures that contribute to it (an externally enabled corrupt ruling elite that drains resources from government public health budgets). Openness to negative emotions may be challenging, however, insofar as members of EA are attracted to its cheery emotional register, and anger at injustice can be difficult to square with willingness to cut bait if an intervention does not seem to be doing the most good.
    EA’s hidden curriculum is deeply troubling, in part because it is not windowdressing: it does important work, especially motivational work. But this should not cause us to lose sight of EA’s central insight, described above: we should be thinking rigorously, comparatively, and collectively about how individuals can use the money in their possession to improve the world, including (but not only) by increasing individual welfare.

• criticisms raised include “hidden curriculum”, that is unintended assumptions, of heroism, individualism, superiority, positivity

• utilitarianism, measurement, identity

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• reducing choices down to two makes deciding easier? hmm…
  value-based attention but not divisive normalization influences decisions with multiple alternatives
  sebastian gluth et al. 2020
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0822-0

  • In two experiments, 139 participants were asked to choose between three different foods that changed over multiple rounds. Based in these experiments, the psychologists determined that people did not distribute their attention equally, but increasingly focused on the two options that they found most promising. This led to faster decisions; the easier it was to discount the worst option, the more quickly the participant was able to decide between the two remaining options.
    In earlier studies on this topic, participants were usually only given two options to choose between; in recent years, however, research has increasingly turned to decisions with three or more alternatives. This is because people can behave in many contradictory and inconsistent ways when multiple related options are available. For example, someone who initially selects chicken over pasta may change their preference when another vegetarian option such as salad is added — and may then suddenly find the pasta more appealing.

  • abstract Violations of economic rationality principles in choices between three or more options are critical for understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms of decision-making. A recent study reported that the relative choice accuracy between two options decreases as the value of a third (distractor) option increases and attributed this effect to divisive normalization of neural value representations. In two preregistered experiments, a direct replication and an eye-tracking experiment, we assessed the replicability of this effect and tested an alternative account that assumes value-based attention to mediate the distractor effect. Surprisingly, we could not replicate the distractor effect in our experiments. However, we found a dynamic influence of distractor value on fixations to distractors as predicted by the value-based attention theory. Computationally, we show that extending an established sequential sampling decision-making model by a value-based attention mechanism offers a comprehensive account of the interplay between value, attention, response times and decisions.

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• choice overload reduces neural signatures of choice set value in dorsal striatum and anterior cingulate cortex
  elena reutskaja et al. 2018
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0440-2

  • choice overload can sometimes have serious consequences, says Colin Camerer, Caltech’s Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair. As an example, he points to Sweden’s partial privatization of its social security system. The government allowed citizens to move some of their retirement savings into private funds. The government gave them hundreds of funds from which to choose, and conducted a large advertising campaign encouraging them to make their own choice. At first, nearly 70 percent of the eligible adult population took an active role in choosing a fund, but the percentage quickly dropped off. After 10 years, only about 1 percent of newly eligible Swedes were making an active decision about where to put their retirement money.
    Now, a study conducted at Caltech by Camerer reveals new insights into choice overload, including the parts of the brain responsible for it, and how many options the brain actually prefers when it is making a choice.
    In the study, volunteers were presented with pictures of scenic landscapes that they could have printed on a piece of merchandise such as a coffee mug. Each participant was offered a variety of sets of images, containing six, 12, or 24 pictures. They were asked to make their decisions while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine recorded activity in their brains. As a control, the volunteers were asked to browse the images again, but this time their image selection was made randomly by a computer.
    The fMRI scans revealed brain activity in two regions while the participants were making their choices: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), where the potential costs and benefits of decisions are weighed, Camerer says; and the striatum, a part of the brain responsible for determining value.
    Camerer and his colleagues also saw that activity in these two regions was highest in subjects who had 12 options to pick from, and lowest in those with either six or 24 items to choose from. Camerer says that pattern of activity is probably the result of the striatum and the ACC interacting and weighing the increasing potential for reward (getting a picture they really like for their mug) against the increasing amount of work the brain will have to do to evaluate possible outcomes.
    As the number of options increases, the potential reward increases, but then begins to level off due to diminishing returns. “The idea is that the best out of 12 is probably rather good, while the jump to the best out of 24 is not a big improvement,” Camerer says. At the same time, the amount of effort required to evaluate the options increases. Together, mental effort and the potential reward result in a sweet spot where the reward isn’t too low and the effort isn’t too high. This pattern was not seen when the subjects merely browsed the images because there was no potential for reward, and thus less effort was required when evaluating the options.
    Camerer points out that 12 isn’t some magic number for human decision-making, but rather an artifact of the experimental design. He estimates that the ideal number of options for a person is probably somewhere between 8 and 15, depending on the perceived reward, the difficulty of evaluating the options, and the person’s individual characteristics.
    Of course, a trip to the nearest grocery store is likely to reveal that lots of products come in many more than a dozen varieties. There might be a whole aisle of toothpastes of varying brands, sizes, flavors, textures, and properties, and on the condiment aisle, there might be dozens of kinds of mustards to choose from.
    Camerer says that’s partly because people tend to feel freer and like they have more control over their lives when they have more options to choose from, even if having all those options ends up distressing them at decision time.
    “Essentially, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs,” he says. “When we think about how many choices we want, we may not be mentally representing the frustrations of making the decision.”
    Camerer says future research in this area could explore and attempt to quantify the mental costs of making a decision.
    “What is mental effort? What does thinking cost? It’s poorly understood,” he says.

