http://humancond.org/ 2012-02-22T22:07:46-05:00 http://humancond.org/ http://humancond.org/lib/tpl/arctic/images/favicon.ico text/html 2012-02-18T13:04:16-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/mind/artificial_intelligence?rev=1329588256&do=diff See Artificial Intelligence for an overview. AI research has succeeded in creating useful abilities in areas such as speech recognition. More interesting for our purposes is what these efforts have revealed about the mind. In our view, the most important result has been a correction misunderstandings about the mind that resulted from the limitations of introspection. Broadly, one of the puzzles is that many things that seem easy to humans (such as recognizing an object) turn out to be quite … text/html 2012-02-18T13:00:29-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/mind/representational_opacity?rev=1329588029&do=diff Representational opacity is the idea that the workings of the unconscious are necessarily invisible to conscious awareness because the way the unconscious mind works is fundamentally different. The conscious mind is fundamentally verbal (see The Interpreter Theory), so its workings are necessarily discrete, symbolic (or qualitative) and somewhat logical, whereas the unconscious is quantitative, approximate, profusely connected and semantically ambiguous. text/html 2012-02-12T09:01:59-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/wiki/todo?rev=1329055319&do=diff This page contains notes on things that need to be done in the wiki and lists of pages that need work (, , and .) Seed Content * Work more keywords into front page: human nature, etc. * SEO “positive self regard” * Fix up “The Human Story” * All the front-page and level map links should be not only not broken, but also to solid content. * economics:0main, split off sustainability, better overview. Ref Luxury Fever. * Add a bunch of stubs * evidence and themes story pages… text/html 2012-01-23T08:25:44-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/evolution/just_so_stories?rev=1327325144&do=diff “”“ We refer to Just-So Story in the sense that Stephen Jay Gould used to criticize Evolutionary Psychology arguments. We admire Gould because he has a humility that many Evolutionary Psychology advocates seem to lack, however the term is not an all-purpose refutation of evolutionary arguments, as Wikipedia observes. text/html 2012-01-23T07:40:56-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/bias/retrospective?rev=1327322456&do=diff Outcome Bias Hindsight Bias bias, unpredictability, story, rough text/html 2012-01-22T22:22:51-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/bias/0main?rev=1327288971&do=diff We use bias without any negative connotation. We've chosen this term mainly because many of the human behaviors we discuss under this topic are technically known as biases, and also because the normal meaning of “bias” refers to our noticing these sorts of behavior in someone else. When a behavioral economist says that people in general have some specified bias, he is saying that people tend to behave in a way that is wrong according to the theory of the field. Normally, when we say that some… text/html 2012-01-22T22:03:02-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/bias/confirmation?rev=1327287782&do=diff Rule: When recalling information relevant to a subject, don't bother recalling information that doesn't support your viewpoint. When interpreting information (making Story), don't think of interpretations that don't support your viewpoint. Confirmation bias is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. As a result, people gather evidence and remember information selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. See Confirmation Bias. text/html 2012-01-22T21:10:14-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/mind/argumentative_theory?rev=1327284614&do=diff Two people are caught in some highly compromising situation, and one says to the other: “Think of something quick!” Why is this such a funny joke? It captures something about the human condition---there were surely lots of times in our evolutionary past where the ability to think of something quick was a vital survival skill. We should not be surprised to find that humans are endowed with an excellent ability to make up explanations after the fact. We should not confuse the ready generation… text/html 2012-01-22T21:09:33-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/spirit/psychological_buddhism?rev=1327284573&do=diff Many practitioners of Buddhist Vipassana meditation refer to it as “a science of the mind.” Buddhist meditators have been practicing a systematic and rigorous examination of the mind for 2500 years, and over this time have arrived at many useful observations about how the mind functions. Buddhist observations of the mind are largely unsupported by scientific experiments. However, we believe such a long history of consistent anecdotal evidence has some value, particularly as there are many com… text/html 2012-01-22T16:45:25-05:00 ram http://humancond.org/analysis/evolution/adaptive?rev=1327268725&do=diff We say than a behavior is adaptive if it leads to improved survival and reproductive success. All organisms that have behavior (i.e. animals) are under evolutionary pressure to choose adaptive behaviors over maladaptive ones. In simple animals such as insects there is little dispute that behavior is primarily instinctual (innate or genetically determined). In humans, much behavior is clearly partially or entirely learned. The Nature Versus Nurture dispute is largely about whether humans have…