Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Sticking to New Year’s resolutions: Turn goals into habits – Inverse

As the new decade begins, you probably came up with a few resolutions worthy of a decade where humans will push the limits of space exploration and A.I. will become less of an abstract and more of a central part of human life. If you made a New Years resolution, youre also probably aware of the pessimistic statistics that surround them.

Humans have been making New Years resolutions for about 4,000 years, when the Babylonians took an opportunity to repay their debts or return items theyd borrowed during a festival called Akitu. Despite millennia of vowing to be better, humans are not any better at keeping our resolutions than we were 4,000 years ago. Research done in the 80s found that only 43 percent of people stuck to their resolutions after three months.

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That bleak history doesnt speak to the futility of resolutions; they just show how hard it is to change our behavior. Humans tend to prefer default options, whatever they may be This is sometimes called status quo bias.

Behavior change is at the heart of basically any New Years resolution you have, which is one of the reasons keeping them feels so hard. To combat that, you have to learn to take a resolution and turn it into a habit you dont have to think twice about.

One expert in habit formation tells Inverse theres no way to hasten the process, but there are ways to set yourself up for success.

Phillippa Lally is a senior research fellow at University College Londons Department of Behavioral Science and Health. In 2009, she published a paper intended to show just how long it took 96 people to form a new eating, drinking, or exercise habit from running for 15 minutes before dinner to drinking a glass of water after breakfast.

That paper, which has been cited over 1,000 times in the intervening 11 years, found that the average amount of time it took for these goals to become habits was 66 days.

Lally tells Inverse that 66 days isnt the magic bullet for habit formation as it appears to be. She found that some people were able to form habits as quickly as 18 days, whereas for others it took as long as 254 days. Instead, the most important thing her study identified is that habit formation follows an asymptotic curve:

This curve shows the relationship between doing your chosen activity and the automaticity of that activity which is basically when you start to feel an impulse to perform that activity. (Her team used surveys that evaluated automaticity on a scale of 0 to 42.) If you look at the early days of the experiment, you can see that there are big jumps in automaticity. But over time those jumps get smaller and smaller and the curve starts to plateau.

With each subsequent repetition, the increase is a bit less, until you reach a point at which the behavior has reached its peak of automaticity. And with each new repetition, the automaticity you experience when you enter the situation remains stable, Lally says.

Once you hit that peak, the automaticity gains start to plateau. Thats the point at which your resolution has transformed into a habit.

You can consider the time it takes people to reach this plateau to represent the time it takes their habit to form, she says.

That 66 days is just a ballpark measure to give you an idea of how long the road to habit formation actually is. To get to that plateau, her advice is to try to be as consistent as you can.

Inevitably, you will miss an opportunity to perform your habit of choice. If youve decided to run every morning, youll sleep in or take a well-deserved day off. Fortunately, Lally says this wont set you back very much. Missing just one day of an activity reduced a persons automaticity score by .29, a very small decrease that didnt have any major consequences in the long term.

In the paper, the team points out that missing larger chunks of time, like a week, can significantly derail habit formation. So, again, theres no shortcut for consistency.

Finally, take heart in the fact that you make the biggest automaticity gains right out of the gate. That means you can use these early days of January, when youre feeling newly inspired to pursue new goals. Every time you actually follow through on your resolution, youre putting money in your automaticity bank and setting yourself up for success once the new year loses its shine.

Lally says that the best way to apply her work to a New Years resolution is to frame that goal in a specific way. Once you decide what your goal is, you need to find a cue for that goal.

In her study, people were told to bake that cue into their goals. They pledged to do 50 sit-ups after my morning coffee or go for a run before dinner. That time element is a situational cue that should trigger that behavior.

The cue doesnt have to be time-oriented, but it does have to be recognizable enough that it becomes associated with the desired behavior in your mind.

It is crucial that there is a cue for the behavior. Otherwise, the behavior could be performed in various situations and a habit wont form, says Lally.

From there, she recommends that you follow this formula to write down your goals:

In situation X, I will perform behavior Y.

This type of structure, says Lally, is called an implementation intention. Instead of pledging to go to the gym more, frame it like this: After work on Tuesday, I will go to the gym.

Then, repeat the desired behavior as many times as possible when you get into situation X. That way youll start working your way along the asymptotic curve and move towards the plateau of automaticity.

Though Lally describes herself as quite a routine person, shes taught her daughter about implementation intentions by asking her to repeat her goals aloud using the in situation X, I will perform behavior Y format:

If I ask her to remind me of something later, she will make a plan and repeat it aloud three times. For example, When we get home, I will remind mummy to put the washing on.

Talking out loud to yourself or writing down your goals is a method that expert musicians also use to learn new skills. In this case, it can help you pursue the automaticity that turns a resolution into a habit.

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Sticking to New Year's resolutions: Turn goals into habits - Inverse

Human Behavior

How Economists Tricked Us Into Thinking Capitalism Works – Truthout

These days, it seems like someone is always trying to privatize something. One day its the Trump administration contemplating the privatization of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The next its the Tories looking to sell off the U.K.s National Health Service, or economists promoting market-based solutions to the climate crisis. In this age of neoliberalism, the rallying cry for politicians and economists alike is always for More privatization! More markets! Sell it all off to the private sector!

Of course, much of the time this faith in the market is used as a cover by those looking to simply make a profit or by the politicians representing their interests. But this is not always the case. There are many who actually believe, wholeheartedly, that markets are the most efficient and even the most ethical way to run a society. And because this is the worldview that is taught in the vast majority of economics departments throughout the world, its not surprising that this is the dominant worldview among those in power.

Its an ideology that was carefully crafted during the time of the early Western economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Homo sapiens are actually Homo economicus, the theory goes: selfish, competitive, rational agents who are all constantly seeking to efficiently maximize their own personal well-being.