  • abstract Modern societies offer a large variety of choices, which is generally thought to be valuable. But having too much choice can be detrimental if the costs of choice outweigh its benefits due to ‘choice overload’. Current explanatory models of choice overload mainly derive from behavioural studies. A neuroscientific investigation could further inform these models by revealing the covert mental processes during decision-making. We explored choice overload using functional magnetic resonance imaging while subjects were either choosing from varying-sized choice sets or were browsing them. When choosing from sets of 6, 12 or 24 items, functional magnetic resonance imaging activity in the striatum and anterior cingulate cortex resembled an inverted U-shaped function of choice set size. Activity was highest for 12-item sets, which were perceived as having ‘the right amount’ of options and was lower for 6-item and 24-item sets, which were perceived as ‘too small’ and ‘too large’, respectively. Enhancing choice set value by adding a dominant option led to an overall increase of activity. When subjects were browsing, the decision costs were diminished and the inverted U-shaped activity patterns vanished. Activity in the striatum and anterior cingulate reflects choice set value and can serve as neural indicator of choice overload.

• measuring workload in a multitasking environment using fractal dimension of pupil dilation
  xiaonan yang, jung hyup kim 2018
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2018.1525022

  shades of blade runner

  • "If your vitals are bad, then something is wrong with your body and doctors will work to figure out what's wrong with you," said Jung Hyup Kim, an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering in the MU College of Engineering. "What about your mental health? Many people multitask, but currently there is no measurement for someone's mental well-being. However, we found that the size of a pupil could be the key to measuring someone's mental state while they multitask."

    Everyone experiences stress differently. Kim and Xiaonan Yang, a graduate student at MU, wanted to find a data-driven way for different industries -- such as emergency communicators, office workers, industry and manufacturing factory workers -- to universally measure the levels of stress in their employees while they are multitasking, or performing work-related duties with simultaneous low and high complexity tasks.

    To do this, they compared data from a workload metric developed by NASA for its astronauts with their observations of pupillary response from participants in a lab study. Using a simulated oil and gas refinery plant control room, Kim and Yang watched, through motion-capture and eye-tracking technology, as the participants reacted to unexpected changes, such as alarms, while simultaneously watching the performance of gauges on two monitors. During the scenario's simple tasks, the participants' eye searching behaviors were more predictable. Yet, as the tasks became more complex and unexpected changes occurred, their eye behaviors became more erratic.

    Through the use of the data from this lab study and a formula Kim and Yang applied called "fractal dimension," Kim and Yang discovered a negative relationship between the fractal dimension of pupil dilation and a person's workload, showing the researchers that pupil dilation could be used to indicate the mental workload of a person in a multitasking environment. Kim and Yang hope this finding can give a better insight into how systems should be designed to avoid mentally overloading workers and build a safer working environment. One day this finding could give employers and educators alike a tool to determine the maximum stress level a person can experience before they become fatigued, and their performance begins to negatively change.

