- Aug 2023
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these are the seven main thrusts of the series
- for: societal design, designing societies, societal architecture, transforming society, whole system change, SSO, social superorganism, John Boik
The seven main ideas for societal design: 1. societal transformation - is necessary to avoid catastrophe 2. the specific type of transformation is science-based transformation based on entirely new systems - de novo design - 3. A practical way to implement the transformation in the real world - it must be economical, and doable within the short time window for system change before us. - Considering a time period of 50 years for total change, with some types of change at a much higher priority than others. - The change would be exponential so starting out slower, and accelerating - Those communities that are the first to participate would make the most rapid improvements. 4. Promoting a worldview of society as a social superorganism, a cognitive organism, and its societal systems as a cognitive architecture. 5. Knowing the intrinsic purpose of a society - each subsystem must be explained in terms of the overall intrinsic purpose. 6. The reason for transformation - Transformation that improves cognition reduces the uncertainty that our society's intrinsic purpose is fulfilled. 7. Forming a partnership between the global science community and all the local communities of the world.
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- Aug 2022
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www.ft.com www.ft.com
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Harford, T. (2021, May 6). What magic teaches us about misinformation. https://www.ft.com/content/5cea69f0-7d44-424e-a121-78a21564ca35
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- Jun 2022
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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https://hybridpedagogy.org/ethical-online-learning/
An interesting perspective on ethical and supportive online learning. More questions and explorations than answers, but then framing is a majority of the battle.
I'm generally in agreement with much of the discussion here.
This was a fabulous piece for "thinking against". Thanks Sean Michael Morris, and Lora Taub.
I definitely got far more out of it by reading and annotating than I ever would in its original keynote presentation version.
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- Apr 2022
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the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.
"Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.
Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.
It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.
The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.
Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17
Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.
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solo thinking isrooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitivescientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind ofinternalized conversation. Our brains evolved to think with people: to teachthem, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought isexquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all isthe presence of other people. As a consequence, when we think socially, wethink differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.
People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.
This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.
I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).
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the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process
great quote
How can social annotation practices take advantage of these sorts of active learning processes? What might be done in a flipped classroom setting to get students to use social annotation on a text prior to a lecture and have the questions and ideas from these sessions brought into the lecture space for discussion, argument, and expansion?
Tags
- thinking with peers
- conversations with the text
- annotations
- quotes
- annotation for learning
- social encoding advantage
- orality and memory
- evolution
- discussion sections
- social annotation
- networked thinking
- thinking tools
- active reading
- flipped classrooms
- orality
- orality vs. literacy
- definitions
- active learning
- individuals vs. groups
- lone genius myth
- individualism
- thinking
- social animals
Annotators
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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2. What influence does annotating with an audience have on how you annotate? My annotations and notes generally are fragile things, tentative formulations, or shortened formulations that have meaning because of what they point to (in my network of notes and thoughts), not so much because of their wording. Likewise my notes and notions read differently than my blog posts. Because my blog posts have an audience, my notes/notions are half of the internal dialogue with myself. Were I to annotate in the knowledge that it would be public, I would write very differently, it would be more a performance, less probing forwards in my thoughts. I remember that publicly shared bookmarks with notes in Delicious already had that effect for me. Do you annotate differently in public view, self censoring or self editing?
To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.
Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).
Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.
There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw
There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.
All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.
Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.
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- Jan 2022
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mitsloan.mit.edu mitsloan.mit.edu
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Study: Digital literacy doesn’t stop the spread of misinformation. (n.d.). MIT Sloan. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-digital-literacy-doesnt-stop-spread-misinformation
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- Dec 2021
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theconversation.com theconversation.com
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Schmid, P., & Lewandowsky, S. (n.d.). Tackling COVID disinformation with empathy and conversation. The Conversation. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from http://theconversation.com/tackling-covid-disinformation-with-empathy-and-conversation-173013
Tags
- critical thinking
- risk
- conspiracy theory
- COVID-19
- social media
- compliance
- conversation
- disinformation
- motivational interviewing
- infodemic
- communication
- lang:en
- anti-vaccine
- social distancing
- science
- is:webpage
- vaccine
- far-right
- empathy
- scientific knowledge
- Germany
- exposure
- COVID denial
- research
- misinformation
Annotators
URL
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- Oct 2021
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www.cbc.ca www.cbc.ca
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Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place
“Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”
The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).