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No need to despair, however, because economists have figured out that these inherent traits can actually be utilized for good, through a social relation known as the market. By its nature, the market encourages competition and efficiency, and thus, by relying on the self-maximizing behavior of individuals, market capitalism is the only economic system that truly accepts human nature for what it is. And in fact, its the only system uniquely situated to actually channel this nature into a net positive outcome for society.

How does this all work? Well, when they are free to make choices that maximize their own interests, people in a market system negotiate on a price and quantity of a product or service until a sort of equilibrium is established. Its a natural process of compromise that leaves everyone satisfied and also leads to an efficient way of producing and distributing goods and services. Everyone wins. And, the theory goes, it just so happens that the process aligns perfectly with human nature. Its a fascinating theory. The only thing is, its completely wrong.

The foundation of this theory relies on an assumption about human nature that has been discredited over and over by research across multiple scientific disciplines. It turns out that Homo economicus is a fairytale, an outdated misconception, a gross distortion of reality. Yet, it still serves as the theoretical foundation of our entire economic system.

Studies have determined that the Homo economicus personality is an extremely rare one. Instead, most humans are marked by a deep capacity for reciprocity, cooperation and selflessness. For example, research shows that by 14 months of age, children are already beginning to help each other by handing over objects that others are unsuccessfully reaching for. This empathic behavior only increases as children grow older and begin to share things that they value with others and even object to other peoples violation of social norms.

These are all early signs of prosociality behavior that is marked by an intent to help or benefit others. And importantly, this behavior is motivated by a genuine concern for others and not by selfishness.

Evolutionary biologists have also largely debunked the theory of Homo economicus. Researchers like David Sloan Wilson and others have determined that more prosocial groups will robustly outcompete less prosocial groups, meaning that prosociality was an advantageous trait when it came to the natural selection of early humans. And these theories are not new. Over a century ago, the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin wrote convincingly on how the survival of our species has depended more on cooperation than on the heroic efforts of isolated individuals. It certainly is difficult imagining an early human taking down a woolly mammoth without engaging in highly coordinated prosocial behavior. How else could the human species evolve to dominate the globe if not by cooperating with one another to overcome the many challenges our species faced?

Another place where we see the myth of Homo economicus debunked is in the research that comes out of post-disaster communities. In her landmark book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit presents a thesis arguing that humans have an innate capacity toward collectivism and that these traits tend to reveal themselves most strongly in community response to disasters. Far from resorting to antisocial behavior after a disaster (a myth which the media tend to elevate), Solnits book outlines enumerable instances where communities demonstrate prosocial behaviors like cooperation, solidarity, sacrifice and generosity instead.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones, Solnit writes. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this.

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence contradicting it, weve come to accept Homo economicus as the truth. Perhaps not always consciously, but it haunts our dreams, our imagination. It confines our sense of possibility and imposes boundaries as arbitrary as those that carve up ecosystems and communities into nation-states.

Market capitalism has been imposed onto us, often at the point of a gun, and as a result, weve been forced to internalize the idea that we are a selfish, competitive and greedy species. Well, thats just human nature, well acquiesce when we hear about the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies or the greed of investment bankers. But the thing this, thats not human nature its just what weve been coerced into thinking by an unfeeling economic system that dominates every facet of our life. And in many ways, Homo economicus is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Its been demonstrated that studying economics actually makes you more selfish. Studies have shown that economics students are much less likely than other students to donate money that was given to them into a common pool; that they are more likely to freeride and are also more likely to defect than to cooperate; that they are more likely to participate in deception for personal gain; and even that they are more likely than their peers to rate greed as generally good, correct and moral.

And its not just students: economics professors give less money to charity than professors in other fields including history, philosophy, education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, physics, chemistry and biology.

When faced with the overwhelming evidence that Homo economicus and thus the whole neoclassical economic project is nonsense, the defenders of the status quo tend to rely on another myth: that there is no alternative. Margaret Thatcher famously uttered those words over 30 years ago, paving the way for an age of neoliberalism that has seen the dismantling of the social safety net, the stagnation of wages and the rise of extreme inequality.

But the thing is, there are alternative ways of organizing society that reflect the human capacity for reciprocity, selflessness and cooperation. The worker cooperative model promotes equity and democracy by giving workers ownership and control over their workplaces. It does so in a way that not only aligns with our inherently human traits, but in a way which has been shown to be more efficient and productive than the traditional workplace models.

There is also the commons model that reflects how communities organized themselves for thousands of years before they were torn off their land in the enclosure acts of 17th-century England. The commons are a way of organizing production and distribution where resources are held in common and are accessible to every member of society to be managed collectively for the benefit of all.

In fact, the political economist Eleanor Ostrom actually won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for disproving the long-held belief known as the tragedy of the commons, a theory which held that resources held in common by communities would naturally be overused and depleted. Ostroms work demonstrated that this assumption is false, and that it is in fact very possible for resources to be managed collectively without privatization.

There are many ways that community resources can be collectivized instead of privatized, from land trusts that take land off of the market to policy proposals like Medicare for All, which represents a major shift in how we view our collective responsibility when it comes to health care, or the Green New Deal, which recognizes our collective responsibility to prioritize climate justice in the fight against climate change.

The alternatives to market capitalism are out there and the thing is, they actually align much more closely to the natural human tendencies toward reciprocity and sharing. The theories behind modern economics have left us with a burning planet and with skyrocketing inequality its time to put them to rest.

And whether economists and politicians choose to accept it or not, the days of Homo economicus are limited, because a society based off of a lie cannot go on indefinitely.

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How Economists Tricked Us Into Thinking Capitalism Works - Truthout

Human Behavior

Can AI Be More Efficient Than People in the Judicial System? – Interesting Engineering

AI is set to replace many human jobsin the future, but should lawyers and judges be among them? Here we explore where AI is already being used in judicial systems around the worldand discuss if it should play a more senior role.

