En la Biblioteca CPS de hoy:
El contexto lo cambia todo
El error fatal en la ciencia de las personas
Historia de las dos perspectivas que nos definen como especie
Una teoría de la democracia compleja
El extraño mundo de los sistemas cuando alcanzan masa crítica
La ciencia emergente del orden espontáneo
Entre otros librazos que todo aspirante a CPSer debería leer.
Sergio Parra es autor y divulgador de la ciencia. Ha escrito libros imperdibles como Historia de la incertidumbre, Cultiva tu memesfera (donde demuestra que el contexto realmente lo es todo) y De qué (no) te vas a morir.
Puedes verle en Baker Café y puedes leerle en Sapienciología
Aquí Sergio.
De un tiempo a esta parte, me ha interesado particularmente cómo el contexto construye lo que vemos, desdibujando hasta cierto punto la percepción de individualidad, de agencia y hasta de causalidad y enfatizando conceptos como la mente extendida, el enactivismo, el ecobionte, el holobionte… todo tan enredado que la influencia "causal" es más bien mereológica y, por consiguiente, inextricable.
Aquí van mis 10 recomendaciones:
1. Context Changes Everything
Alicia Juarrero
Este es un libro denso y repetitivo, pero, si te dejas, también te empuja a empellones a otro plano intelectual y hasta existencia, como si estuvieras bajo los efectos de una droga enteógena.
No recomiendo la lectura de más cinco páginas al día, so pena de sufrir una indigestión. Hay que tomarlo a sorbitos cortos, paladeando cada párrafo. Es posible que seas incapaz de entenderlo todo (si entiendes la mitad, ya puedes darte con un canto en los dientes), pero el viaje es fascinante.
Enre otros temas, Juarrero explica con detalle quirúrgico cómo, en el corazón de los sistemas complejos, tales como ecosistemas, sociedades humanas o redes económicas, existe un entrelazado de procesos y restricciones que guían su evolución hacia estados de mayor complejidad y coherencia.
Las limitaciones que surgen tanto del entorno como de las interacciones internas del sistema (ascendentes, que dictan cómo los componentes inferiores influyen en los superiores; habilitantes, que, al restringir ciertos comportamientos, posibilitan otros; y dependientes del contexto, que varían según las condiciones externas), juegan un papel crucial en determinar cómo puede evolucionar un sistema.
Dentro de este marco, mecanismos como la retroalimentación positiva (donde un cambio inicial se amplifica), junto con la presencia de catalizadores y autocatalizadores (agentes que aceleran las transformaciones sin consumirse), impulsan al sistema hacia puntos de inestabilidad crítica. Aquí, a través de la recursividad (la repetición de procesos que utilizan sus propios resultados como punto de partida) y la iteración (la repetición constante de estos procesos), el sistema puede alcanzar transiciones de fase: momentos donde emerge un nuevo orden, caracterizado por interdependencias y dinámicas de coordinación que no estaban presentes antes. Estos momentos de cambio radical son esenciales para la emergencia de estructuras y comportamientos novedosos, demostrando cómo los sistemas complejos se autoorganizan y evolucionan hacia estados de mayor integración y funcionalidad.
"Philosopher Marc Lange argues that not all scientific explanations appeal to causal force laws. Questions of the form, “Why are gravitational and electrical interactions alike in conserving energy?”— or more generally, why are X and Y alike with respect to Z?— cannot be explained solely by deriving gravitational interactions from gravitational laws, and electrical interactions from laws governing electrical interactions. Individually or jointly, such force explanations make no mention of why the two cases would be alike with respect to energy conservation.
The point is a general one: “Causal explanations do not unify two cases” from different fields (Lange 2017, 57).
Neither do compound explanations such as combining appeals to gravitational and electric laws explain why two actual instances of gravity and electricity are alike with respect to energy conservation.
In particular, separate and joint explanations that make reference to forces cannot rule out the possibility that the two instances conserve energy just as a mere coincidence.
(...)
As noted, in the natural sciences the term law is commonly used to designate only those correlations that support counterfactuals; natural laws commonly identify force laws underwritten by projectible predicates.
Natural laws so understood ground the “covering- law model of explanation” that contends that events are successfully explained if and only if they can be inferred from a natural law together with initial condition statements.
It is for that reason that philosophers like Shapiro refuse to apply the labels lawful and scientific to the special sciences; they are dismissed because their purported laws lack the necessity and universal scope to support inferential predictions.
Lange contends that even in those cases where entailment holds, proofs deriving the explanandum from force laws would still not show why two cases are alike with respect to a certain property despite being the outcome of different forces.
Satisfactory explanations of the relation between the two cases must show not only why gravitational and electrical interactions are alike in conserving energy, they must also show why their joint occurrence is not coincidental.
Coincidences, to put it crudely, do not have a “common reason”.
In contrast, specifying a real and “distinct class” of which the two cases in question are instances would identify a common reason for why the two cases are alike.
By identifying that they are similar “in virtue of some context where the results exhibit this noteworthy similarity”, explanations of this form would succeed in showing why distinct cases must be alike."
2. Minds Make Societies
Pascal Boyer
Antes de que supiéramos mucho sobre truenos y terremotos, parecía bastante natural pensar que algunos agentes estaban detrás de estos fenómenos. Pero aprendimos a evitar este tipo de explicaciones.