The Design Problem
Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.
(Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)
The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.
- Figure 1: The Design Problem
- Figure 2: A Country
- Figure 3: The World
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Education and job hiring should be integrated.
Systemic Problems
The problem is systemic. How do you deal with the problem when the system is off the table when it comes to the design problem?
Tags
Annotators
URL
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- Sep 2021
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Motz, B., Fyfe, E., & Guba, T. P. (2021). Learning to Call Bullsh*t via Induction: Categorization Training Improves Critical Thinking Performance. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/65qfj
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.
Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.
How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?
Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?
At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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For better or worse, our brains seem activated by conflict.
How might we use the fact that are brains are activated by conflict to potentially make the social media space better (healthier)?
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- Feb 2021
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Rateau, P., Tavani, J. L., & Delouvée, S. (2021). Social representations of the Coronavirus and causal perception of its origin. The role of reasons for fear. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2dawr
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www.nybooks.com www.nybooks.com
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Sharpe claims that Englishmen “were able to…constitute themselves as political agents” by reading, whether or not they read about state affairs; for politics was “a type of consciousness” and the psyche “a text of politics.” “The Civil War itself became a contested text.” So reading was everything: “We are what we read.”
The argument here is that much of the English Civil War was waged in reading and writing. Compare this with today's similar political civil war between the right and the left, but it is being waged in social media instead in sound bites, video clips, tweets, which encourage visceral gut reactions instead of longer and better thought out arguments and well tempered reactions.
Instead of moving forward on the axis of thought and rationality, we're descending instead into the primordial and visceral reactions of our "reptilian brains."
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- Oct 2020
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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from tuka al-salani 60:48 and well actually it is a question but it's something that will probably 60:52 is out beyond our scope here but how would 60:56 social annotation be used as a research tool so not research into it but how 61:00 would we use it as a research tool
Opening up social annotation and connecting it to a network of researchers' public-facing zettelkasten could create a sea-change of thought
This is a broader concept I'm developing, but thought I'd bookmark this question here as an indicator that others are also interested in the question though they may not have a means of getting there (yet).
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adanewmedia.org adanewmedia.org
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Digital texts embody the intersections between history and biography that Mills (1959) thought inherent to understanding social relations. Content from my blog is a ready example. I have access to the entire data set. I can track its macro discursive moments to action, space, and place. And I can consider it as a reflexive sociological practice. In this way, I have used my digital texts as methodologists use autoethnographies: reflexive, critical practices of social relationship.
I wonder a bit about applying behavioral economics or areas like System 1/System 2 of D. Kahneman and A. Tversky to social media as well. Some (a majority?) use Twitter as an immediate knee-jerk reaction to content they're reading and interacting with in a very System 1 sense while others use longer form writing and analysis seen in the blogosphere to create System 2 sort of social thinking.
This naturally needs to be cross referenced in peoples' time and abilities to consume these things and the reactions and dopamine responses they provoke. Most people are apt to read the shorter form writing because it's easier and takes less time and effort compared with longer form writing which requires far more cognitive load and time expenditure.
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- Aug 2020
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Martel, C., Mosleh, M., & Rand, D. (2020). You’re definitely wrong, maybe: Correction style has minimal effect on corrections of misinformation online. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/w3tfb
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- Jun 2020
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Velez, G., & Power, S. A. (2020). Teaching students how to think, not what to think: Pedagogy & political psychology [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yedap
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Kharal, L. (2020, May 16). “FORMATIVE RESEARCH” FOR SYSTEMATIC BEHAVIOR CHANGE PROGRAM DESIGN. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bpqfw
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- Apr 2020
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Johnson, S. G. B., Bilovich, A., & Tuckett, D. (2020, April 30). Conviction Narrative Theory: A Theory of Choice Under Radical Uncertainty. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/urc96
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Hallford, D. J., & D'Argembeau, A. (2020, April 15). Why We Imagine Our Future: Introducing the Functions of Future Thinking Scale (FoFTS). https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bez4u
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