Two Minds Blog

  The simulation hypothesis  is popular these days in certain high-tech-influencer circles. It's the idea that we are all currently living in a world like the one envisioned in the Matrix movies, where everything we see and do is produced by a computer program. If you haven't heard this one before, start with philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2003 paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?", which presents a mathematical-odds-based argument. Some versions of the argument suggest that the more unlikely the events that have occurred -- for instance, the possibility that Donald Trump would win the White House not just once, but for two non-consecutive terms -- the less likely it is that the world we live in is the actual "base level" world rather than an interesting simulation experiment. For a fuller contemporary treatment of these ideas, I recommend David Chalmers's 2022 book Reality+ .  In a recent post, I also tackled the question of whether it makes ...

  Jonathan Haidt's book  The Anxious Generation  made a big splash in education circles last year. It elaborates the thesis that social media is harming people's mental health, especially that of teenagers and young adults. Haidt has compiled  a lot of different evidence  that he says supports this conclusion, but some of his academic colleagues aren't buying it.    To briefly summarize Haidt’s position, there is strong correlational evidence based on two co-occurring trends: The specific timeframe from 2010-2015 showed a dramatic emergency of new mental health problems on a wide range of measures for teenagers, especially younger adolescents ages 10-14. At the same time, smartphones made social media apps continuously available to people in this age bracket. Haidt argues that it was the specific combination of social media apps and the internet in one’s pocket that made the situation so harmful, which helps him to explain why this specific 5-year peri...

Image of protest against the 1918 Sedition Act during World War I. That act was repealed in 1920. Many concerning things have happened in the United States over the past month, but the one I'd like to write about today is an effort to win arguments by redefining terms. In a recent article titled "In Trump's Washington, Words Become Weaponized," the New York Times  presents a variety of examples in which the White House's recent Executive Orders use terms in ways that are unusual, or in some cases literally opposite from the term's plain-language meaning. Here are some notable instances (if you're up on all the news, you can skip to the part after the bullets, but I do like to document my sources): The term "DEI" (for  diversity, equity, and inclusion ) was used as a pejorative in President Trump's press conference after a January 30 airplane crash, in which he said that "we need to have our smartest people" as air traffic controll...

We say things like "I'm stressed this week" or "how are you coping?" with such frequency that these are almost generic terms for any unpleasant psychological experience we might have. The words "stress" and "coping" have become so much a part of the vernacular that we might forget they were originally technical terms used by psychologists. We probably have a sense that stress is on a continuum, less intense than things like depression or PTSD but also more than everyday hassles. And we likely also think about different ways of coping (if we think about coping at all), with the inherent idea that some ways of coping are probably healthier than others in some undefined way. The terms "stress" and "coping" are like the "Kleenex" of psychology -- former brand-name terms that now have acquired a much broader and more diffuse meaning than they originally had. The 1984 book Stress, Appraisal, and Coping , by Richard Laz...

  I have written previously about "bounded rationality," a behavioral economics concept that says people's decision-making is not as logical as they might believe. I have also written about various ways that we can improve our decisions, whether that's through the scientific method , the legal process , or peer review . Some of these strategies rely just as much on the Intuitive Mind as on the Narrative Mind, and other strategies like Gary Klein's Naturalistic Decision Making  or the actions triggered by situational awareness are even more Intuitive. This week, I'd like to examine the idea that even the more rational strategies don't need to be strictly true  in order to help us succeed. The philosopher Immanuel Kant described a difference between phenomena , which are the things we experience, and noumena , which is the underlying reality that generates phenomena. Unfortunately, we have no way to connect with that underlying reality. Everything we might...

By fall 2024, most schools and universities have gotten just far enough in their understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) to officially forbid its use. The problem, most professors say , is plagiarism -- the practice of presenting another person's work as your own. This is, on its face, nonsense. Courts have already determined that the products of AI are not copyrightable because there is no human author , and legal experts predict that courts will also find AI is not a "person" and cannot be held liable for its actions. (There's more disagreement about who should  be liable for adverse products of AI, though -- the user? the original programmer? the company that makes money from the tool?). The whole point of AI is that it can process reams of existing data, identify patterns, and use those patterns to produce something new . The student using AI to write a term paper therefore is not plagiarizing in the usual sense of the word; instead, they are employing a no...