El mundo está gobernado por leyes fisicas, no por las intenciones de los agentes. Los árboles crecen y los rios fluyen, pero no porque ellos quieran.
A medida que la ciencia amplió gradualmente nuestro conocimiento de la forma en que el mundo realmente funciona, el antropomorfismo (ver a otras especies como seres humanos) y el animismo (ver agentes en cosas como árboles, ríos y tormentas eléctricas) se han ido alejando gradualmente de la erudición seria.
Hay un dominio, sin embargo, donde este alejamiento del animismo y el antropomorfismo todavía encuentra una resistencia considerable: el comportamiento humano.
Cuando tratamos de explicar por qué las personas hacen lo que hacen, nuestra inclinación natural es verlas como personas. Es decir, asumimos que el comportamiento de las personas está causado por sus intenciones, que las personas tienen acceso a estas intenciones, que pueden expresarlas.
Suponemos también que las personas son unidades, es decir, cada individuo tiene preferencias, por ejemplo, por el café sobre el té, por lo que sería extraño preguntar qué parte de ellos tiene esas preferencias o cuántas subpartes de ellos favorecen el café. Tratamos a las personas como personas íntegras e integradas. En otras palabras, los antropomorfizamos.
Eso es tan erróneo para la ciencia de las personas como lo fue para la ciencia de los ríos y los árboles. De hecho, durante siglos, ser antropomórfico acerca de las personas ha sido el principal obstáculo para tener una ciencia adecuada del comportamiento humano.
Pascal Boyer se ha convertido en uno de mis filósofos favoritos.
Algunos fragmentos del libro:
Observers from outside our species would certainly be struck by two facts about humans. They are extraordinarily good at forming groups, and they are just as good at fighting other groups.
There is no species in which organisms can do so much through collective action. There are few species where so much collective effort is aimed at attacking other groups and defending the group from such attacks. No human population is immune from potential ethnic rivalry and conflict. These can escalate into full-blown civil war and genocide. It should suffice to mention racial antagonism in the United States, the history of pogroms in Europe, the murderous conflict following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the innumerable ethnic wars in Africa and their culmination in the Rwanda racial massacres to provide some idea of the scope and intensity of such conflicts.
We have names for the phenomenon, like “nationalism” and “tribalism,” suggesting a strong urge in human beings to side with their village, their clan, their nation, against the other side, strangers or foreigners. But saying that humans are strongly tribal does not explain anything.
This is where seeing human behaviors from another species’ viewpoint, or from an evolutionary standpoint, can be of help, as this perspective raises “why?” questions, such as, Why are individuals committed to their group? Why do they persist in that commitment when it might be to their advantage to defect from their group? How can groups survive at all, as cohesive units, in the face of individual, divergent interests? Why are groups often locked in intractable conflicts even when all parties realize there is little profit to be expected from prolonged rivalry? Why do group conflicts, especially ethnic ones, often flare up in outbursts of extraordinary violence? How can that occur between groups that had coexisted in peace for decades or centuries?
From an evolutionary perspective, having very high group solidarity and intergroup conflicts is just like having claws on your feet or antlers on top of your head—something that requires an explanation in terms of what it did for organisms over evolutionary time."
"KILLING BABIES, DRINKING BLOOD, AND occasionally eating fetuses is what middle-class English people do, or at least what some of them were described as doing during the 1980s—when not submitting their own children to bizarre forms of sexual abuse in the context of Satanic rituals.
What had started as a rumor became a public crisis, when more and more cases were reported and some children volunteered their own testimonies of horrendous rituals. Local authorities were flooded with anonymous accusations. Some social workers managed to persuade the authorities that the children should be taken away from their homes.
After more careful police investigations, it turned out that there was no evidence for any of those alleged episodes of abuse, Satanic or otherwise.
Penis-snatching outbreaks have afflicted African and Asian countries for at least thirty years. In many places, people report that dangerous individuals have the power to steal a man’s genitals by simply looking him in the eyes, shaking hands, or pronouncing special magical words.
It is also said that crowded places like markets and bus stations are these dangerous people’s favorite hunting grounds. What usually happens is that someone in these public places suddenly shouts that his penis got stolen, pointing to a specific individual as the perpetrator. The suspect is quickly surrounded by an outraged mob. This can lead to a summary execution. With more luck, the supposed thief is led to the local police station. Although people are certain that a penis was stolen, they are equally confident that searching the accused would be futile, as he probably disposed of the evidence through magic.
The world over, as far back as historical documents can be found, human groups have experienced episodes of panic of this kind. Witchcraft accusations are another example.
An individual claims to have suffered magical attacks on the part of some relatives or acquaintances, and enlists the support of the community to make the alleged witches confess their wrongdoing.
The craze can give rise to a large and lasting social upheaval, as in the witch hunts of Elizabethan England, where hundreds of suspected witches were tried and found guilty (not necessarily in that order).
Why do these panics occur, and why do people hold such strange beliefs to start with?
These episodes are salient illustrations of something much broader, an entire domain of culture in which people’s passions are triggered by information of extremely low value (to be clear, there simply are no witches or penis thieves).
To rephrase T. S. Eliot, it would seem that humankind can bear a lot of unreality.