    "It would be great if people could work perfectly every time," Kim said. "But when you're tired, you often make a mistake. So, if we can monitor a worker's mental well-being, then we can hopefully prevent future mistakes from happening."

    Kim and Yang plan to apply this finding to further research involving different age groups and certain biometric measures such as heartbeat, brain signals and muscle or nerve reactions.

  • abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate the usefulness of the fractal dimension of pupil dilation as a measure of workload in a multitasking environment. Researchers have found that pupil dilation can reveal the underlying mechanism of the cognitive workload in a dynamic task environment. However, the workload metrics by using pupillary responses in a multitasking environment are not well studied in the literature. In this study, the participants’ pupil dilation was collected and analyzed by using a fractal analysis technique to assess the participants’ workload during the experiment. During the experiment, each participant performed a process monitoring task and Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) task together. The process monitoring task simulated the responsibilities of process operators in the control room of oil and gas refinery plants. The MATB task consisted of system monitoring, target tracking, and dynamic resource management. To validate the outcome of this new metric, NASA-TLX questionnaires were used to measure the subjective workload, and the result of NASA-TLX was compared to the fractal dimension result. The findings from this study showed that the fractal dimension of pupil dilation could be used as a new physiological index to measure the workload in a multitasking environment.

• amount and time exert independent influences on intertemporal choice
  dianna amasino et al. 2019
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-05378-2

  • When presented with a choice between a smaller dollar amount now or more money weeks later, savers focus immediately on the two dollar amounts, quickly screening out other factors as irrelevant -- as revealed by their eye movements.

    Then they make a rapid choice in favor of the higher amount.

    "Patient people are not doing more analytic work," said Scott Huettel, a Duke psychology professor who co-authored the study. "They actually make these decisions the fastest.

    "It's the opposite of an effortful process."

    U.S. personal savings rates are at historic lows, so understanding what influences saving behavior is important. The authors said they hope their findings could help suggest better ways to improve financial literacy.

    "Figuring out how people actually make decisions is helpful for pinpointing where the decision process can go awry," said study co-author Dianna Amasino, a Duke graduate student in neurobiology. "It could give people strategies they can use without having to increase time and effort."

    The new research appears online Monday in Nature Human Behaviour.

    For the study, researchers recruited 217 young adults with a median age of 21 years. They observed participants in the lab as they chose between different monetary rewards, such as $5 today versus $10 in a month.

    Using an eye tracker camera system, researchers captured subjects' eye movements as they considered their choices. The eye tracking gave researchers a moment-by-moment snapshot of what participants considered important.

    Eye tracking revealed that savers do not meticulously analyze all the information available for each decision. Instead, they essentially screen out the noise by ignoring the element of time and focus solely on the factor that's most important to them -- the higher dollar amount. And in the most patient people, information about monetary amounts actually entered the decision process much earlier than information about time.

    "We can see the savers' decisions in their eye movements as their eyes jump back and forth between two dollar amounts," Huettel said. "They don't integrate information about time and money to determine how much a choice is worth, but instead use a simple rule that helps them make quick but good decisions."

    The results could help shape more effective interventions to promote savings, Huettel said. For instance, financial literacy efforts could place less emphasis on how to resist temptation, and instead emphasize the dollar amounts people will receive by saving.

    "The way a decision is approached matters," Amasino said. "Focusing on the long wait to accumulate savings can feel overwhelming. Focusing on the returns to savings and investments can be motivating."

  • abstract Choices often involve trade-offs between smaller, sooner and larger, later outcomes. Canonical intertemporal choice models assume that reward amount and time until delivery are integrated within each option prior to comparison. We use a novel multi-attribute drift diffusion modeling (DDM) approach to show that attribute-wise comparison, in which amounts and times are compared separately rather than integrated, better represents the choice process. We find that accumulation rates for amount and time information are uncorrelated, but the difference between those rates strongly predicts individual differences in patience. Moreover, patient individuals incorporate amount earlier than time information into the decision process. Using eye tracking measures, we link these modeling results to attention, showing that patience results from a rapid, attribute-wise process that prioritizes amount over time information. Thus, we find evidence that intertemporal choice reflects the interaction of two distinct processes – one for amount, the other for time – whose combination determines choice.

