-
-
"It's impossible... to predict who will change the world, because major changes are Black Swans, the result of accidents and luck. But we do know who society's winners will be: those who are prepared to face Black Swans... and to rigorously exploit them."
-
Interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, on Black Swans, prediction, and understanding. Most interesting is his argument that information-driven economies or industries are more prone to black swans than others.
-
We "assume the entire world is "Mediocristan", whereas in reality large swathes of it are "Extremistan".... [A]s a result of globalisation and... electronic communications, the world is becoming more like Extremistan and less like Mediocristan."
-
Review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Black Swans." One bright spot is that it argues, "corporate “scenario planners” are better than they used to be at thinking about Black Swan-type events." Ha! Take that, Taleb! (I just hope it's true.)
-
"Taleb's view is that our inability to get to grips with... unknown unknowns - events, or inventions, or runaway successes... for which no statistical analysis, or inductive reasoning can possibly arm us... is, in part, hard-wired into us."
-
-
"Planning for the future is a fundamental human survival strategy. New results suggest that great apes can anticipate future needs and that this ability has roots more ancient than previously thought."
-
Introduction to special issue. Reviews previous thinking on differences between time perception in people and animals, and recent research suggesting that distinctions between them are not as strong as previously thought.
-
"In this paper, we discuss the construct of episodic future thinking," and argue that "episodic future thinking emerges between 3 and 4 years of age."
-
Behaviors that "increase future survival chances provide an adaptive advantage. The flexibility of human behavior is at least partly the result of one such mechanism, our ability to travel mentally in time and entertain potential future scenarios."
-
-
Humans have the ubiquitous capacity to imagine, plan for, and shape the future (even if we do frequently get it wrong). This capacity must have long been of major importance to our survival... and may have been a prime mover in human cognitive evolution.
-
"Scientists have long believed that animals do not have so-called episodic memory—the kind that allows humans to remember past events. But recent experiments with scrub jays, chimpanzees, and gorillas have led to rethinking of... [animal] memory."
-
Count the number of times the players in white pass the basketball. Then watch it a second time.
-
How the tricks that magicians use to deceive their audiences illustrate more basic gaps in consciousness. A lighter piece, but actually a pretty good underlying argument.
-
"At Big Blue, Martin Wattenberg is developing leading-edge projects to bolster the ability to read, share, and understand data in new ways."
Comments