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One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be. Larry Page created one of these moments when he posted his “These ads suck” note in the Google kitchen. Popovich delivers such feedback to his players every day, usually at high volume.
The Culture Code
Daniel Coyle
How Measurability/Mathematical Bias Limits the Scope of Scientific Inquiry and Human Discovery
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So there's this old paper from the, I think, 1960s by Eugene Vigner, the Nobel Prize physicist. It's called something like, on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. The fun paper, and he's like, there's no good reason why mathematics should work as well as it does. And there's no good reason why there should be a tool that allows humans to predict things as well as math does. There's no good reason. It's kind of nuts. And we should all just be grateful. And he says some other things, but he's basically just kind of being all about how great mathematics is and how there's no good reason why it should be. And it's pretty cool that it does work so well. I think that there's a counter to that, which is that not everything is that easily described that mathematics. And there's lots of things for which mathematics is not that effective at describing. And it's actually just the things that were well described or easily described by mathematics are the things that were discovered using mathematical tools. They're the things that lend themselves that were amenable to mathematical inquiry. And a lot of the things that we're interested in terms of social science and cognitive science and the related philosophical inquiry are things that are much less tangible in terms Of this kind of specification. And you can see it like in a physics equation, right, a physical theory, whether it's about mass or electricity or something else, right, you have a theory about how things work. And then you can write out equations. And all the terms in the equations have units. And they are all directly related to the things that are measurable. The theories are directly about relationships between things that are measured. And in social theories and cognitive theories, so often our theories are about relating constructs. And then we have proxy measurements, but the theory isn't about the relationship between the proxy measures. The theory is about the constructs and the relationships between the constructs that are social in nature, that are cognitive in nature, but aren't the things that are being measured. And so there's this gap. And I don't know the extent to which that gap can be overcome.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
People have more accurate models of people in close proximity than they do of people far away (socially)
Summary:
People have a good understanding of their friends and are accurate in predicting their behavior.
This is shown by their ability to accurately predict election results based on their friends' voting preferences. However, biases arise when people are asked to judge unfamiliar populations.
These biases can be attributed to the structure of their personal social networks.
The more biased their social networks are, the more biased their estimates of the general population will be.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Oh yeah, after seven years of research on this paper, that people actually have a quite a good idea about their friends, family, acquaintances, people that they meet on every day basis And then we'd whom they need to cooperate with, learn from or avoid. And that they're actually not that not as biased as a traditional social psychology would like us to think. And we see that because when we ask people about their friends, we see that this predicts societal trends quite well. So in one line of research, we asked a national probabilistic sample of people to tell us who their friends are going to vote for. We average those things across the national sample and got better prediction of election results than when we asked people about their own behavior. And this would not have happened if people were biased in reporting their friends. They must have told us something that must have given us information that's accurate and that's goes beyond their own behavior in order for that to happen to predict the elections better. And by now we saw that in four further, so we five elections all together in the US 2016 in France, the Netherlands, the Sweden and US 2018, and we hope to predict again 2020. So things like that tell us that people are actually pretty good in understanding their social circles and then the apparent biases show up when people are asked to judge people that They don't know so well. So when I'm asked to tell you something about people in another state or another country or people from another socioeconomic cluster, which I don't know well, then I am likely to have Some biases. But these biases we show can be explained by what I know about my friends. So if you ask me something like that, I will really try to answer your question honestly. And to do that, I will try to recall from my memory everything that I know about our social my social world. But you know, if I'm surrounded by rich people like here on the East side of Santa Fe, it could be very difficult to imagine in what poverty people can live in other parts. And so even if I'm trying my best to recall, you know, the most poor person I know, I might never recall such poverty that actually exists in the world. And when asked about the overall level of income in the US, I'm likely to overestimate the overall level. And similarly, if you are poor, you're people who are poor might have problems imagining the wealth of really rich people and they will typically underestimate the wealth of the country. So okay, so let me let me summarize this. So this piece actually suggests that people are not that biased when it comes to judging their immediate friends. They have a lot of useful information about their friends and pretty accurate. The bias is show up when people are asked about other populations that they don't know so well. And they can be mostly explained by the structure of their own personal social networks. The more biased your social networks are, the more biased your estimates will be about the general population.
Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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