Two Minds Blog

With Mustafa Ozkaynak, PhD CU Nursing Associate Professor Mustafa Ozkaynak has received a new grant from the National Institutes of Health to study nurses’ decision-making under conditions of fatigue. Paul is a co-investigator on this project. The study has some cool technical aspects: Besides self-reported measures of fatigue we’re going to use EHR audit logs to see how clinicians interact with the electronic health record when fatigued versus not. But more fundamentally, the study can tell us interesting things about how people who are tired relate to the world. There’s a lot of data showing that people do poorly when fatigued on tasks that require lots of conscious focus and attention. This has been studied extensively in aviation, for example, and is the reason that crews and pilots have mandatory hours of rest time between flights. Clinicians who are fatigued make more medical errors , communicate less effectively with colleagues, and are less able to relate to others . In th...

One of this summer's most interesting news stories came out of Google, where an engineer working on a computer program that could understand and speak English  became convinced that his creation was alive. The program is called LaMDA, which stands for "Language Model for Dialogue Applications." Here's what the company says about this technology. Engineer Blake Lemoine didn't feel that the company was taking his claims of sentience seriously, so he decided to go public with the information. Google subsequently dismissed him for violating its company policy on confidentiality. If you grew up on 80s films like Short Circuit  (pictured above), this plot seems pretty familiar: An artificial intelligence (AI) becomes sentient, an evil corporation tries to hide, exploit, or destroy it for their own gain, and a plucky hero helps the AI to resist. In the transcript linked below, Lemoine's collaborator directly compares LaMDA to the robot from Short Circuit , Johnny F...

The bestselling book Nudge , first published in 2008, opened the field of behavioral economics to a general audience. Lead author Richard Thaler is an economist who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2017; co-author Cass Sunstein is a lawyer who went on to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Obama White House. The authors define a "nudge" as " any aspect of the choice architecture  that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives" (p. 8). The concept of choice architecture  itself was also popularized by this book, defined as design decisions in the way that information or choice options are presented to consumers, with the understanding that different presentation formats might subtly steer people in one direction or another. Some popular examples of nudges include many companies' policies of automatically enrolling employees in retirement pr...