Could, or should, AI ever be developed that could pass judgment on a living, breathing human being?

RELATED: CHINA HAS UNVEILED AN AI JUDGE THAT WILL 'HELP' WITH COURT PROCEEDINGS

Believe it or not, AI and some forms of advanced-algorithms are already widely used in many judicial systems around the world. In the various states within the United States, for example, predictive algorithms are already being used to help reduce the load on the judicial system.

"Under immense pressure to reduce prison numbers without risking a rise in crime, courtrooms across the U.S. have turned to automated tools in attempts to shuffle defendants through the legal system as efficiently and safely as possible." - Technology Review.

In order to achieve this, U.S. Police Departments are using predictive algorithms to strategize where to deploy their forces most effectively. By being fed historical crime statistics and other technology, like face-recognition, it is hoped this level of automation will help improve the effectiveness of their human resources.

The U.S. judicial service is also using other forms of algorithms, called risk assessment algorithms, to help handle post-arrest cases, too.

"Risk assessment tools are designed to do one thing: take in the details of a defendants profile and spit out a recidivism scorea single number estimating the likelihood that he or she will re-offend.

A judge then factors that score into a myriad of decisions that can determine what type of rehabilitation services particular defendants should receive, whether they should be held in jail before trial, and how severe their sentences should be. A low score paves the way for a kinder fate. A high score does precisely the opposite." - Technology Review.

In China, AI-powered judges are also becoming a reality. Proclaimed as the "first of its kind in the world," the City of Beijing has introduced an internet-based litigation service center that features an AI-judge for certain parts of the service.

The judge, called Xinhua, is a completely artificial female with a body, facial expressions, voice, and actions that are based on an existing living and breathing human female judge in the Beijing Judicial Service.

This virtual judge is primarily being used for basic repetitive casework, the Bejing Internet Court has said in a statement. "She," therefore, mostly deals with litigation reception and online guidance rather than final judgment.

The logic is that this AI-powered feature of the online court should make it more effective and more widely reaching for Beijing's citizens.

"Accordingto court president Zhang Wen, integrating AI and cloud computing with the litigation service system will allow the public to better reap the benefits of technological innovation in China." - Radii China.

AI is also being used in China to sift through social media messages, comments, and other activity online to help build body evidence against a potential defendant. Traffic police in China are also beginning to use facial recognition technology to identify and convict offenders.

Other police forces around the world are also using similar tech.

The answer to this question is not a simple one to answer. While AI can make decisions of a kind, this doesn't mean it is necessarilyfoolproof.

Many AI systems and predictive algorithms that use machine learning tend tobe trained byusing existing data sets or other existing historical information.

While this sounds like a relatively logical approach, it relies heavily on the supplied data particularly on the quality of it.

"Junk in, junk out." as the saying goes.

One major use of machine learning and big data, as in this case, is that it is used to identify correlations or apparent correlations within data sets. This could lead to false positives in the case of crime data and not actuallybe very useful for identifying the underlying causes of crime.

As another famous adage warns, "correlation is not causation."

Humans are just as guilty of this logical fallacy as an artificial replica could potentially be. One famous one is low income and a person's proclivity towards crime.

This is not always the case, merely a mitigating circumstance.

If such a potential error is not handled correctly, an AI-law enforcement decision or judgment could quickly generate a vicious cycle of false identification or too severe or lenient a punishment.

But, as with everything in life, things are a little more nuanced. Humans are not perfect decision-making machines either.

If other studies from 2018 are also correct, it seems thatAI can be faster and more accurate at spotting potential legal issues than human beings. This meansit could be argued that AI should definitely be used in legal support roles or at least reviewing legal precedent.

As we have already seen, AI and advanced algorithms are already in use around the world for certain clerical and data gathering tasks. They are, in effect, doing some of the "legwork" for human judges and lawyers.

But could they ever be used to completely replace their,vis-a-vis, humansuperiors in a judicial system? What exactly would be the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?

Many would claim that an AI should be able to remove any bias in the final judgment making process. Their final decisions should, in theory, be based purely on the facts at hand and existing legal precedent.

This, of course, is supposed to already be the case with human judges. But any human is susceptible to prejudice and unconscious bias, despite the best of their intentions.

But, probably more significantly, just because something is law it doesn't necessarilymean it's just. "Good" and "bad" behavior is not black or white, it is a highly nuanced and completelyhuman construction.

The answer to such things remains safely within the realm of philosophy, not computer science. Of course, others would likely disagree, and that's a "good" thing.

Judges also need to make decisions on the offender's punishment post-conviction. These decisions can range from very minor (petty fines) or granting bail to life-changing events like long-term imprisonment, or even death in some places around the world.

Such decisions are based on, in theory at least, the severity of a crime to the convict's likelihood of re-offending. As we have seen in places in the U.S., this is where AI and predictive algorithms are already being used to help with the judge's decision-making process.

They can, of course, completely ignore the recommendation from the AI. But this might not be possibleif humans were completely removed from the process.

Perhaps a case could be made here for generative adversarial network (GAN) panels of AI-judges?After all, the almost combative naturesetting and resetting of precedentis the basis of most common law legal systems.

But that's beyond the scope ofthis article.

One apparent benefit of using AIs or clever algorithms to make decisions is that they can't really have a bias. This should make them almost perfect for legal decisions as theprocess should be evidence-based rather than subjective as can be the case for human judges.

Sounds perfect, doesn't it? But "the grass isn't always greener on the other side."

Algorithms and AI are not perfect in-and-of-themselvesin this regard. This is primarily because any algorithm or AI needs to be coded by a human.

This can introduce unintended bias from the offset.

AIs may even learn and mimic bias from their human counterparts and from data they have been trained with. Could this ever be mitigated against?

Another issue is who will oversee AI-judges? Could their decisions be challenged at a later date? Would human judges take precedence over an AIs decision or vice versa?

