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"Hills, Thomas"
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ما وراء التل
رواية ما وراء التل هي إحدى روائع الكاتب الكبير توماس وولف الكلاسيكية، والتي يروى فيها قصة ثلاثة أجيال لأسرة واحدة وهي أسرة جوينر، ومن خلال أسلوب الكاتب الرقيق، وكلماته الأخاذة نتعرف في هذه الرواية على شخصيات إنسانية وأخرى واقعية عاشت في بلدة أسطورية في القرن التاسع عشر. ولا يزال يمر الزمن، كما يتساقط ورق الشجر، وتذبل الزهرة، ويمر الزمن كما يمر النهر بفيضانه إلهي العظيم أنت وحدك الذي تعرف أن الأرض وأن الزمن وأن الحياة كلها أغرب من الأحلام.
BOOK
The Dark Side of Information Proliferation
There are well-understood psychological limits on our capacity to process information. As information proliferation—the consumption and sharing of information—increases through social media and other communications technology, these limits create an attentional bottleneck, favoring information that is more likely to be searched for, attended to, comprehended, encoded, and later reproduced. In information-rich environments, this bottleneck influences the evolution of information via four forces of cognitive selection, selecting for information that is belief-consistent, negative, social, and predictive. Selection for belief-consistent information leads balanced information to support increasingly polarized views. Selection for negative information amplifies information about downside risks and crowds out potential benefits. Selection for social information drives herding, impairs objective assessments, and reduces exploration for solutions to hard problems. Selection for predictive patterns drives overfitting, the replication crisis, and risk seeking. This article summarizes the negative implications of these forces of cognitive selection and presents eight warnings that represent severe pitfalls for the naive “informavore,” accelerating extremism, hysteria, herding, and the proliferation of misinformation.
Journal Article
Neurocognitive free will
Free will is an apparent paradox because it requires a historical identity to escape its history in a self-guided fashion. Philosophers have itemized design features necessary for this escape, scaling from action to agency and vice versa. These can be organized into a coherent framework that neurocognitive capacities provide and that form a basis for neurocognitive free will. These capacities include (1) adaptive access to unpredictability, (2) tuning of this unpredictability in the service of hierarchical goal structures, (3) goal-directed deliberation via search over internal cognitive representations, and (4) a role for conscious construction of the self in the generation and choice of alternatives. This frames free will as a process of generative self-construction, by which an iterative search process samples from experience in an adaptively exploratory fashion, allowing the agent to explore itself in the construction of alternative futures. This provides an explanation of how effortful conscious control modulates adaptive access to unpredictability and resolves one of free will's key conceptual problems: how randomness is used in the service of the will. The implications provide a contemporary neurocognitive grounding to compatibilist and libertarian positions on free will, and demonstrate how neurocognitive understanding can contribute to this debate by presenting free will as an interaction between our freedom and our will.
Journal Article
Information Search in Decisions From Experience: Do Our Patterns of Sampling Foreshadow Our Decisions?
Do different patterns of sampling influence the decisions people make, even when the information the decisions are based on is equivalent? Do more and less switching between options correlate with different kinds of decision policies? In past research, the correspondence between search and decision patterns has been difficult to ascertain because the information obtained has often been confounded with its consequences in an exploration-exploitation trade-off. We used a sampling task in which information is explored prior to being exploited. We found that search patterns did reveal decision policies. Individuals who transitioned more frequently between options were more likely to choose options that win most of the time in round-wise comparisons and were more likely to underweight rare, risky events. Less switching between options was associated with choosing options that win in the long run on the basis of summary comparisons—decisions consistent with expected-value maximization and linear weighting of outcomes.
Journal Article
Structural differences in the semantic networks of younger and older adults
Cognitive science invokes semantic networks to explain diverse phenomena, from memory retrieval to creativity. Research in these areas often assumes a single underlying semantic network that is shared across individuals. Yet, recent evidence suggests that content, size, and connectivity of semantic networks are experience-dependent, implying sizable individual and age-related differences. Here, we investigate individual and age differences in the semantic networks of younger and older adults by deriving semantic networks from both fluency and similarity rating tasks. Crucially, we use a megastudy approach to obtain thousands of similarity ratings per individual to allow us to capture the characteristics of individual semantic networks. We find that older adults possess lexical networks with smaller average degree and longer path lengths relative to those of younger adults, with older adults showing less interindividual agreement and thus more unique lexical representations relative to younger adults. Furthermore, this approach shows that individual and age differences are not evenly distributed but, rather, are related to weakly connected, peripheral parts of the networks. All in all, these results reveal the interindividual differences in both the content and the structure of semantic networks that may accumulate across the life span as a function of idiosyncratic experiences.