The emergence and success of such beliefs is puzzling, given the fact that our minds were shaped by natural selection as efficient learning machines. There seems to be a failure of engineering, if human minds are so susceptible to information of such low value.
That is why so many anthropologists in the past wondered, Why would people believe these things?
But this raises another, often neglected question, Why does all this matter to people? Why are people motivated to tell others about such events? Why would they participate in the witch hunt? Why the madness of crowds?"
3. The World Behind the World
Erik Hoel
Constituye un gran logro de la civilización el poder ver extrínsecamente el universo "desde afuera'.
También es un logro de la civilización el poder ver intrínsecamente el universo "desde adentro".
Las dos perspectivas son la fuente de nuestros mayores triunfos, como nuestra capacidad de observar galaxias a años luz de distancia, y también la elegancia y la belleza de las historias que contamos.
Las perspectivas intrínseca y extrínseca son maravillas conceptuales, y tomó tanto trabajo intelectual el crearlas como nuestras más grandes instituciones y construcciones.
Son, a juzgar por su fecundidad, las Maravillas cognitivas del Mundo.
La historia de estas dos perspectivas y su eventual entrelazamiento en la forma de un intento de ciencia de la conciencia es el tema de este libro.
Porque es en la ciencia moderna de la conciencia donde las dos perspectivas convergen en un punto crítico.
Hoel es un divulgador impresionante.
Aquí algunas muestras:
"(...).when a science doesn’t know what to do or where to go, it becomes obsessed with drilling down on the methodology: as if science were simply an algorithm, like furniture assembly, a process that once purged to be rigorous enough ensures that whatever is cranked out of the algorithm is automatically a successful science.
This isn’t true.
In science, just as in the rest of human endeavor, if you aim for a nonexistent target, your arrow will never hit anything at all.
And what is the target of the arrow of modern neuroscience? Uncertainty over this question reveals itself in the shifting terminology that neuroscientists regularly employ. The jargon changes amorphously from subfield to subfield, often based on the exact same empirical phenomena.
If a brain area responds to outside stimuli via some change in neural firing, depending on the subfield that response might be called “computation” or “representation” or “storage” or “retrieval” or “replay” or “processing” or “information transmission.”
And the chosen term also depends on what narrative the authors want to tell; only rarely does it signify any fundamental difference in the neural activity being observed. Most of the time, all a neuroscientist can really say is that there was a change in neural activity.
Therefore, when scientists try to understand the Big Questions of neuroscience, such as “How does the brain process information?,” they run into irresolvable problems, since the methods of neuroscience only actually track what they seek once the nomenclature has done its work."
"INDEED, TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE BRAIN at a macroscale is precisely what most neuroimaging does, focusing on things like local field potentials or even entire brain regions.
Scientists failing to describe the brain at its most natural scale surely would explain a lot—it would mean that we neuroscientists have been observing and intervening on the brain in ways that aren’t very meaningful to behavior or even perception.
All these issues are based on the fact that while science is the taking of the extrinsic perspective, this leaves open which extrinsic perspective to take. After all, there are a huge number of possible descriptions for any given physical system—some better, some worse, some more informative, or interesting—and we know this intuitively, but it’s unclear what it means formally or mathematically.
The existence of the many sciences means there is a reason for us to intervene in and understand the world at
the level of the macroscopic rather than merely the microscopic.
It is ironic that, despite macroscales comprising the bulk of all practiced science, science is generally thought of to be fundamentally based in
reduction.
Moving explanations down the ladder is what science supposedly aims at. Scientific
reductionism has had a long history, and there is no denying that it has been enormously successful.
Indeed, so central are reductionist approaches to science that it is second nature for scientists to try to reduce a system to its smallest parts with
the simplest behavior possible.
And I want to stress—I do not throw out some charge of scienticism or foolishness at the reductionist stance of most scientists. The idea that science requires or entails universal reduction is by no means obviously wrong.
However, universal reductionism translates into an incredibly strong assumption: that scientists only use macroscales to understand the world because it is unwieldly (to the point of impossible) to talk about most of the things we care about down in a microphysical level of
description.
Information theory gives us a useful way to
talk about such reductionism: compression.
When data is dimensionally reduced, it is compressed, and such a compression can be either lossless (like zipping a file on a computer) or lossy (information is lost in the compression).
Most macroscales of science, like temperature, which loses the energy of all the individual particles, are lossy. The “null hypothesis” of how science got its scales is that science’s chosen scales are simply a function of convenient compressions. Meaning that macroscales, pretty much all the objects and things we are familiar with, are useful merely because they are
compressions.
One might imagine a race of alien superintelligences, committed reductionists, who could somehow model the world at a fine-grained scale of microphysics. According to
universal reductionism, such aliens wouldn’t miss out on anything, without caring about any macroscales, and could easily talk about and refer only to microphysical states.
The issue with the macroscales of science being merely compressions is that it seems that scientists should want to avoid compression as much as possible. After all, it’s throwing out information about whatever they’re studying.
This seems to imply that, if they could be, scientists should be like these reductive aliens, and are simply inconvenienced into not being them."
4. Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
Steven Strogatz
Las leyes de la termodinámica parecen dictar lo contrario: que la naturaleza debería degenerar inexorablemente hacia un estado de mayor desorden, mayor entropía.