The World Government Summit held in 2018, made an interesting and poignant conclusion on this subject that bears repeating verbatim: -

"It is as yet uncertain which of these technologies may become widespread and how different governments and judiciaries will choose tomonitor their use.

The day when technology will become the judge of good and bad human behavior and assign appropriatepunishments still lies some wayin the future.

However, legal systems often provide ideal examples of services that could be improved, while trials are likely to benefit from better data analysis.The law often requires a trial to set a precedentso watch out for the test case of AI as a judge."

So, in conclusion, could AI ever replace human legal professionals or be more efficient at legal decision-making? The answer, it seems, is both yes and no.

Yes, with regards to performing support or advisory roles like gathering evidence or estimating the likelihood of re-offense. No, with regards to making final judgments and sentencing.

It is probably prudent to keep human beings as the "top dog" when it comes to sentencing other mortal and sentient human beings rather than bits of code. Law and the legal system can, after all,be legitimately labeled "a human construction."

Existing legal systems are both beautifully jerry-rigged and maddening illogical at timesthat have been patched and upgraded as sense and sensibilities evolved over time and that suits human beings just fine. They are not set in stone for all time; they evolve as society does.

No machine could ever hope to understand, empathize or pass judgment "in the spirit of the law."

Perhaps humans, with all our imperfections and logical inconsistencies, are the only possiblearbiters of justice on one another. For this reason, it could be arguedthat "justice" should never be delegated to machines and cold logic as it is at odds with the "human condition?"

But we'll let you make up your own mind.

Link:
Can AI Be More Efficient Than People in the Judicial System? - Interesting Engineering

Human Behavior

CAL THOMAS: As we move into new decade, at look at life 100 years ago – Rockdale Newton Citizen

It can be useful and instructive to observe the turning of a decade by looking back on what life was like in America a mere 100 years ago.

On Jan. 2, 1920, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 108.76. Today it is over 28,000 points.

In 1920, the U.S. had become an economic power, which is remarkable considering the bloody war to end all wars that ended just two years earlier. Republican presidents shifted their attention from foreign entanglements to economic growth (sound familiar?).

The beginning of the Roaring 20s featured new rights for women, including the right to vote, daring flapper outfits and cigarette smoking. It also included Prohibition, which led to the rise of Al Capone and the Mafia. People should have been convinced that attempts to regulate human behavior by government fiat only work if the public is willing to obey the law, which in the case of liquor it clearly was not.

The one thing that hasnt changed in the last 100 years and for that matter since the first humans walked the Earth is human nature. One can change styles of clothing and hair, change modes of transportation, even change politicians, but human nature never changes. Greed, lust and the quest for power are embedded in each of us in every generation.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution found more people living in big cities than on farms for the first time beginning in 1920. That year also launched what we today call the consumer society. Americas total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929.

As the website history.com notes: People from coast to coast bought the same goods (thanks to nationwide advertising and the spread of chain stores), listened to the same music, did the same dances and even used the same slang. Many Americans were uncomfortable with this urban, sometimes racy mass culture, and for many people in the U.S., the 1920s brought more conflict than celebration.

Isnt it the same today? Have we learned nothing? The tension between people with opposing political and social views and religious beliefs has increased these last 100 years because of contemporary social media and the 24/7 news cycle in which revolution sells better than resolution.

Cars, washing machines, new forms of birth control and other creations gave especially women new freedoms. Radio united the nation and phonograph records, which sold 100 million in 1927 alone, created a common culture, even if some older people didnt like the modern music.

As with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley in the 1940s and 50s, some older folks in the 1920s rejected the dance hall lifestyle and what they saw as the vulgarity and depravity of jazz music and the moral erosion they claimed it caused. But for the younger generation, it was a new world in which the future looked bright.

What will America be like in 2120? In 1920 no one could have foreseen a Great Depression, or a second World War, much less the prosperity and cultural changes that would come, or the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The saying that the more things change, the more they remain the same has never seemed more accurate and providential.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas new book Americas Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers and the Future of the United States (HarperCollins/Zondervan). Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.

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CAL THOMAS: As we move into new decade, at look at life 100 years ago - Rockdale Newton Citizen

Human Behavior

ND ends 2019 with fewer than 100 reported traffic fatalities – Wahpeton Daily News

BISMARCK Preliminary reports indicate that North Dakota had 98 motor vehicle fatalities in 2019 a total that, if it goes unchanged, would be the first time in 17 years the state has recorded fewer than 100 traffic fatalities. Gov. Doug Burgum thanked the agencies involved in the Vision Zero traffic safety initiative for making a difference and expanding their efforts during the past year.

Since the comprehensive Vision Zero initiative was launched in 2018 by the North Dakota Department of Transportation (NDDOT), Highway Patrol and Department of Health, traffic fatalities in the state have decreased from 116 in 2017 to 105 in 2018 to a preliminary total of 98 in 2019, which would be the lowest total since 97 traffic fatalities were recorded in 2002. It will take up to 30 days to finalize the 2019 total as crash reports and investigations are completed.

This past year, Vision Zero was expanded with additional safety measures including more highway safety engineering systems, law enforcement equipment and programs; the establishment of highway safety corridors; crash data improvements and dashboards; and Vision Zero Schools, a new peer-to-peer program in high schools.

Of the 98 motor vehicle fatalities in 2019, 42 percent were alcohol-related and 25 percent were speed-related. Victims ranged in age from 3 years old to 93 years old, and 83 percent were North Dakota residents. By mode of transportation, 74 of the fatalities were in a passenger vehicle, 11 were motorcyclists, five were pedestrians, four were on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and two were bicyclists. One fatality involved a train and 14 involved commercial motor vehicles.

Vision Zeros ongoing success requires strong partnerships and buy-in from the public, said Col. Brandon Solberg, superintendent of the Highway Patrol.

