Katrin Prager at Nature: “As a social scientist, I know that one person cannot solve a societal problem on their own — and even a group of very intelligent people will struggle to do it. But we can boost our chances of success if we ensure not only that the team members are intelligent, but also that the team itself is highly diverse. By ‘diverse’ I mean demographic diversity encompassing things such as race, gender identity, class, ethnicity, career stage and age, and cognitive diversity, including differences in thoughts, insights, disciplines, perspectives, frames of reference and thinking styles. And... (More >)
How to be a good ancestor
Article by Sigal Samuel: “In 2015, 20 residents of Yahaba, a small town in northeastern Japan, went to their town hall to take part in a unique experiment. Their goal was to design policies that would shape the future of Yahaba. They would debate questions typically reserved for politicians: Would it be better to invest in infrastructure or child care? Should we promote renewable energy or industrial farming? But there was a twist. While half the citizens were invited to be themselves and express their own opinions, the remaining participants were asked to put on special ceremonial robes and... (More >)
The Social Sector Needs a Meta Movement
Essay by Laura Deaton: “Imagine a world where the social sector exercises the full measure of its power and influence, fueled by its more than 12 million employees and 64 million volunteers. Imagine people who are fighting for living wages, women’s rights, early childhood education, racial justice, and climate action locking arms and pushing for broad social and environmental progress. Imagine a movement of movements with a bold, integrated policy agenda that drives real progress toward a more healthy, sustainable, resilient, and equitable world—not in some utopian future, but in the next decade. If we click the heels of... (More >)
The real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war
Philip Oltermann at The Guardian: “…The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future. The academics weren’t AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts. Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for black roll-necks…. But Wertheimer says great writers have a “sensory talent”. Literature, he reasons, has a tendency to channel social... (More >)
America’s ‘Smart City’ Didn’t Get Much Smarter
Article by Aarian Marshall: “In 2016, Columbus, Ohio, beat out 77 other small and midsize US cities for a pot of $50 million that was meant to reshape its future. The Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge was the first competition of its kind, conceived as a down payment to jump-start one city’s adaptation to the new technologies that were suddenly everywhere. Ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft were ascendant, car-sharing companies like Car2Go were raising their national profile, and autonomous vehicles seemed to be right around the corner. “Our proposed approach is revolutionary,” the city wrote in its... (More >)
Making Sense of the Unknown
Paper by Nils Gilman and Maya Indira Ganesh: “We all know what artificial intelligence (AI) looks like, right? Like HAL 9000, in 2001: A Space Odyssey—a disembodied machine that turns on its “master.” Less fatal but more eerie AI is Samantha in the movie Her. She’s an empathetic, sensitive and sultry-voiced girlfriend without a body—until she surprises with thousands of other boyfriends. Or perhaps AI blends the two, as an unholy love child of Hal and Samantha brought to “life” as the humanoid robot Ava in Ex Machina. Ava kills her creator to flee toward an uncertain freedom. These... (More >)
Pooling society’s collective intelligence helped fight COVID – it must help fight future crises too
Aleks Berditchevskaia and Kathy Peach at The Conversation: “A Global Pandemic Radar is to be created to detect new COVID variants and other emerging diseases. Led by the WHO, the project aims to build an international network of surveillance hubs, set up to share data that’ll help us monitor vaccine resistance, track diseases and identify new ones as they emerge. This is undeniably a good thing. Perhaps more than any event in recent memory, the COVID pandemic has brought home the importance of pooling society’s collective intelligence and finding new ways to share that combined knowledge as quickly as... (More >)
Spies Like Us: The Promise and Peril of Crowdsourced Intelligence
Book Review by Amy Zegart of “We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News” by Eliot Higgins: “On January 6, throngs of supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump rampaged through the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to derail Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results. The mob threatened lawmakers, destroyed property, and injured more than 100 police officers; five people, including one officer, died in circumstances surrounding the assault. It was the first attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812 and the first violent transfer of presidential power in American history.... (More >)
Who’s Afraid of Big Numbers?
Aiyana Green and Steven Strogatz at the New York Times: “Billions” and “trillions” seem to be an inescapable part of our conversations these days, whether the subject is Jeff Bezos’s net worth or President Biden’s proposed budget. Yet nearly everyone has trouble making sense of such big numbers. Is there any way to get a feel for them? As it turns out, there is. If we can relate big numbers to something familiar, they start to feel much more tangible, almost palpable. For example, consider Senator Bernie Sanders’s signature reference to “millionaires and billionaires.” Politics aside, are these levels... (More >)
Why Business Schools Need to Teach Experimentation
Elizabeth R. Tenney, Elaine Costa, and Ruchi M. Watson at Harvard Business Review: “…The value of experiments in nonscientific organizations is quite high. Instead of calling in managers to solve every puzzle or dispute large and small (Should we make the background yellow or blue? Should we improve basic functionality or add new features? Are staff properly supported and incentivized to provide rapid responses?), teams can run experiments and measure outcomes of interest and, armed with new data, decide for themselves, or at least put forward a proposal grounded in relevant information. The data also provide tangible deliverables to... (More >)