Sin embargo, aunque esto es cierto, a nuestro alrededor vemos estructuras magníficas (galaxias, células, ecosistemas, seres humanos) que de alguna manera han logrado ensamblarse.
Un libro interesante, y muy bien escrito.
"Among scientists, Norbert Wiener will never be forgotten, for reasons both serious and silly. On the serious side, his name is enshrined in the terminology of advanced mathematics: Wiener process, Paley-Wiener theorem, WienerHopf technique, and so on.
A former child prodigy who received his Ph.D. from Harvard at age 18, Wiener revolutionized the theory of random processes.
His analysis of Brownian motion, the erratic jiggling of molecules in solution, went far beyond Albert Einstein's intuitive approach to the same problem, and his methods laid the foundation for Richard Feynman's work in quantum electrodynamics and for Fisher Black and Myron Scholes's Nobel Prizewinning work on finance.On the silly side, mathematicians love to tell stories about Wiener. Short and spherical, with thick glasses and a penchant for smoking cigars, he could often be found riding his unicycle through the corridors of MIT.
Even in a profession whose members are not known for their athleticism or common sense, Wiener stood out. After failing to return dozens of consecutive serves from his tennis partner, Wiener suggested that they switch rackets.
He was so absentminded that when he and his family moved from Cambridge to Newton, his wife wrote out their new address and directions home from his office, knowing full well he would forget they had moved. Sure enough, Wiener used the note as scrap paper for some calculations, threw it away, and walked back to his old house.
When he arrived, he realized he no longer lived there, so he stopped a little girl on the street and asked her if she knew where the Wieners had moved. She said, "Yes, Daddy, come with me."Wiener is a central figure in the science of sync, in part because he asked a question that no one before him had dared to address.
Whereas earlier mathematicians had been content to work on problems involving two coupled oscillators, Wiener tackled problems involving millions of them.Perhaps even more important, he was the first to point out the pervasiveness of sync in the universe. Chirping crickets, croaking frogs, fashing fireflies, gaps in the asteroid belt, generators in the power grid—Wiener spotted sync in all of them.
Superficial differences did not distract him.
He was looking for transcendent principles and he thought he found one, while pondering the origin of human brain."
5. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
Annie Murphy Paul
Una estupenda introducción al llamado "sesgo neurocéntrico" (es decir, nuestra idealización e incluso fetichización del cerebro) y nuestro correspondiente punto ciego respecto de todas las formas en que la cognición se extiende más allá del cráneo.
"ALL OF US THINK DIFFERENTLY depending on where we are. The field of cognitive science commonly compares the human brain to a computer, but the influence of place reveals a major limitation of this analogy: while a laptop works the same way whether it’s being used at the office or while we’re sitting in a park, the brain is deeply affected by the setting in which it operates.
And nature provides particularly rich and fertile surroundings with which to think. That’s because our brains and bodies evolved to thrive in the outdoors; our ancient forebears practiced a lifestyle that would look, to us, like “a camping trip that lasts a lifetime,” as a pair of ecologists has put it.
Over hundreds of thousands of years of dwelling outside, the human organism became precisely calibrated to the characteristics of its verdant environment, so that even today, our senses and our cognition are able to easily and efficiently process the particular features present in natural settings.
Our minds are tuned to the frequencies of the organic world.
No such evolutionary adjustment has prepared us for the much more recent emergence of the world in which we now spend almost all our time: the built environment, with its sharp lines and unforgiving textures and relentless motion.
We’ve set up camp amid the high-rises and highways of our modern milieu, but our minds
are not at ease in this habitat.
The mismatch between the stimuli we evolved to process and the sights and sounds that regularly confront our senses has the effect of depleting our limited mental resources.
We are left frazzled, fatigued,
and prone to distraction, simply as a function of the hours we spend in a setting for which we are biologically ill-equipped."
"Imitation even appears to be behind our success as a species. Developmental psychologists are increasingly convinced that infants’ and children’s facility for imitation is what allows them to absorb so much, so quickly.
So efficient is imitation as a method of learning, in fact, that roboticists are studying babies in order to understand how they pull off the trick of observing an adult and then doing as the grown-up does.
Imagine if a robot could watch a human perform an action—say, place a silicon chip on a circuit board, or make a repair on a space capsule—and then replicate that movement itself.
Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has invested in research on just such “one-shot imitation learning.”
But, as University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Alison Gopnik notes, the most sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence “are still far from
being able to solve problems that human four-year-olds accomplish with ease.”
While it was once regarded as a low-level, primitive instinct, researchers are coming to
recognize that imitation—at least as practiced by humans, including very young ones—is a complex and sophisticated capacity.
Although non-human animals do imitate, their mimicry differs in important ways from ours. For example, young humans’ copying is unique in that children
are quite selective about whom they choose to imitate. Even preschoolers prefer to imitate people who have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent.
Research shows that while toddlers will choose to copy their mothers rather than a person they’ve just met, as children grow older they become increasingly willing to copy a stranger if the stranger appears
to have special expertise.
By the time a child reaches age seven, Mom no longer knows best.
At the same time, children are strikingly unselective about what they imitate—another way in which our practice of imitation departs from that of animals.
Humans are “high-fidelity”
copiers: our young imitate adults to the letter, while other animals will make do with a slapdash approximation. This difference can make apes, monkeys, and even dogs look like the smarter
species. Shown a procedure with an extra, unnecessary step—like touching a box with one’s forehead before prying it open and retrieving the treat inside—chimps and canines will skip the superfluous move to go right for the goods.