If every driver and passenger chooses to buckle up, and every driver obeys speed limits and traffic laws and drives sober, the vast majority of traffic fatalities would be eliminated. Preventable human behavior contributes to 94 percent of motor vehicle crashes. Personal responsibility is the foundation of Vision Zero.

Vision Zero continues to educate through various mediums about the importance of passenger safety and dangers of speeding, distracted driving and impaired driving, including a new Not Funny campaign that stresses the importance of always driving sober or finding a sober ride.

Parents play a vital role in keeping their children safe on the road, no matter the age, State Health Officer Mylynn Tufte said. Parents should talk often with their young drivers about alcohol, lack of seat belt use, distracted driving, speeding, and driving with passengers. Young children should always be buckled in a car seat that is installed correctly and appropriate for their age and size.

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ND ends 2019 with fewer than 100 reported traffic fatalities - Wahpeton Daily News

Human Behavior

Multiculturalism, or Cultural Appropriation? Progressives Can’t Have It Both Ways. – City Journal

The progressive concept of cultural appropriation has become an increasingly mainstream idea. Do a Google search on, say, yoga is cultural appropriation, and youll see for yourself. What does cultural appropriation mean, though? According to law professor Susan Scafaldi, author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, cultural appropriation consists of taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone elses culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another cultures dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. Its most likely to be harmful when the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways.

Even if one takes this dubious definition seriously, thoughwhat would constitute unauthorized use?policing cultural appropriation quickly falls apart when applied to actual human behavior. A group of students at Pitzer College, for example, declared that hoop earrings should be off-limits to white women. But how can any culture lay claim to determining the size and shape of acceptable jewelry for individuals to wear?

Critics should never assume, though, that bad ideas will die a natural death. In 1991, Antioch College gained national fameand ridiculeby mandating that each step of a sexual encounter receive express permission from the participants. Lawyerly protocol replaced spontaneity, and process replaced passion. Saturday Night Live mocked the school, showing hormonal undergraduates uttering stilted authorizations. But what was once fodder for comedy is now law, at least in California and New York. Progressive goals have a way of becoming mainstream edicts.

In Salem, Massachusetts, the Peabody Essex Museum offers a case study in the mainstreaming of cultural appropriation. Cross-cultural appreciation has sustained the museum for centuries. Americas oldest continuously operating museum, PEM has long displayed exotic artifacts associated with the maritime tradebut patrons must now read a guilt-ridden disclaimer when visiting the museums exhibits. Cultural appreciation and exchange are vital parts of any society, but appropriation is complicated and tied up with complex power dynamics and histories of oppression, the message reads. Cultural appropriation occurs when appreciation becomes theft, when exchange is one-sided, or when marginalized cultures are reduced to stereotypes.

As with other definitions of cultural appropriation, the PEM statement does not offer any guidelines on how to know when appreciation becomes theft or when exchange is one-sided. The best it can offer is a statement from Jezebel founder Anna Holmes: You cant always prove appropriation. But you usually know it when you see it.

No well-intentioned person favors marginalized cultures being reduced to stereotypes, but cultural-appropriation watchdogs see these offenses everywhere, even in instances where harm was clearly not intended. Consider the case of high school senior Keziah Daum, who wore a cheongsam to her prom, setting off a Twitterstorm of condemnation. Daum chose the dress because she thought that it was beautiful and would set her apart on a special night. But activists admonished Daum, who is white, for wearing a traditional Chinese garment. Her defenders, including some Chinese-Americans and native Chinese, argued that her selection complimented Chinese culture. Critics attacked them in turn as inauthentic, orin the case of Chinese nationalslacking the social authority to speak about American minorities. To Daums woke critics, every ethnic group must stay in its own lane.

Another puzzling aspect of the cultural-appropriation focus is that it seems clearly to clash with another progressive imperative: the need to nurture multicultural appreciation. Multiculturalism has been a prominent cause among progressives for more than a generation, but today, admiration for other cultures apparently comes with a warning sign: look, but dont adopt, lest you face accusations of theft or insensitivity.

Most reasonable people have no trouble understanding that to adopt an artifact or practice doesnt diminish the culture from which it originates. You cant steal a culture, as Columbia University linguist John McWhorter has observed. Cultural exchange is enriching, not impoverishing, and imitation remains, as in the old formulation, the sincerest form of flattery. Its time for progressives to decide between embracing multiculturalism or policing cultural appropriation. They cant have it both ways.

Matthew Stewart is associate professor of humanities and rhetoric at Boston University and the author of Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingways In Our Time.

Photo: monkeybusinessimages/iStock

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Multiculturalism, or Cultural Appropriation? Progressives Can't Have It Both Ways. - City Journal

Human Behavior

End of an era: Leslie Lowe finds truths during a career in marriage therapy – Herald and News

Human behavior is the most complicated thing on the planet. The only thing more complicated than human behavior is string theory, Leslie Lowe said.

After a full 40-year career in marriage and family counseling and mediation, she is retiring this month.

H&N sat down with Lowe to hear about the journey her life has taken her on, and to glean some of the universal truths shes learned about how people can better relate to each other.

I guess what I will miss most is what drove me into getting licensed the opportunity to help people have better lives and relieve them of some of their personal pain, she said.

Lowe is originally from Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley.

I was raised in a very dysfunctional family. And thats why a lot of people go into counseling is their own personal experience, and wanting to try to understand and cope with it, she said.

I did not grow up with healthy self-esteem. I didnt have healthy conflict management skills. I certainly didnt have control of my emotions, because in my family screaming was the way everybody worked, she said.

Lowe explained that problems in relationships often stem from childhood problems, and one of the most important parts of learning how to get along with other people is to understand where your hang-ups come from.

Before you can talk about how to have a good relationship with somebody, you have to talk about how to manage your own brain and be in control of your own emotional stuff, she said.