Journal Article
Adaptive Lévy Processes and Area-Restricted Search in Human Foraging
A considerable amount of research has claimed that animals' foraging behaviors display movement lengths with power-law distributed tails, characteristic of Lévy flights and Lévy walks. Though these claims have recently come into question, the proposal that many animals forage using Lévy processes nonetheless remains. A Lévy process does not consider when or where resources are encountered, and samples movement lengths independently of past experience. However, Lévy processes too have come into question based on the observation that in patchy resource environments resource-sensitive foraging strategies, like area-restricted search, perform better than Lévy flights yet can still generate heavy-tailed distributions of movement lengths. To investigate these questions further, we tracked humans as they searched for hidden resources in an open-field virtual environment, with either patchy or dispersed resource distributions. Supporting previous research, for both conditions logarithmic binning methods were consistent with Lévy flights and rank-frequency methods-comparing alternative distributions using maximum likelihood methods-showed the strongest support for bounded power-law distributions (truncated Lévy flights). However, goodness-of-fit tests found that even bounded power-law distributions only accurately characterized movement behavior for 4 (out of 32) participants. Moreover, paths in the patchy environment (but not the dispersed environment) showed a transition to intensive search following resource encounters, characteristic of area-restricted search. Transferring paths between environments revealed that paths generated in the patchy environment were adapted to that environment. Our results suggest that though power-law distributions do not accurately reflect human search, Lévy processes may still describe movement in dispersed environments, but not in patchy environments-where search was area-restricted. Furthermore, our results indicate that search strategies cannot be inferred without knowing how organisms respond to resources-as both patched and dispersed conditions led to similar Lévy-like movement distributions.
Journal Article
Identifying Areas of Overlap and Distinction in Early Lexical Profiles of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Late Talkers, and Typical Talkers
This study compares the lexical composition of 118 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) aged 12 to 84 months with 4626 vocabulary-matched typically developing toddlers with and without language delay, aged 8 to 30 months. Children with ASD and late talkers showed a weaker noun bias. Additionally, differences were identified in the proportion of nouns and verbs, and in the semantic categories of animals, toys, household items and vehicles. Most differences appear to reflect the extent of the age differences between the groups. However, children with ASD produced fewer high-social verbs than typical talkers and late talkers, a difference that might be associated with ASD features. In sum, our findings identified areas of overlap and distinction across the developing lexical profiles.
Journal Article
Could You Be Wrong: Metacognitive Prompts for Improving Human Decision Making Help LLMs Identify Their Own Biases
Because LLMs are still in development, what is true today may be false tomorrow. We therefore need general strategies for debiasing LLMs that will outlive current models. Strategies developed for debiasing human decision making offer one promising approach as they incorporate an LLM-style prompt intervention designed to access additional latent knowledge during decision making. LLMs trained on vast amounts of information contain information about potential biases, counter-arguments, and contradictory evidence, but that information may only be brought to bear if appropriately prompted. Metacognitive prompts developed in the human decision making literature are designed to achieve this and, as I demonstrate here, they show promise with LLMs. The prompt I focus on is “could you be wrong?” Following an LLM response, this prompt leads LLMs to produce additional information, including why they answered as they did, identifying errors, biases, contradictory evidence, and alternatives, none of which were present in their initial response. Further, this metaknowledge often reveals that how LLMs and users interpret prompts are not aligned. I demonstrate this prompt in three cases. In the first two cases I use a set of questions taken from recent articles identifying LLM biases, including implicit discriminatory biases and failures of metacognition. “Could you be wrong” prompts the LLM to identify its own biases and produce cogent metacognitive reflection. In the last case I present an example involving convincing but incomplete information about scientific research (the too much choice effect), which is readily corrected by “could you be wrong?” In sum, this work argues that human psychology offers a valuable avenue for prompt engineering, leveraging a long history of effective prompt-based improvements to decision making.
Journal Article
Bias in Zipf’s law estimators
The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be computationally intractable. A more computationally efficient method of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is explored. This method is shown to have less bias for data generated from idealised rank-frequency Zipfian distributions. However, the existing estimators and the ABC estimator described here assume that words are drawn from a simple probability distribution, while language is a much more complex process. We show that this false assumption leads to continued biases when applying any of these methods to natural language to estimate Zipf exponents. We recommend that researchers be aware of the bias when investigating power laws in rank-frequency data.
Journal Article