Children, however, will faithfully imitate every step.
There is sense behind this seemingly irrational behavior.
Humans’ tendency to
“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis.
After all, there might be good reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially since so many human tools and practices are cognitively opaque: not self-explanatory on their face.
Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functional rationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smart move for a highly social species like our own.
Indeed, researchers have demonstrated that a four-year-old child is more likely to overimitate than a two-year-old, indicating a growing sensitivity to social cues. Our tendency to engage in overimitation continues to increase across
development, all the way into adulthood.
Because so much of human culture is arbitrary in form—why do we clap at the end of a performance, or eat cake at birthday parties, or wear wedding rings on the fourth finger of the left hand?—it depends on imitation for its
perpetuation.
Imitation is at the root of our social and cultural life; it is, quite literally, what makes
us human."
6. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
Geoffrey West
Ambicioso libro sobre cómo algunos de los principales desafios y problemas a los que nos enfrentamos hoy en día, que van desde la rápida urbanización, el crecimiento y la sostenibilidad global hasta la comprensión del cáncer, el metabolismo y los orígenes del envejecimiento y la muerte, pueden abordarse en un marco conceptual unificador e integrado.
Definitivamente, un viaje alucinante sobre las formas notablemente similares en que funcionan las ciudades, las empresas, los tumores y nuestros cuerpos, y cómo cada uno de ellos representa una variación de un tema general que manifiesta regularidades y similitudes sorprendentemente sistemáticas en su organización, estructura y dinámica.
"Despite the vagaries and accidents inherent in evolutionary dynamics, almost all of the most fundamental and complex measurable characteristics of organisms scale with size in a remarkably simple and regular fashion.
This is explicitly illustrated, for example, in Figure 1, where metabolic rate is plotted against body mass for a sequence of animals.
This systematic regularity follows a precisely mathematical formula which, in technical parlance, is expressed by saying that 'metabolic rate scales as a power law whose exponent is very close to the number ¾.'
This is what it means colloquially. Consider the following: elephants are roughly 10,000 times (four orders of magnitude, 10⁴) heavier than rats. Consequently they have roughly 10,000 times as many cells.
The ¾ power scaling law says that, despite having 10,000 times as many cells to support, the metabolic rate of an elephant (that is, the amount of energy needed to keep it alive) is only 1,000 times (three orders of magnitude, 10³) larger than a rat's.
Note the ratio of 3:4 in the powers of ten. This represents an extraordinary economy of scale as size increases, implying that the cells of elephants operate at a rate that is about a tenth that of rat cells.
Parenthetically, it's worth pointing out that the subsequent decrease in the rates of cellular damage from metabolic processes underlie the greater longevity of elephants and provides the framework for understanding aging and mortality."
7. Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists
N.J. Enfield
Así como el lenguaje no puede crear la realidad física, tampoco puede simplemente reflejar la realidad física tal y como es. Siempre impone una visión doblemente subjetiva, formada por las opiniones codificadas en el idioma que se habla y la opinión del hablante que elige las palabras que se utilizan.
El lenguaje está moldeado por nuestra visión de la realidad subjetiva y calibrada con un propósito.
Y, a su vez, nuestra visión de la realidad está determinada por el lenguaje.
“The idea that language is an infrastructure for social coordination and not for the transfer of information per se will help us understand sorne of its shortcomings, which we shall encounter in the first two parts of this book: why language seems to fail us in the ways it does, why it is so ambiguous and approximate, why it distracts and detracts, why it falls short when we try to describe an experience or capture an innermost feeling.
At the same time, the idea that language is a coordination device will help us understand why it can be so good at the things ít is good at: dírecting people's attention, framing situations in arbitrary ways, playing to people's biases, tuning our interactions, managing reputations, and regulating social life.
Arguments for the social function of human intellect go back to pioneering ideas in evolutionary psychology, and language is central to those ideas.
In this book, I focus not on the natural history of language's role in socially oriented reasoning but rather on the properties of language that shape its functions today.
Language excels at reason giving, storytelling, and sense making: the quintessentially social qualitles that characterize our species.
One of the most dangerous properties of language is that it allows us to say things that aren't true.
The danger is not just that people may be misled, but that falsehood may be more effective than truth.
Truth becomes a collateral victim of human sociality.
The strength of human commitment to beliefs in supernatural enlities and conspíracy theories—a kind of commitment found in human groups worldwide—draws precisely on the disconnect between a statement and the reality it claims to describe.
lf a group of people collectively state a belief in something that is likely to be false, then the statement, far from seeding doubt, will work as an honest signal of each individual's commitment to the group.
Author Curtis Yarvin explains the attraction of improbable ideas in building social movements. For the purpose of social allegiance, it's actually better if the belief that people coordinate around is patently false:
"Nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth .... To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a politícal uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”
8. Masa Crítica: Cambio, caos y complejidad
Phillip Ball
A primera vista, no resulta muy obvio por qué las principales propiedades de las partículas de la materia deberían guardar alguna relación con el comportamiento de los humanos en masa, pero, con frecuencia, los físicos han descubierto que los sistemas cuyas partes integrantes tienen capacidad para actuar de forma colectiva comparten rasgos invariables incluso cuando todo parece indicar que no tienen nada en común.
