Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights

A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

People's Understanding of Others' Lives Is Biased Based on the Structure of Their Social Network Transcript: Speaker 1 So there's something in that that I found really interesting about this social sampling, which is that as you mentioned, like if you happen to be worse off and everyone else is worse Off, as is the case with like income, for example, then being worse off, you're going to project your bias into that general population more accurately than if you're better off in some Situation for which the most of the population is worse off. And that these biases are not all created equal. Yes. It has to do with how they stand relative to the broader population. So what we show is that this kind of biases of judgments of the broader population can be explained by the structure of social network and not by some cognitive deficit or motivational, Motivational bias, some desire to be better than others or that or some idea that everybody's like me or some cognitive deficit that people cannot, that people are too stupid to understand How other people live. It's really determined by the context of memory, that by the content of one's memory, which comes from one social circle.

Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Pol.is: An Example of Tools for Facilitating Non-Adverserial Debate at Scale Summary: A twitter-like system in Taiwan guides conversations towards consensual outcomes by using k-means clustering. It's a simple proof of concept for fact checking and has been effective in large-scale conversations. The science of plurality can advance to help navigate complexity in diverse opinions. Transcript: Speaker 2 Pol.is i don't know if you guys are familiar with that but it's a system used in Taiwan it's a twitter like format but it deliberately guides conversations towards consensual or partially Consensual outcomes while highlighting the differences that exist in the conversations in a non-judgmental way and it's just a wonderful system and at the same time it's like the Most simplistic proof of concept of the general direction it uses k-means clustering of stated opinions it doesn't use any natural language processing it's like the bargain basement Version of what it's trying to achieve but it still has been transformatively effective for these types of conversations at scale in Taiwan and is being adopted if it survives by the Twitter bird watch folks as the foundations of what they're trying to do for fact checking so i do believe that there is a science here that can advance dramatically i think that we have Not chosen to apply ourselves to it because we've been seduced by oh we're going to do the unbiased algorithm that's going to predict the truth the right way rather than saying no people Are diverse you have a lot of different opinions how do we actually help people navigate that complexity so i really am hopeful that this science what i would call plurality really can Advance and and help us do these things much better and again i'll put in the plug if you're a researcher interested in these things we're trying to build an academic community that really Wants to work on them right to me at when at pluralitynetwork.org

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Feeling like a speck in the wind amongst massive Societal systems Transcript: Speaker 1 I mean we have thousands of years of human history where you know since the agricultural revolution and the dawn of city-states it's just been constant change and one could argue that On a longish you know say century timescale we haven't been at equilibrium in 10,000 years what's next right how are all these nested feedback loops churning around between you know Societal structure and environmental structure to change the shape of society in the next couple hundred years Peter Turchin probably knows this better than I do but this is where I think thinking about these things at population scales rather than individual scales is it really helps me because when I think about things at the individual level like what can I do how do I live in the society right I find myself slightly distraught about like well I don't know I'm just a speck in the wind getting blown around by this maelstrom of society by trying To sort of think about the way the whole system is of all thing I can see it's not that I'm hurtling through space it's that we're all hurtling through space together in similar ways and That creates patterns that can then be identified what do you do with those patterns well then you know you get a professorship and you get to talk about it that helps sometimes

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

...catch up on these, and many more highlights