Quora: Mind expanding books?

Not mentioned:

Why zebras don't get ulcers by Robert Sapolski.  This is the book of the last decade or two that actually changed my interactions with others.  Stress is a basic factor in social biology and it contributes something like 50% of your quality of life.  Our social interactions constantly play with our own and others stress levels so understanding stress is understanding a lot of what is being done to you and what you are doing to others. This covers the chemistry, physiology and biology of stress and it's role in social interactions and dominance.  I thought I understood stress but I didn't real get it.  This book provided clear insight in to social interactions in a new light so I could both soften up and toughen up, appropriately.

The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller.  Ever wondered why people make art, polish their cars, write poetry, etc.  I don't mean what peoples stories are about these things, but why they really want to do them.  Biological organisms have evolved to minimize energy use, to only expend energy when it counts.  Why did a species of great apes evolved the desires to engage in these weird waste-of-time-and-energy activities.  Find out.

Just about anything by John Gray but Straw Dogs or maybe The Silence of Animals.  We think of mythologies as belonging in historical times but we are embedded in modern myths so thoroughly that we can't see beyond them.

"Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?"

Science as narrative

I’ve spent a lot of time recently wondering why so many people just don’t get science. As a result, I’ve stopped thinking of science as a logically separate category of activity to other stuff we do. Science is a big multistranded narrative. Scientific laws are narratives. This is not to say that scientific narratives are equivalent to any old narrative, it’s just to say that narratives are how humans understand the world, and how we communicate our understanding: through these sequences of associations. What makes science science, and homeopathy or the Illiad not science, is simply the practice of testing the narratives against reality. Narratives that do not fit reality are discarded, or honed into a new version that works

From an evolutionary viewpoint, becoming narrative-capable represents a massive leap for a species. Individual actions need no longer be generated by the immediate local observed environment, or by habit, but can be driven by retained narratives. Collecting good narratives – that is, narratives that improve your decisions – is obviously adaptive.
A “good” narrative doesn’t have to be true – and in the Pleistocene it probably typically wasn’t – it just has to enable a better decision than you would have made without it. So we are beguiled by the story-tellers, driven to listen and collect narratives. Narratives can also create power for their power for their tellers: if I tell a believable story about why I am king, it secures my position. Therein lies our fall, we are seduced by the believable story and driven to make up stuff to control others.

Science provides a radical antidote to our weakness for seductive tales. No matter how beguiling the story, it must pass any test thrown at it to be retained. And for as long as it passes, it is Science.

The Insula: recasting body sensations as emotions

From the New York Times:
"According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/health/psychology/06brain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Virtualize the UI?

It was interesting listening to the designer comments and reading the reactions. It seems to me that the time to virtualize the UI has arrived. This mean extending the presentation adaptions for mouse/touch, keyboard/virtual kb, screen sizes, etc, right down into the presentation design. I can't see it would actually be that much more work and it would allow users to choose the presentation paradigm.

I'd been thinking of this in terms of my 82 year old mother for whom moving from Win7 to Win8 would be just too much. Just trying to get her to just shift email clients is actaully too much, let alone a complete OS paradigm shift. In a couple of years - if she's still around - it will be a case of staying with an unsupported OS or moving to something close to the old UI like Linux perhaps. There are a lot of people in similar in the same or similar floating transportation systems.

(I've also thought that there should be more emphasis on building systems that adapt to the expertise level of the user, rather than designers trying to adapt all levels of users to their one slick and sexy interface. Design treads various trade-off lines including a big one between obvious easy usability on one hand, and sexy newness on the other. This line is actually different for users, but vendors and designers want a one size that fits all product. There's even an element I-get-it-you-don't to many products that, like teenage buzzwords, exclude the uncool. Exclusivity requires exclusion.)

The alternative would be to use a CSS-like presentation approach to the whole UI. Your open applications could then appear as Win8 rectangles, start strip icons, phone popup list items, or whatever they come up with next. Notifications would be sent through the preferred notification paradigm and shake, rattle, pop or coalesce.

Competition implies value in chimps

Since most behaviour is actually driven by proxies of one kind or another - like the sight or smell of food being a proxy for nutrition - we might expect that competition itself would be a good default proxy for scarcity and value.

I am reminded of ape communities where the top male produces half of the offspring of the troop while at the top then is killed by guy who takes over because he's too dangerous to have around.  A big stakes game.  It would take a few nasty beatings to get to the top and give a few to remain there.  The risk might actually provide the physiological oomph - in the form of stress hormones - that would tell him to stick around and compete.  Competition, stress, value and risk-taking are regularly associated.

The fact that there are random scientists wandering around with undisclosed bowls of food is vaguely misleading to us because of we are trained to think abstractly about chance.  In a more natural situation with imperfect knowledge, competition itself should be a useful indicator of value.  A chimp might reasonably assume* that the hidden bowl contains more if the scientist wants to fight for it or even if there is competition in its general vicinity.

* Ok, I know chimps aren't philosophers who "reasonably assume" stuff.  What I should say is ...

Comment at http://evoanth.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/ape-risk/

Death by Sitting

Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> A growing body of evidence is pointing to the health risks associated with sedentary behaviours, and in particular risks associated with prolonged periods of sitting, independent of other physical activities.

While the benefits of exercise are well-established it is possible that the case against sitting may be oversimplified and the biology may be more causally complex.  The evidence against sitting is largely based on observation rather than intervention studies.  However, people who tend to have lower physical health and lower metabolic rates will tend to end up in sitting jobs and will also tend to die earlier.

See, eg:

 "Are people dying early because they sit too long, or are they sitting so long because they'll die earlier?"
http://drlutz.blogspot.de/2012/07/how-media-monkeys-get-you-panicked.html

Disclaimer: I try to avoid sitting for long periods.  I run a background application "Eyeleo" (in Windows) that tells me to take 8 second eye breaks every 15 minutes and 3 minute get-up-and-move breaks every hour.  It greys the screen during the long breaks and even has a no skip option is available for the recalcitrant.  I try to take the lift to the ground floor and walk up the five floors back to my desk job on four of the long breaks each day.  While the the sitting effect may be overstated, lots of good intervention studies indicate a strong link between improved fitness with improved health.  Some current research efforts are finding that short bursts of intense exercise improves physiological markers as much several times longer gentle exercise. So hit it!
 
Jim

[Link crosspost]

Conservatives can't get science

Are conservatives hostile to science because science is hostile to their causes or is the problem actually a lot worse:

Tim Dean:

I’d like to advance a fourth hypothesis: the same psychological proclivities that predispose individuals towards conservatism and the Republican party are the same psychological proclivities that predispose those individuals to not have a strong interest in science.

Contrary to the popular view that political attitudes and ideological commitments are the product of environmental factors, such as family upbringing, socio-economic conditions, or rational reflection, in fact it’s psychology that plays a dominant role in influencing an individual’s political leanings. And career choices.

Some of these key psychological features are:

    Openness to experience (Mondak, 2010)
    Integrative Complexity (Tetlock, 1983)
    Tolerance of Ambiguity (Jost et al., 2007)
    Uncertainty Avoidance (Jost et al., 2003)

http://ockhamsbeard.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/science-and-politics/