"NORMALMENTE, EN LA ETAPA en que convergen hacia esas ciudadelas formadas por agregación, las células del Dictyostelium se organizan en remolinos de forma muy parecida a como hacen los bacilos del morfotipo de remolino (véase figura 6.2a).
Es un movimiento que resulta familiar a otro tipo de biólogos, porque lo adoptan muchos bancos de peces (véase figura 6.2b).
Pero los peces no se comunican por quimiotaxis, tienen ojos para verse. Y, además, tienen cerebro, por pequeño que sea, lo que les permite un abanico de respuestas al entorno mucho más amplio.
Así pues, ¿es mera coincidencia que encontremos el mismo tipo de comportamiento colectivo en los hongos del limo y en los peces?
Muchas clases de animales se congregan en grupos que se mueven al unísono, a menudo por razones identificables y precisas. Los grupos pueden proteger a los jóvenes vulnerables y, ante la presencia de predadores, el número constituye una buena defensa. Un enjambre de abejas regula la temperatura de una colmena aprovechando el calor se sus cuerpos; las hormigas son más eficaces cuando buscan algo si lo hacen en masa.
Pero los biólogos Julia Parrish y Leah Edelstein-Keshet han señalado: “es difícil sostener que todas las agregaciones de animales tienen un propósito funcional. La figura y la estructura pueden surgir a través de interacciones no lineales tanto si las unidades están vivas como si no lo están”.
En otras palabras, al buscar una explicación biológica (es decir, de adaptación) para el conjunto del comportamiento colectivo de las poblaciones animales, se corre el riesgo de invocar una explicación evolutiva contingente de algo que, en realidad, es consecuencia inmediata de la física de la situación.
Con independencia de si responde o no a un propósito, queda por explicar cómo coordinan los animales el movimiento y su comportamiento.
Un ejemplo sorprendente de desplazamiento colectivo del mundo animal puede verse al crepúsculo sobre las copas de los árboles, cuando las bandadas de estorninos describen, de forma casi milagrosa, complicados rizos en formación cerrada.
De nuevo, ningún individuo los guía, no siguen a ningún líder. Y sin embargo, todas las aves parecen tomar la misma decisión al mismo tiempo.
Con las abejas sucede algo similar.
Este es un terreno abonado para quienes desean creer que la ciencia está pasando por alto algún aspecto profundo y misterioso de la naturaleza."
"El 15 de abril de 1989 en Sheffield, Inglaterra, los aficionados llenaron las calles que rodean el estadio de Hillsborough desesperados por entrar y ocupar sus localidades para ver la semifinal de la Copa Inglesa que enfrentaba al Liverpool y al Nottingham Forest.
El paso constante de seguidores a través de los tornos no sirvió para impedir las aglomeraciones, así que, diez minutos antes del comienzo del partido, la policía decidió abrir una puerta de salida.
La subsiguiente avalancha en las gradas empujó a los aficionados de la parte delantera contra las vallas que impedían el acceso al terreno de juego, contra las que murieron aplastadas noventa y seis personas.
A primera vista se diría que la predicibilidad se desvanece cuando el pánico sacude una multitud. Las medidas de seguridad que se toman dando por hecho que la gente las va a aprovechar de un modo racional pueden volverse inútiles muy rápidamente cuando tienen que contener una horda aterrorizada.
¿Qué esperanzas hay de anticipar la conducta humana en esas situaciones?
Pero irracional no es lo mismo que impredecible.
Más bien al contrario.
Porque una multitud presa del pánico sólo tiene un objetivo en mente: escapar lo más rápidamente posible.
El miedo, sin embargo, no es la única causa de las avalanchas.
En algunos conciertos, la precipitación con la que algunos buscan sitio se ha saldado con muertos y heridos graves como, por ejemplo, sucedió en 1979 en Cincinnati, en un concierto de The Who en el que fallecieron once personas.
En 1999, Dirk Helbing viajó a Budapest para trabajar con Tamás Vicsek. Querían usar el modelo para los humanos del primero para estudiar la formación de los senderos frecuentados por animales, pero Vicsek tenía la sensación de que aún quedaban cosas por aprender de ese modelo acerca de las multitudes.
Los investigadores se percataron de que si los desplazamientos de las personas se volvían demasiado erráticos (demasiado ruidosos), podría producirse un atasco en un pasillo o corredor estrecho. Visto como problema de la física, éste es un resultado ilógico. Hacer que los movimientos de los gentoides sean más erráticos es como elevar la temperatura de un grupo de partículas, hacer que el frenesí de sus movimientos aumente.
Y sin embargo, la consecuencia es que la multitud se “congela”.
En otras palabras, la gente fluida puede congelarse al calentarla, mientras que un fluido normal como el agua se congela al enfriarlo.
Tamas Vicsek advirtió que la aglomeración de una multitud sobreexcitada se asemeja mucho a los efectos del pánico. De modo que él, Dirk Helbing e Illés Farkas, un compañero de Vicsek de la Universidad de Eot- vós de Budapest, empezaron a utilizar el modelo de desplazamiento de los caminantes para estudiar lo que ocurre cuando una multitud pierde el control. Según su razonamiento, el pánico y el movimiento normal se diferencian por algo en particular: las personas pierden sus inhibiciones y se tocan.
