Two Minds Blog

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...