If youre not in control of your emotional stuff, you lay that on the other person and that frequently creates conflict, she said.

Lowe began her higher education at UC Santa Barbara in 1964, where she studied psychology, but the program wasnt all she hoped it would be.

They were not doing the kind of psychology I wanted to do, she said.

I switched over to religious studies. The reason I did that is that looking at the structure of religious groups gave me more information about human dynamics. I learned a lot about human dynamics by studying religious studies, she explained.

After a year and a half of religious studies, a divorce caused Lowe to move to Berkeley and drop out of school.

When I decided a year and a half later to go back to school, they didnt have a religious studies department, they only had a theology department, which I didnt want, because Im an atheist, she said.

Lowe recalled with some pride that she was able to negotiate a major that suited her. It was technically an independent study and religious studies major, although she said on paper it was more of a literature degree.

Lowe ended up going back to school a few times, picking up degrees in English, teaching and finally in marriage and family counseling.

Her personal life has been just as interesting and dynamic as her path to becoming a marriage counselor.

Shes had her fair share of romance. Lowe has been married five times, an irony that isnt lost on her. She recalled the tales of her past marriages, sharing a few lessons she learned along the way. The man she is married to now she is very in love with.

Were going to celebrate 31 blessed years, she said with a smile.

100 years ago, people were so focused on just surviving, getting food, having shelter. The whole concept of marriage was completely different back then, she mused.

People, for the most part, in human history did not marry for love. For the most part, they married in order to be able to raise a family, which was the cultural expectation. Thats not whats going on today.

People get together because the other person is supposed to make them feel good. And if the other person stops making them feel good, because those emotional bank accounts have been withdrawn till they leave. So people are ping-ponging in and out of relationships, just like I did, she said frankly.

The emotional bank account is a concept widely used in psychology which Lowe explained.

An emotional bank account is opened whenever you develop a relationship of any kind with anybody. And you each engage in some kind of behaviors that make each other feel good, those are deposits.

And then frequently, relationships get to a point where the honeymoon is sort of over. And then people start showing their true colors. At that point, the withdrawals occur.

When the withdrawals start happening, if they as a couple dont catch those withdrawals and turn them around to the kind of problem-solving that prevents those withdrawals from drawing down the bank account, suddenly someone is bankrupt, there just isnt anything left.

Thats usually the point at which the other person wants credit. Because they wake up and go Oh, give me another chance. But at that point, the other persons kind of drained out. There isnt another chance, she explained.

Lowe reflected on some of the common avoidable mistakes that many make as married people.

What happens to a lot of couples is they wait too long to come to counseling. And so they come in as a last-ditch effort to show that theyve tried everything and its too late, she said. The first time they start having problems that are tough to resolve is when they should come in for therapy.

She said many people dont know the difference between healthy fears and healthy worries in their lives.

Healthy fear is future based. You see something that could potentially be harmful and you problem solve the best you can to take care of yourself. Healthy worry is backward based.

Something has been happening that bothers you. And you have to do some problem solving so that it doesnt pop up in the future, she said.

I think thats the biggest problem that I see today is that people are stuck in their fears.

When youre in the middle of emotional conflict, and it has to do with how your brain works, your brain is in fight or flight mode, youre really in animal survival. Versus your frontal lobe, which has the ability to more calmly look at all the choices available to you evaluate data and make better choices. People spend far too much time in that [survival] part of their brain, she said.

Lowes career in Klamath Falls has been full, and shes been active in many groups, including the League of Women Voters, Klamath Wingwatchers, Klamath Sustainable Communities and more.

She says shell continue her leadership efforts in those other organizations, but her time as a marriage and family counselor is drawing to a close.

I have loved working with people to help them have a better way of feeling about themselves and relating to other people. Ive loved that work, she said.

Im at a point where there are a number of factors that are emerging that tell me its time to stop. I dont hear as well as I used to. I dont process information as fast as I used to. But I think the really big thing is I dont have the patience with people I used to have, she said.

Through the hardship and heartbreak that shes experienced, Lowe said one of the most important things shes learned is to be grateful for the good things.

Life is a gift and too many people dont count their blessings. And I dont mean that in a religious sense. Theres far more good happening to most of us than bad and yet we tend to focus on the horrible stuff.

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End of an era: Leslie Lowe finds truths during a career in marriage therapy - Herald and News

Human Behavior

Linking Connectivity to Livability and Better-Planned Cities – Urban Land

Tim Stonor, managing director of Space Syntax, speaking at the ULI Asia Pacific Leadership Convivium in Singapore.

Improved connectivity leads to better cities and more profitable buildings, and data can play a crucial role in analyzing that connectivity and planning to maximize it. Speaking at the ULI Asia Pacific Leadership Convivium in Singapore, Tim Stonor, managing director of Space Syntax, a London-based urban planning and design company, describing how his company uses data to analyze human behavior patterns and applies the resulting insights to urban spaces.

Stonor also serves asa visiting professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and is a former Harvard Loeb Fellow.

Space Syntax builds algorithms and models that measure the connectivity of street networks. The companys models analyze pedestrian, cycle, and vehicle movement networks; its algorithm identifies the most-connected and the least-connected streets.

The more connected the street, the more people flow down it. Not just in Shanghai but also in London, in every town and city weve ever looked at. [That] one variable influences 60 to 70 percent of what then happens, he said. For example, in London, 80 percent of the citys shops are located on the 20 percent most spatially connected streets.

The percentages might vary from city to city, but this is a rule of nature we find again and again, he said. No matter how good you are, you cant drag people to you. Youve got to go to the people. The people go to the connectivity, so build connected places.

This model doesnt take account of what the buildings are, Stonor added. It doesnt take account of how tall they are, what they look like, the quality of their managementall of these things matter. However, the connectivity of the street grid seems to matter most.