Hasta tal punto es así en realidad, que la presión puede poner en peligro la vida. Se ha constatado que la fuerza de una multitud puede derribar muros y doblar obstáculos de acero.
Eso no significa que la natural aversión de las personas al contacto físico desaparezca, sino que ya no domina sus desplazamientos. Cuando las personas se tocan, sus movimientos se restringen.
En una multitud densa y compacta, pasar entre los demás o girar sobre uno mismo puede resultar imposible. Hay entre Ia gente una especie de rozamiento que dificulta el movimiento. De modo que los investigadores añadieron a sus gentoides la propiedad del rozamiento, como si fueran bolas de billar envueltas en papel de lija.
Además, incluyeron otro ingrediente un tanto sombrío.
Cuando la presión sobre una persona era demasiado grande, el infortunado individuo era incapaz de moverse o resultaba lesionado. Por supuesto, esto sólo sirve para empeorar las cosas, porque el lesionado se convierte en un obstáculo para el movimiento de los demás.
Calculando el nivel de presión que puede producir una lesión, los investigadores esperaban obtener alguna indicación de cómo y cuándo aparecen las víctimas en las multitudes compactas."
9. Una teoría de la democracia compleja: Gobernar en el siglo XXI
Daniel Innerarity
En su forma actual, la práctica política constituye una capitulación ante lo complejo, en lógica correspondencia con el hecho de que tampoco la conceptualización de la filosofía política está a la altura de la complejidad social.
Se requiere otra forma de pensar la democracia y otro modo de gobernar si es que sigue teniendo sentido aspirar a que la democracia sea compatible con la realidad compleja de nuestras sociedades.
Este libro se dirige a quienes no creen en las respuestas simples, pero tampoco quieren perder la fe ante la complejidad de los problemas.
"LAS DEMOCRACIAS SON MEJORES QUE sus modelos competidores no solo por los valores que promueven, sino también por la inteligencia que institucionalizan.
Las dictaduras, las oligarquías y las aristocracias de los expertos no tienen ninguna superioridad epistémica ni están libres de errores (también cognitivos) de quienes supuestamente saben más.
La democracia, tantas veces disfuncional, sigue siendo epistémicamente imbatible porque cultiva mejor que otros sistemas políticos la división del trabajo, los hábitos deliberativos y la multiplicación de las fuentes de información.
Las democracias lo hacen mejor a este respecto que sus modelos alternativos, sobre todo porque son un conjunto de disposiciones e instituciones que combinan lo deliberativo y lo agregativo, una mayor delegación o participación según los asuntos, están llenas de mecanismos de aprendizaje y distribución de la información, que operan de manera centralizada y distribuida a la vez, y que en ocasiones se confían a la división del trabajo y en otras, a la intervención de todos.
Dicho esto, también somos conscientes de que la naturaleza de muchos de los problemas que hemos de resolver –baste citar la crisis climática, la gobernanza financiera o los problemas generados por la robotización, la digitalización y la inteligencia artificial– exigen una mejora considerable de la infraestructura cognitiva de la democracia.
«Cuando las respuestas a los problemas políticos no son obvias, las demandas epistémicas a las democracias son muy altas» (Goodin / Spiekermann 2018, 301).
La complejidad social nos hace especialmente conscientes de los daños que produce la ignorancia (de los gobernantes y de los gobernados).
Nadie duda de que la competencia de los gobiernos es hoy especialmente crucial dada la naturaleza de los problemas a los que tienen que enfrentarse, aunque no sea la única habilidad que se les exige, ni esté del todo claro en qué consiste.
El saber es uno de los principales recursos del gobierno, pero se encuentra actualmente muy limitado. Los límites cognoscitivos de la acción de gobierno se refieren al hecho de que entramos en una era de mayores incertidumbres en general, pero de manera particularmente aguda en el caso de la política.
Aquí hemos de hacer una precisión: la sociedad del conocimiento constituye una verdadera explosión del saber
disponible y estamos en una época de mayores posibilidades de conocimiento que cualquier otra; pero al mismo tiempo también es cierto que
esa sociedad nos pone delante de un abismo de ignorancia en relación con el saber que deberíamos tener para resolver los problemas generados, por ejemplo, como consecuencia de
las tecnologías que hemos puesto en marcha.
Nuestro conocimiento puede ser de muy poco valor en «un mundo dominado por lo extremo,
lo desconocido y lo muy improbable» (Taleb
2008).
Detrás de nuestras tecnologías
energéticas o financieras hay un gran conocimiento, que es compatible con una enorme ignorancia por lo que se refiere a sus consecuencias secundarias o al modo como deberíamos regularlas.
Estas limitaciones se ponen especialmente de manifiesto en ciertas asimetrías cognoscitivas a las que el poder político no estaba acostumbrado, más bien al contrario.
Por un lado, en una sociedad del conocimiento los estados ya no tienen enfrente a una masa
informe de inexpertos, sino a una inteligencia distribuida, una ciudadanía más exigente y una
humanidad observadora, de la que forman parte un gran número de organismos internacionales que no solamente los evalúan, sino que disponen frecuentemente de más y mejor saber experto
que los estados.