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  • passing judgment: praise and blame in everyday life
    terri apter 2018

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• reaction time by itself is a useless measure. what use fast reaction time if you don't perceive what you need to react to? or react inappropriately?

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• value
  • when someone’s achievements are not encoded in money or scientific papers or prestige, most people will have a hard time understanding the worth of that person
  • might think of book as free and thus not value it. but we have paid dearly as individuals, as a culture, as a planet, to reach this point.
  • blame is based on judgment, which is based on worth, which is based on value. we need to unlearn all that we have learned.
  • to see if something we want is worth buying, express in equivalent hours or days or years of life required to earn money to purchase item
  • what would be an equivalent expression for virtue or responsible action?

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• thinking about how we think
  • my empathy and predictive sense as a internalised informal chance forecast
  • for example, speed. you might remember from physics the definition that something’s speed is the frequency with which it occurs. but what happens when we change a speed? are we increasing the frequency, and is it by changing the likelihood? what does speed mean when we say a catalyst speeds up a reaction? the chemist’s reaction rate is a description of speed.
    • what if we can replace speed with the concept of likelihood? so that something is faster as its likelihood increases? so a catalyst does not increase the speed of a reaction but rather makes it more likely, and the passing of time does the rest.
    • so too words and concepts, ideas and beliefs are catalysts that make certain actions more or less likely, depending on how you define the action.
  • we are amoral — without morals — when we do not know, have not learned the concept of, or have not gained or have lost the ability to think about how something we do affects others. for young children, this may mean that they have not been taught the concept of caring for others, or that this concept is not salient to them, or that they have been taught to prioritise other things — whether by the intention of their guardians, neglect, or circumstance. it may well be that their frontal brain lobes are not developed enough to learn this yet — but it may be that learning and practicing this social skill is one of the major ways in which our brains develop in complexity and ability as we grow.
    • they are all amoral, because their only way to understand morality is their own internal feelings
  • we don't often ask why or how we do things, or when we don't do certain things. these are very interesting questions, the answers to which may be fun to write and read about.

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• clear purpose
  • clear purpose makes it easy to choose, creates momentum. purpose comes from knowing a destination. helps us to aim towards it rather than away.

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• to raise something up as “the most important” is to create a self–fulfilling false prophecy. it may certainly become most important to our minds but it can never be so in reality.

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• just like other heuristics, the affect heuristic is useful, if you can refine the linked emotion based on evidence.

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• why do people devalue what is freely given? it is a response learned from a corrupted culture, a culture that affects us all, no matter whether we realise it or not. it might seem irrelevant, or unimportant, but because this culture shapes so much of our lives, in a way that is very often not understood, it is one of the important things we need to know on our way to leading better lives.

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• integrity is what people seem to call what they like in me that seems so unusual to them in the world today. It seems that integrity appears rare to almost everyone.

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• salience not importance
  • it can be difficult to understand the dominance that salience has on our lives. what is salient appears more important, although it is almost always not as important as it appears, due to probabilities — the vast majority of important data escape our notice and understanding, so if we base our decisions of importance on only what we can perceive or understand then we are bound to make decisions which do not match reality much more often than our decisions happen to match reality.
  • we can understand better what real issues are by recognising those which are misleadingly salient
  • what is most salient is often not what is most important
  • people don't neglect the environment because they are evil, although some do, but like many human responsibilities, because something else more salient has their attention. that isn't to say that what has caught our attention is more important, simply that we have given it our attention.
  • “the role of such formal knowledge will be overappreciated precisely because it is highly visible.”
  • what is salient is taken as reality, when it is not. comparison of different cultures and societies, among many other different ways of experiencing life, can show us that reality is not what somebody tells us it is.

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• people don't appreciate what they have, not only because they don't know what they have but also because they do not understand value and appreciation, only what they were taught to believe about it.

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• when we justify actions to ourselves, what we do is hide the understanding that we could be biased.

  when someone professes to be fair, or to justify their actions, you know that they are trying to justify their actions to themselves, because if people could truly evaluate their actions, we would know they are biased.

  in reality, we cannot truly evaluate even our own actions, let alone the actions of others. so we have to work around this limitation.

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• praseodymium Pr (πράσινος δίδυμος prasinos didymos, green twin)
• astrid
  • wielding a battleaxe
  • battleaxe
• EI
• http link back to 00100