Data analysis is increasingly entering the field of architecture and urban planning, said Stonor. Place really matters because it is in places where people come together and do lots of very basic things which drive innovation. The city offers the greatest density of opportunities for people to trade socially and economically.

Data analysis demonstrates that connectivity affects value. Linking footfall to the value of existing real estate enables developers to see the potential difference in value of the lifetime of a project that being better connected creates.

Space Syntaxs analysis also suggests a link between connectivity and health. Healthier people live in the more-connected places, certainly from the work weve done so far in England, said Stonor. Knowing this, we can work with public health professionals. The more disconnected and car dependent you are, the more likely you are to be lonely with enormous consequences for public health budgets: prescribing tranquilizers and pick-me-ups to people who are depressed because of the results of planning.

He would like to see cities working to increase or restore connectivity that has been lost because of highways dividing parts of the city. We are now fragmenting and dividing our cities where once they used to be connected and integrated, he said.

If I could do one thing quickly, I would slow the traffic down in every city and make it easier to cross the street.

Stonor also outlined a few Space Syntax projects, including a new central business district master plan for Darwin, Australia. Here, the company could demonstrate that a master plan that focused on connectivity would add value, connecting design with the money.

On a smaller scale, the company has worked with owners of shopping malls to show how increasing connectivity within the malls and between the malls and the city can add value. Getting inside shopping centers, making very small changes to the performance of a shopping center, you can open up sight lines, open up visibility, open up flow to make the place trade better.

In the future, using data in planning will lead to new business models and require architects, the public sector, data scientists, and investors to work together to create the best places.

The adoption of digital technologies will change the face of cities as surely as any previous technology, whether the railway, the car, or the skyscraper, he concluded.

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Linking Connectivity to Livability and Better-Planned Cities - Urban Land

Human Behavior

CAL THOMAS: As we move into new decade, at look at life 100 years ago – SCNow

It can be useful and instructive to observe the turning of a decade by looking back on what life was like in America a mere 100 years ago.

On Jan. 2, 1920, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 108.76. Today it is over 28,000 points.

In 1920, the United States had become an economic power, which is remarkable considering the bloody "war to end all wars" that ended just two years earlier. Republican presidents shifted their attention from foreign entanglements to economic growth (sound familiar?).

The beginning of the Roaring 20s featured new rights for women, including the right to vote, daring flapper outfits and cigarette smoking. It also included Prohibition, which led to the rise of Al Capone and the Mafia. People should have been convinced that attempts to regulate human behavior by government fiat only work if the public is willing to obey the law, which in the case of liquor it clearly was not.

The one thing that hasn't changed in the past 100 years and for that matter since the first humans walked the earth is human nature. One can change styles of clothing and hair, change modes of transportation, even change politicians, but human nature never changes. Greed, lust and the quest for power are embedded in each of us in every generation.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution found more people living in big cities than on farms for the first time beginning in 1920. That year also launched what we today call the "consumer society." America's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929.

As the website history.com notes: People from coast to coast bought the same goods (thanks to nationwide advertising and the spread of chain stores), listened to the same music, did the same dances and even used the same slang. Many Americans were uncomfortable with this urban, sometimes racy mass culture, and for many people in the United States, the 1920s brought more conflict than celebration.

Isn't it the same today? Have we learned nothing? The tension between people with opposing political and social views and religious beliefs has increased these past 100 years because of contemporary social media and the 24/7 news cycle in which revolution sells better than resolution.

Cars, washing machines, new forms of birth control and other creations gave especially women new freedoms. Radio united the nation and phonograph records, which sold 100 million in 1927 alone, created a common culture, even if some older people didn't like the "modern" music.

As with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley in the 1940s and 50s, some older folks in the 1920s rejected the dance hall lifestyle and what they saw as the vulgarity and depravity of jazz music and the moral erosion they claimed it caused. But for the younger generation, it was a new world in which the future looked bright.

What will America be like in 2120? In 1920 no one could have foreseen a Great Depression, or a second World War, much less the prosperity and cultural changes that would come, or the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The saying that "the more things change, the more they remain the same" has never seemed more accurate and providential.

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CAL THOMAS: As we move into new decade, at look at life 100 years ago - SCNow

Human Behavior

What Chess Can Teach Us About the Future of AI and War – War on the Rocks

This article was submitted in response to the call for ideas issued by the co-chairs of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Eric Schmidt and Robert Work. It addresses the first question (part a.), which asks how will artificial intelligence affect the character and/or the nature of war.

***

Will artificial intelligence (AI) change warfare? Its hard to say. AI itself is not new the first AI neural network was designed in 1943. But AI as a critical factor in competitions is relatively novel and, as a result, theres not much data to draw from. However, the data that does exist is striking. Perhaps the most interesting examples are in the world of chess. The game has been teaching military strategists the ways of war for hundreds of years and has been a testbed for AI development for decades.

Military officials have been paying attention. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work famously used freestyle (or Centaur) chess to promote the third offset strategy, where humans and computers work together, combining human strategy and computer speed to eliminate blunders while allowing humans to focus on the big picture. Since then, AI and supercomputers have continued to reshape how chess is played. Technology has helped to level the playing field the side with the weaker starting position is no longer at such a disadvantage. Likewise, intimidation from the threat of superhuman computers has occasionally led to some unorthodox behaviors, even in human-only matches.

The experience of AI in the chess world should be instructive for defense strategists. As AI enters combat, it will first be used just in training and in identifying mistakes before they are made. Next, improvements will make it a legitimate teammate, and if it advances to superhuman ability in even narrow domains of warfighting, as it has in chess then it could steer combat in directions that are unpredictable for both humans and machines.

What Does Chess Say About AI-Human Interaction?

