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What a Child Can Teach a Smart Computer
The Wall Street Journal: Every January the intellectual impresario and literary agent John Brockman (who represents me, I should disclose) asks a large group of thinkers a single question on his website, edge.org. This year it is: “What do you think about machines that think?” There are lots of interesting answers, ranging from the skeptical to the apocalyptic. I’m not sure that asking whether machines can think is the right question, though. As someone once said, it’s like asking whether submarines can swim. But we can ask whether machines can learn, and especially, whether they can learn as well as 3-year-olds. Everyone knows that Alan Turing helped to invent the very idea of computation.
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Want To Know When You’ll Die? Ask Your Friends
Refinery29: Your best friends know your favorite band and brunch place and exactly what movie will cheer you up. Sometimes, you may even feel like they know you better than you know yourself. Now, research suggests they might be able to accurately predict some pretty big things — like how long you'll live. We've known for a while now that there's a link between personality traits and lifespan. This new study, published online earlier this month in the journal Psychological Science, wanted to take that a step further by looking at whether our friends' ratings of our personalities can more accurately predict our mortality risk than our own self-ratings can.
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Why Are People So Annoying?
It’s human nature to want other people to think well of us. And indeed we are often called upon to put our best foot forward—highlighting our accomplishments and character traits in job interviews and on first dates. So we get a lot of practice in effective self-presentation. Then why are so many people annoying? The simple answer is that, despite all our natural inclination and practice, much of our self-presentation backfires. And it backfires because we too often misunderstand the tradeoff between self-promotion—blowing our own horn—and humility. The fact is that modesty, or even self-effacement, can be more effective than bragging in creating a good first impression.
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Les tweets négatifs permettent de prédire la fréquence des attaques cardiaques (oui oui)
Slate: Dans la longue liste de corrélations en apparence absurdes entre deux phénomènes observées ces dernières années, la récente trouvaille d’une équipe de chercheurs de la Penn University restera dans les annales. En géolocalisant des tweets répartis sur 1.500 comtés américains, ils ont identifié un lien entre les tweets exprimant des sentiments négatifs et… le taux d’infarctus. Dans le résumé de leur article à paraître dans la revue Psychological Science, les chercheurs expliquent avoir recherché des formulations ou des termes qui reflètent la présence de relations sociales et d’émotions négatives (par exemple la colère).
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To Thine Own Self: The Psychology of Authenticity
The Huffington Post: One of the core principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12-step addiction-recovery program, is authenticity. At least two of the steps emphasize the importance of honest moral inventory, and the AA "chip" -- the medallion handed out to commemorate periods of continued sobriety -- reads, "To thine own self be true." The people who created AA back in the 1930s were not scientists or philosophers, but the early literature contains many insights that scientists have verified in intervening years. The link between authenticity and morality and psychological health is not intuitively obvious.
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Without Friends or Family, even Extraordinary Experiences are Disappointing
Scientific American: Imagine you are with some friends at a concert, and the bouncer approaches the group and says that, because you are all looking so ravishing tonight, he’s been instructed to offer one of you—just one!—a backstage pass to meet the artist. Do you raise your hand? For most people, this would be a no-brainer: who wouldn’t leap at the chance to meet a famous singer or secure a long-sought autograph? The results of a recent study, published in Psychological Science by Gus Cooney, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson, however, suggest taking a second’s pause before snapping up that backstage pass.