Por otro lado, el aumento de la
complejidad de los problemas que la política debe resolver se traduce en una disminución de
las competencias cognitivas del poder político, muchas de cuyas dificultades proceden no tanto
de que no pueda como de que no sabe. Por poner el caso agudo de la gobernanza financiera: toda la clave de la dificultad estriba en el hecho
dramático de que los reguladores han de regular
a partir del saber experto que le suministran quienes van a ser regulados.
O pensemos en el caso de la ciberseguridad, que debe ser
encargada a los hackers, es decir, a los más competentes a la hora de ponerla en peligro.
En estos y en otros muchos casos ocurre que, dicho
sin eufemismos, el que manda ya no es el que más sabe."
10. The Experience Machine
Andy Clark
Contrariamente a la creencia habitual de que nuestros sentidos son una especie de ventana pasiva al mundo, aflora la imagen de un cerebro siempre activo que se esfuerza denodadamente por predecir lo que el mundo podría ofrecerle. A continuación, esas predicciones estructuran y dan forma a toda la experiencia humana, desde la forma en que interpretamos la expresión facial de una persona hasta nuestros sentimientos de dolor y nuestros planes para ir al cine.
Por consiguiente, nada de lo que hacemos o experimentamos está libre de nuestras propias expectativas. Hay un constante toma y daca en el que lo que experimentamos refleja no sólo lo que el mundo nos dice, sino lo que nosotros, consciente o inconscientemente, esperábamos que nos dijera.
Una consecuencia de esto es que nunca vemos simplemente lo que "realmente está ahí", despojado de nuestras propias anticipaciones o aislado de nuestras propias experiencias pasadas.
Más bien, toda experiencia humana es en parte fantasmagórica: el producto de predicciones profundamente arraigadas.
"AUTISM SPECTRUM CONDITION WAS initially thought to reflect a specific imbalance of the first kind—a systematic underweighting of prior expectations.
This was the “weakened prior” theory of autism.
Underweighting prior knowledge would make weak or elusive patterns hard to detect, and hard to learn too.
Such patterns would include things like facial expressions, intonation, or body language, things that delicately hint, in context, at other people’s mental states and attitudes.
An imbalance of that kind would also make it very hard to learn these patterns in the first place, and even harder to recognize them in situations that are complicated or ambiguous.
Recent evidence casts subtle doubt, however, on this bald initial hypothesis.
Rather than weakened predictions, intriguing evidence is emerging that suggests that the core issue involves (not underweighting knowledge-based predictions but) actively overweighting the incoming sensory evidence.
You might think that these are essentially equivalent—it’s a balancing act, after all, and underweighting one side of the scales (predictions) will have many of the same effects as overweighting the other (sensory stimulation).
But good evidence against the simple “weakened priors” theory has been found using Mooney images of the kind we met in Chapter 1. Mooney images, you will recall, are simple black-and-white images that are hard to decipher at first, but very easy to see once you have been exposed to the full grayscale image on which they are based.
A team of psychologists from the Netherlands showed Mooney images and their source images (the original, non-Moonified pictures) to people with autism spectrum condition.
They also showed the images to a large and varied group of more neurotypical participants. All were later shown the Mooney image again and asked to identify what it represented.
Contrary to what would be expected under the weakened priors theory, there was no difference in performance between those with autism spectrum condition and the other participants.
The clear conclusion is that the ability to use acquired prior knowledge to perform the Mooney task is intact throughout both groups. This favors an alternative theory in which those with autism are instead overweighting normal sensory evidence rather than underweighting their own knowledge or predictions.
Converging evidence now favors the broad idea that a tendency to overweight the sensory evidence (enhanced sensory precision) is the core difference separating autism spectrum condition from the more neurotypical profile.
What might this mean in practice?
(...) she feels in exquisite detail all the sensations that typical people readily identify as hunger, but she can’t piece them together.
“It’s very hard for me to conclude I’m hungry,” she says. “I feel irritated, or I feel sad, or I feel something is wrong. This information is separated, not connected.”
It takes her so long to realize she is hungry that she often feels faint and gets something to eat only after someone suggests it to her.
She doesn’t just feel “hunger,” instead the more fine-grained specifics of the bodily signals dominate.
You are feeling a whole lot of something—but what is it?
According to the overweighted sensory information theory, autism spectrum condition individuals constantly encounter an excess of highly detailed and apparently very salient sensory information of this kind, coming from both inside their own body and the outside world.
This sensory excess impedes the moment-by-moment identification of the broader context or scenario (in this case, hunger).
In other words, the emphasis on every aspect of sensory detail effectively makes it impossible to spot the larger forest for the trees.
Moreover, just as neurotypical people build environments that suit the ways neurotypical brains balance evidence, expectations, and uncertainty, so those with autism spectrum condition structure and seek out environments that better fit their own distinctive inner balances. "
Hasta aquí las recomendaciones de esta semana.
Ojo porque el próximo domingo hay otros 10 librazos:
-Cómo recoger la Thick Data más densa que hayas visto nunca
-Lo que no cambia en la generación de demanda.
-Cómo lanza hipótesis un empiricista vs un realista, o Edison vs Popper
-El mejor libro sobre Warren Buffet que probablemente no hayas leído
-Teambuilding tips de uno de los mejores orquestadores de equipos
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Hasta la próxima
"La mente no es un recipiente a llenar sino un fuego a encender"
-Álvaro de Biblioteca CPS