Will AI replace soldiers in war? The experience of using AI and machine learning in chess suggests not. Even though the best chess today is played by computers alone, humans remain the focus of the chess world. The world computer chess championship at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Stockholm attracted a crowd of only three when I strolled by last year. In contrast, the human championship was streamed around the globe to millions. In human-only chess though, AI features heavily in the planning process, the results of which are called prep. Militaries are anticipating a similar planning role for AI, and even automated systems without humans rely on a planning process to provide prep for the machines. The shift toward AI for that process will affect how wars are fought.

To start, computers are likely to have an equalizing effect on combat as they have had in chess. The difference in ability among the top competitors in chess has grown smaller, and the advantage of moving first has become less advantageous. That was evident in last years human-only chess championship where competitors had the closest ratings ever in a championship, and the best-of-12 match had 12 straight draws for the first time. There have been more draws than wins in every championship since 2005, and though it is not exactly known why, many believe it is due to the influence of superhuman computers aiding underdogs, teaching defensive play, or simply perfecting the game.

AI is likely to level the military playing field because progress is being driven by commercial industry and academia which will likely disseminate their developments more widely than militaries. That does not guarantee all militaries will benefit equally. Perhaps some countries could have better computers or will be able to pay for more of them, or have superior data to train with. But the open nature of computing resources makes cutting-edge technology available to all, even if that is not the only reason for equalization.

AI Favors the Underdog and Increases Uncertainty

AI seems to confer a distinct benefit to the underdog. In chess, black goes second and is at a significant disadvantage as a result. Fabiano Caruana, a well-known American chess player, claimed that computers are benefiting black. He added that computer analysis helps reveal many playable variations and moves that were once considered dubious or unplayable. In a military context, the ways to exert an advantage can be relatively obvious, but AI planning tools could be adept at searching and evaluating the large space of possible courses of action for the weaker side. This would be an unwelcome change for the United States, which has benefited from many years of military superiority.

Other theories exist for explaining the underdogs improvement in chess. It may be that computers are simply driving chess toward its optimum outcome, which some argue is a tie. In war it could instead be that perfect play leads to victory rather than a draw. Unlike chess, the competitors are not constrained to the same pieces or set of moves. Then again, in a limited war where mass destruction is off the table, both sides aim to impose their will while restricting their own pieces and moves. If perfect play in managing escalation does lead to stalemate, then AI-enhanced planning or decision-making could drive toward that outcome.

However, superhuman computers do not always drive humans toward perfect play and can in fact drive them away from it. This happened in a bizarre turn in last years chess world championship, held in London. The Queens Gambit Declined, one of the most famous openings that players memorize, was used to kick off the second of the 12 games in the London match, but on the tenth move, the challenger, Caruana, playing as black, didnt choose either of the standard next moves in the progression. During planning, his computers helped him find a move that past centuries had all but ignored. When the champion Magnus Carlsen, who is now the highest-rated player in history, was asked how he felt upon seeing the move, he recounted being so worried that his actual response cant be reproduced here.

It is not so much that Caruana had found a new move that was stronger than the standard options. In fact, it may have even been weaker. But it rattled Carlsen because, as he said, The difference now is that Im facing not only the analytical team of Fabiano himself and his helpers but also his computer help. That makes the situation quite a bit different. Carlsen suddenly found himself in a theater without the aid of electrical devices, having only his analytical might against what had become essentially a superhuman computer opponent.

His response might presage things to come in warfare. The strongest moves available to Carlsen were ones that the computer would have certainly analyzed and his challenger would have prepared for. Therefore, Carlsens best options were either ones that were certainly safe or ones that were strange enough that they would not have been studied by the computer.

When asked afterward if he had considered a relatively obvious option that he didnt chose seven moves later in the game, Carlsen joked that Yeah, I have some instincts I figured that [Caruana] was still in prep and that was the perfect combination. Fear of the computer drove the champion, arguably historys best chess player, to forego a move that appeared to be the perfect combination in favor of a safer defensive position, a wise move if Caruana was in fact still in prep.

In war, there will be many options for avoiding the superhuman computing abilities of an adversary. A combatant without the aid of advanced technology may choose to withdraw or retreat upon observing the adversary doing something unexpected. Alternatively, the out-computed combatant might drive the conflict toward unforeseen situations where data is limited or does not exist, so as to nullify the role of the computer. That increases uncertainty for everyone involved.

How Will the U.S. Military Fare in a Future AI World?

The advantage may not always go the competitor with the most conventional capabilities or even the one that has made the most computing investment. Imagine the United States fighting against an adversary that can jam or otherwise interfere with communications to those supercomputers. Warfighters may find themselves, like Carlsen, in a theater without the aid of their powerful AI, up against the full analytical might of the adversary and their team of computers. Any unexpected action taken by the adversary at that point (e.g., repositioning their ground troops or launching missile strikes against unlikely locations) would be cause for panic. The natural assumption would be that adversary computers found a superior course of action that had accounted for the most likely American responses many moves into the future. The best options then, from the U.S. perspective, become those that are either extremely cautious, or those that are so unpredictable that they would not have been accounted for by either side.

AI-enabled computers might be an equalizer to help underdogs find new playable options. However, this isnt the only lesson that chess can teach us about the impact of AI-enabled supercomputers and war. For now, while humans still dominate strategy, there will still be times where the computer provides advantages in speed or in avoiding blunders. When the computer overmatch becomes significant and apparent, though, strange behaviors should be expected from the humans.

Ideally, humans deprived of their computer assistants would retreat or switch to safe and conservative decisions only. But the rules of war are not as strict as the rules of chess. If an enemy turns out to be someone aided by feckless computers, instead of superhuman computers aided by feckless humans, it may be wise to anticipate more inventive perhaps even reckless human behavior.

Andrew Lohn is a senior information scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. His research topics have included military applications of AI and machine learning. He is also co-author of How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War? (RAND, 2018).

Image: U.S. Marine Corps (Photo by Lance Cpl. Scott Jenkins)

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