09 FEB 2018 by ideonexus
Bias in Praise VS Punishment and Reversion to the Mean
I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, “On many occasions I ha... 1 
notes
notesUser Cortesoft has a good analogy for this:
"Flip 100 coins. Take the ones that 'failed' (landed tails) and scold them. Flip them again. Half improved! Praise the ones that got heads the first time. Flip them again. Half got worse :(
"Clearly, scolding is more effective than praising."
(source)
See also Regression Fallacy
17 MAY 2017 by ideonexus
The Collector's Fallacy
There’s a tendency in all of us to gather useful stuff and feel good about it. To collect is a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge.
Let’s call this “The Collector’s Fallacy”. Why fallacy? Because ‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as ... 1 notes
notes21 APR 2017 by ideonexus
Law, Education, Religion are Names We Give to Adaptation
The changes in the conditions of human life during the last twenty or thirty thousand years have been mainly brought about by the acceleration of invention through increasing co-operation and the release of material and social power. There have been no doubt climatic and geographical changes, but their share has been relatively less important. The essential story of history and pre-history is the story of the adaptation of the social- educated superstructure of the animal man to the novel pro... 1 notes
notes10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Gamification Auction Mechanic
On a previous assessment, Mrs. Tabor asked her students three different questions to assess their science-centered critical thinking. Based on the answers, she gives each student a chip with a different color and value (much like the suns in Ra). Students who demonstrated an “average” level of critical-thinking skills get chips worth 3 or 4; students who demonstrated greater critical-thinking skills get chips worth slightly less (2 or 3); and students who struggled a bit get chips worth m...Folksonomies: education gamification
Folksonomies: education gamification
1 notes
notes03 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
Example of Lexical Context
A duct-less split can produce the exact amount of energy needed to temper an
envelope.
When I first read this sentence, my mind started to try to make connections to envelopes and
wondered if tempering had something to do with getting or keeping the glue on the flap. If you
are an engineer, you probably know that the sentence above refers to equipment and its capability
of cooling a room. As with any topic, the more you know about heating and cooling, the easier
it is to learn and understa... 1 notes
notes08 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
China to Rate Online Behaviour in Social Credit System
Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibi...Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
1 12 OCT 2014 by ideonexus
Teleporters Homogenize the World
In Munich he walked.
The air was warm and clean; it cleared some of the fumes from his head. He walked the brightly lighted slidewalks, adding his own pace to their ten-miles-per-hour speed. It occurred to him then that every city in the world had slidewalks, and that they all moved at ten miles per hour.
The thought was intolerable. Not new; just intolerable. Louis Wu saw how thoroughly Munich resembled Cairo and Resht ... and San Francisco and Topeka and London and Amsterdam. The st... 1 notes
notes24 JUN 2014 by ideonexus
The Law of Large Numbers
The game is called who’s the best at flipping coins. It’s pretty simple. You flip a bunch of coins and whoever gets the most heads wins. To make this a little more interesting, though, not everybody has the same number of coins. Some people—Team Small—have only ten coins, while the members of Team Big have a hundred each.
If we score by absolute number of heads, one thing’s for almost sure—the winner of this game is going to come from Team Big. The typical Big player is going to ...Folksonomies: mathematics statistics
Folksonomies: mathematics statistics
1 notes
notes24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
We All Experiment
Experimentation is something done by everyone all the time. Babies experiment with what might be good to put in their mouths. Toddlers experiment with various behaviors to see what they can get away with. Teenagers experiment with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But because people don’t really see these things as experiments or as ways of collecting evidence in support or refutation of hypotheses, they don’t learn to think about experimentation as something they do constantly and thus need...
1 Roger Schank describes a world where we are all collecting evidence to test various hypotheses.
11 DEC 2013 by TGAW
Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma) on Compassion
Not long ago, a young boy handed me an envelope containing 300 euros. He said he wanted it to be used to help the orphans at our ashram. I asked him to keep the money, which he had won in a music competition, but he refused.
Two weeks later, his little sister came to me with an envelope containing her ice-cream pocket money. She told her parents: “I eat ice cream all the time. This time I want to give to the orphans, like my brother.” The sister’s compassion was awoken by her brother...I really responded to this excerpt of Amma's response to the New York Times on who our moral leaders are.
Two sentences in particular stuck out: “The sister’s compassion was awoken by her brother’s moral integrity” (on the girl who donated her ice cream money after seeing her brother donate his music competition winnings) and “The universe is like a vast net; if one corner is shaken, the vibration pervades the whole.” (on the man who mowed the Lincoln Memorial).
She really illustrated how generosity and compassion can spread.
