#SystemFail

The responsibility for Trump, and the fact that millions of citizens think he's 'their man', rests squarely on our 'American culture'!

We create these people.

We create the killers, racists, misogynists: every hater.

The path toward a more enlightened, compassionate and empathic culture is knowable.

#CulturalEvolution
#RadicalBehaviorism

https://naturaldrift.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/skinner-1981-selection-by-consequences.pdf

Another weekend in the #library. This weekend: #culture, #CulturalEvolution and the #evolution of society

@mikeblazanin @sse_evolution @SystBiol @ASNAmNat have fun in #Albuquerque ! #Evolution2023 is only about biological #evolution, right? No #CulturalEvolution ?

Don't miss the talk "From #culturalevolution to the evolution of #cooperation" by Charles Stanish (Inst. for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment, Uni South Florida/Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at #UCLA, at
#UniKiel today. More info: https://cluster-roots.uni-kiel.de/en/calendar-events/biweekly-colloquia/biweekly-colloquia-from-cultural-evolution-to-the-evolution-of-cooperation-charles-stanish-2022-cotsen-institute-of-archaeology-at-ucla-usa
#BiWeeklyColloquia #SFB1266

Our research article on body-based units of measure and the evolution of measurement systems was published in
@sciencemagazine today. Written with Mikael Manninen and @roopeOK (who was the lead in this one).

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf1936

#Science #anthropology #cognition #archeology #CulturalEvolution

1/n

Sometimes you find the truth buried in a sequence of nested citations: a old book of an anthropologist citing an older article of another anthropologist which summarizes the idea of another, now forgotten researcher. In this case a book of C.R. Hallpike, ("The Principles of Social Evolution", Oxford Univ. Press, 1986) citing Jerome H. Barkow which summarizes Ted Cloak's idea of the "instruction" as a basic unit of #CulturalEvolution (in American Anthropologist, Volume 80, Issue 1 (1978) 5-20).

@tero

Agree that human nature, common sense, and popular culture tend to perpetuate lack of interest in seeing the bigger picture — or even recognizing that there might be one.

We fail to see that "more is different", and that what worked for our ancestors in small tribes no longer works at the scale of our global community. And especially in the US perhaps, individualism as identity leads to blind denial of collective approaches to problems/opportunities that exceed the grasp of individuals or small groups.

Issues that cross geopolitical borders, or involve multiple domains of knowledge—exceeding the context of meaning-making or scope of application of present-day agents—are opportunities for bigger-picture cognition augmented by machine intelligence.

Examples include creating and maintaining our evolving models of values—multi-layered, complex, and fine-grained—and our models of instrumental methods (science & technologies) for the promotion of those values into the future we discover by creating it.

But before we let ourselves depend too much on tools for thought that we don't adequately understand, we need to improve our philosophies of trust, reputation, values/preferences, decision-making, … ah, never mind. I got carried away considering the possibilities.

I suppose humans don't really care about bigger-picture thinking when there are more tangible opportunities right in front of us: using machine intelligence to more easily compete against our neighbors in business, defeat our enemies in war, and to increasingly amuse ourselves with decreasing effort…

#HumanNature #CulturalEvolution #SystemsThinking #Cooperation #individualism #collectivism #CollectiveCognition #SocialDecisionMaking

@jandockx

Thanks, I will listen to Joe's Garage as you suggested. Nothing wrong with that. 😉

I'm afraid that our disconnect on this topic is due to difference in conceptual background, not on basic differences between us on what we consider morally right or wrong.

I see your points, and I agree with you, under the assumption that I do understand your context and perspective.

I tend toward big-picture, abstract thinking that might be considered mathematical/logical in nature. So it's like I'm trying to explain that 'gravity' is not what really explains objects falling—it's better explained as curvature in space-time.

Why do I do this? Because, as I said, it avoids some significant bumps, discontinuities, non-monotonicities in popular thinking about moral decision-making, and make our thinking more extensible to future possibilities.

But by doing so, I lose my audience. How to effectively convey it? Long one-on-one conversations, but that doesn't scale. A collaborative discussion site on the web? Music? Art? Videos? Games...?

I really appreciate your comments, but I honestly don't know how to approach the project of constructing the necessary background in common given the limited bandwidth.

