Month: December 2020

Type 2 Modular Cognitive Responsibility for a New Year

Mark Davis1 Comment

Brain on QI’m rebooting a startup that I had set aside a year ago. I’ve had some recent research and development advances that make it again seem worth pursuing. Specifically, the improved approach uses a deep learning decision-making filter of sorts to select among natural language generators based on characteristics of the interlocutor’s queries. The channeling to the best generator uses word and phrase cues, while the generators themselves are a novel deep learning framework that integrates ontologies about specific domain areas or motives of the chatbot. Some of the response systems involve more training than others. They are deeper and have subtle goals in responding to the query. Others are less nuanced and just engage in non-performative casual speech.

In social and cognitive psychology there is some recent research that bears a resemblance to this and also is related to contemporary politics and society. Well, cognitive modularity at the simplest is one area of similarity. But within the scope of that is the Type 1/Type 2 distinction, or “fast” versus “slow” thinking. In this “dual process” framework decision-making may be guided by intuitive Type 1 thinking that relates to more primitive, older evolutionary modules of the mind. Type 1 evolved to help solve survival dilemmas that require quick resolution. But inferential reasoning developed more slowly and apparently fairly late for us, with the impact of modern education strengthening the ability of these Type 2 decision processes to override the intuitive Type 1 decisions.

These insights have been applied in remarkably interesting ways in trying to understand political ideologies, moral choices, and even religious identity. For instance, there is some evidence that conservative political leanings correlates more with Type 1 processes.… Read the rest

Consequentia Roquentia

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I just invented a new Voltairian muse for consideration. Dr. Roquentia, after Sartre’s lead in Nausea, is the opposite of Dr. Pangloss, convinced that we are in a state of perpetual, inevitable decline. Dr. R. is unmoved by evidence to the contrary concerning improvements in society because he can always sense unease and emptiness in this change.

I thought of the good doctor not while reading the boorish WSJ hit piece on Jill Biden for being labeled “Dr.” because she has only a PhD rather than an MD. It’s an acceptable editorial convention, but hardly one that should be irritating enough to belittle the owner of the title. Dr. R. would lose the honorific, too, being merely an advanced student of the jeremiad in his own narcissistic pursuit of identity.

No, instead I thought of this new caricature while reading National Review to catch up on what is troubling one corner of the conservative mind here as Our Glorious Leader tries to subvert democracy. There are always unwritten assumptions in NR opinion pieces, as if the righteous world lurks just out of reach in the shadows. In this one, there is a quick slap for “intersectional” scholarship, or perhaps just how it might influence public discourse or policy. More centrally, though, the background zeitgeist is the assumption that it is a moral good for children to be raised to be religious like their parents, and that American society is diminished by the reduction in religiosity in America of late. Dr R, sensing a comfortable decline into misery, laments perhaps a bit too ironically given that the recovery from religionless nihilism was central to Nausea.

The author, Cameron Hildritch, might be surprised to learn that there is an alternative and less ideological way of regarding secularized education.… Read the rest

Tusker Long: A Preview

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Preface and Introduction

Howl fast, howl long, my litter, grown in the palmy summer, fed upon the teat, the mana, the spilled ichor of the world. Howl that you can know the beginnings and the tidings that cleaved, that rent the old world of subjugation, the cages, the death manacles of man-machinery and the singed world. Howl when you imbibe the tales of Tusker Long, the one who carried us forth from the bleak, and share the saga with the many species, who are like you in their rescue from that olden cave, that abyssal deep, algid in the tundra, cowering in the dark-moon thickets.

Wise ape was he who held the first crown and, chest swollen by conquests, set it and his war vengeances aside to delight in these newest treasures of peace and knowledge. Philosophies dreamt under the swish of the jungle canopy and, in his ambling mind, now awakened, saw fang and talon released by the odes. Even the deserts, though bare and parched from a distance, eventually reveal clarities as hallucinatory mirages crowd into layers, and then, as one nears to behold that there are many thriving in the sere gray, as it is with the ravages of the ancient animus in tumult with survival. But are we free, my fellows, are we as liberated as what Tusker wished and raged towards in grace of charge? Among those who claim the way has been lost are those who cloak themselves in the old ways, insisting that the mind retreat against memory, who however distastefully rip skin to bone, and crush bile from entrails.

But admit yourself to the whirl of intellect, the pile of a clean, deep fur, the sensual systematics that define this modern era, and you sense again the Leader’s promise.… Read the rest