Posted on Fri 06 August 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with diffusion, information
Recently I read a paper co-authored by a number of social network social scientists on the dynamics of the news cycle as evidenced by a medium-grained examination of the diffusion and transformation of phrase variants across the web. The authors, Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg, have a supporting web site, http …
Posted on Fri 06 August 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with belief, rationality
Rational Belief: Rational Acceptance or Rational Action?
Patrick Maher in his book Betting on Theories (1993, chapter 6) notes two common assumptions about belief:
(1) An agent A believes in H just in case A is willing to act as if H
were true.
(2) Sincere intentional assertion of H …
Posted on Thu 05 August 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with constraints, creativity, culture, intelligence
Maybe a year or more ago, in another context, John McCreery wrote:
As an anthropologist I both feel attracted to describing culture as “the panoply of resources that show that a place is unique and distinctive” and also aware that attaching culture to place may be too limiting. Consider diasporas …