#morality #DecisionMaking #MoralDecisionMaking #ethics #explanation #pedagogy #constructivism #CulturalEvolution #SocietalEvolution #ToolsForThought #ToolsForThinking #DiscussionPlatforms

New #preprint with Marco Smolla (now at MPI Leipzig) now up at @biorxivpreprint: "Pathways to cultural adaptation: the coevolution of cumulative culture and social networks" https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.21.529416

We look at how cumulative culture coevolves with social network structure and discover that there are two distinct pathways this coevolution takes AND that there is a conflict between individual selection and group-level interests!

#CulturalEvolution #SocialNetworks #EvolutionPaper

New paper where Eugenio Bortolini, Mark Lake, and I explore the implications of objects in #CulturalEvolution From inferential biases in frequency data to key features of "object mediated" transmission. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-022-09599-x

Most corporations are not learning organizations. Why is that? One would expect the natural process of cultural evolution would favor learning organizations, and thus they would predominate.

https://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/layoffs-bad/

#corporations #organizations #learning #culturalEvolution #memetics #naturalSelection

Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective innovation https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01380-5

A mathematical model of collective innovation..

...A cultural domain can expand to the point where it exceeds the supply of subject-specific experts and the balance favours imitation over invention. At this point, we expect diversity to decrease and information redundancy to increase as ideas are increasingly copied rather than invented....

#innovation #technology #evolution #culturalEvolution

#Books to read this month: mostly #CulturalEvolution, but also some ordinary #evolution and #cooperation in biological systems. Searle, Dugatkin, Finchelstein and of course Boyd & Richerson

I've read Robert Boyd's book "A different kind of animal: how culture transformed our species" in the library today and noticed while reading it that there are similar adaptations in different evolutionary systems 💡. The result is s short blog post
https://blog.cas-group.net/2022/12/common-convergent-adaptations/

Boyd and Richerson are known for their work in #CulturalEvolution and #Anthropology. The most recent book from Richerson is named "A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution".
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-story-of-us-9780190883201

#CulturalEvolution
#SelectionByConsequences

It kills me how we accept that we have 'rights' (which we cherish) that were granted (through struggle) by an oppressor.

Isn't that backwards?

How is it that oppression is the default- from which we must struggle?

There are so many of us!

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Selection-by-consequences-Skinner/71196a4ad8b25edfaedbb769192af87573a73bf5

@amandahoover
Just to repeat for Mastodonians: the federated model + the 3-months notice of an instance's exiting + the ease of moving to a new instance = accommodation of evolution of the server universe. Servers can rise and fall, with the better-run persisting (natural selection). The diversity provides the resilience and strength that the Twitter model clearly lacks, as when it is taken over by an unstable person.

#twitter #mastodon #evolution #CulturalEvolution #diversity #resilience

The first presentation of the GOLEM project will be in January (in Amsterdam + online). Thanks to @melvinwevers for the invitation

https://create.humanities.uva.nl/events/cultural-evolution/

#culturalevolution #digitalhumanities #DH #computationalliterarystudies

But for either group of scenarios, achieving the ultimate goal will likely require rethinking our values as well as reimagining society & our economic systems. 2/

#decisionmaking #regenerativedesign #designforhumans #behavior #behaviorchange #overshoot #doughnuteconomics #economics #evolution #culturalevolution #prosocial #valuesmatter

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marcel-harmon_policies-for-adapting-to-the-new-normal-activity-6998314033300819968-tzR8/

Time to make my #introduction. I study the #CulturalEvolution of human environmental behaviors and institutions at the University of Maine.

I focus especially on the role of cooperation in determining important sustainability outcomes.

I am currently studying cultural adaptation to #ClimateChange in the US, and am helping to lead the #CulturalEvolutionSociety working group on sustainability.

https://timwaring.info

https://ces-transformationfund.org/our-projects/sustainability-awg/

https://culturalevolutionsociety.org/story/sustainability

I suppose it's time for an #introduction post!

My core personality in hashtags:
#writing
#reading (#urbanfantasy #paranormalromance)
#artsandcrafts (#painting #sculpting #sketching #coloring)
#history (#ancienthistory #mythology #culturalevolution #anthropolgy)
#nerd
#dnd
#pagan
#witch (#witchcraft)
#equality
#LGBTQIA member
The #paranormal
#gamer (#videogaming)
#anime

Skills I want to learn/master:
#graphicdesign
#contentwriting
#digitalart
#crochet

That is it for now! Bye!