In light of the sheer grimness of that last post, there has been a request for a “kittens, puppies, bonbons and rainbows thread.” So here you go. Discussion does not have to be confined to kittens, puppies, bonbons and rainbows, but keep it positive! This is a thread for uplifting stuff only. No trolls, MRAs, Hitlers.
@Dalillama
Well, fuck them, too, those fuckheads.
I’m sorry. I hope you don’t have to deal with such douchebags in the future. You’re too awesome for this shit.
@Dali
If it makes you feel any better I did scream. Then mumbled some obscenities
Yep, supremely worried about the customers. That’s it. Definitely…
So sorry, darlin. Hugs and love 🙂
@Dalillama
What the actual fuck? And I’ve dealt with plenty of asshole customers whom were made uncomfortable by my voice (only men can do tech support, you know) but that never stopped me from providing excellent service. That’s a bullshit excuse and they know it.
fhh. Fuck those guys, Dalillama. It’s their loss. Sounds like you wouldn’t have wanted to work there anyways.
Thanks, folks.
@Axe
Back atcha, sweets.
@Scidlfreja
I bloody well don’t now.
@Dalillama
Did they even try to justify that? A company coddling bigot customers. I wish I was surprised. I’m sorry that happened to you.
@ej
Congrats! What was your thesis about?
@Scidlfreja
Would it be safe to assume that you use the concept of affordances in your work? Sorry if that should be obvious, I read more anatomy and circuitry than the raw mathematical models that represent a phenomena?
One of my big challenges has been looking for good metaphors to tie average experience to brain and mind science that shapes my analysis of arguments. What would you say to using organized sets of affordances as a basic building block to conceptualize working memory and perception? I would supplement that with videogame metaphors in outlining a logic of aggression in text among other things.
@Brony, we do use that concept, though it’s not really the term we use.
Well, we do, sometimes! Affordances are found specifically in UX (User Experience, a design field), which I’ve got a little experience with. In AI, we tend to talk more about problem spaces and solution spaces, frames and semantics. But that’s pretty much the same thing, really, just a different lexicon.
It’s very important concept overall, and really central to the discussion of how thought moves from point A to point B, so I totally encourage you to use affordances in your paper. I’d probably call a set of affordances associated with a single setting a frame or a stage, each holding several roles with their affordances or scripts. Lots of the work in my field has related cognition and storytelling, so using video games as analogy is an awesome idea.
(There are plenty of other analogies and systems available, but they can get pretty esoteric.)
I’m looking forward to reading it!
@Dalillama
Wow. Real subtle of them, huh?
I hope you find a job that is a kajillion times better.
@Brony
That was the ‘justification’. If there was going to be any more, I missed it, because that was the point where I told the interviewer to go to hell and stormed out.
@Scildfreja
I think you will find this very interesting even if it is not precisely in your area. I still have some work to do because of how much I’m preparing in the background, but I finally have an outline.
What sort’s of problems? Have you created any solutions?
I have used those kinds of concepts too. In my case a big one is “rule based” as it relates to language and alterations of grammar due to “deficits of inhibition in the basal ganglia”. And my concepts of frames are basically the ones in that book on the self and consciousness by Dr. Damasio, “Self Comes to Mind. That talks about how consciousness, the self, and some really specific anatomy seem to be connected. Big concepts are “value principle”, “sociocultural homeostasis”, “disposition”, “emotion”, “feeling of emotion”, “body maps”, “sensory maps”, “primordial self”, “core self”, “autobiographical self”, “Convergence-Divergence Zones”, “Convergence-Divergence Regions”, “Qualia 1 and 2”,
I think it was “raging debate” that the author connected to “Qualia”. Qualia 1 is compared to music and with a “score” that affects and operates within mental processes. Qualia 2 has to do with “feeling” and why reality should feel like anything at all. I use this stuff to try think about the hands that you are not typing with.
I have some working concepts of spaces that I use. They come from sources that associate spaces with concepts in human evolution and brain anatomyTriadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction: a scenario of human brain evolution extrapolating tool use and language from the control of reaching actions. That one is really interesting because it describes things related to tool use and how they might have impacted brain evolution.
My take home thoughts included that major domains of cognitive processing use the same parts of anatomy, potentially explaining things like the relationship between math and language using many of the same parts of the brain. I like to imagine that it’s also related to things like synesthesia.
Four kinds of spaces they discuss are perceptual, temporal, social, and conceptual spaces. Maybe this could help with that dream you had. Numbers aren’t nothing, symbols are everything 😉
This is very useful. Thank you! I does sound like I’m using the concept right, and it’s central to many things. Since I’m not doing this professionally I sometimes try to ask questions of people in different fields for advice too. One of the authors on that paper on rule-based grammar for example.
I’ve been mulling this one over for weeks and have been outlining different categories of uses of the concept of an affordance. It’s sort of like a “pixel” of the flow of thought in my use. I’m using “affordance space” as a set of “perceptual affodances”. Things that we are able to rapidly perceive in the immediate moment, and that we are capable of interacting with at the level of “frame rate of consciousness”.
My goal is a working concept of a “social affordance”.
I have some for how emotions seem to work for me that use algebra equations for analogizing about the nature of the shifts in logic in basal ganglia circuitry that I perceive. I have several more for what Tourette’s Syndrome feels like because “demon possession” has been mentioned in journal articles. it’s a geeky hobby I do when reading journal articles.
Thanks! I’ve been letting this one blog post lurk in the back of my head for the last several months. It’s one thing to feel something that gets turned into wikipedia articles like this, finding ways to use data to to convey guiding concepts in brain science that are useful more generally is about as scary as it is fascinating.
http://i.imgur.com/wbT28Dj.png
@Dalillama
I like that. I have never seen someone complain about things like voices and language respond in a way that did not require me to suppress thoughts of child behavior modification techniques.
For some reason the first two links in my first post did not work.
“…alterations of grammar…”
“…Self Comes to Mind…”
Excellent and very insightful as always, my Brony bro. I’m pretty doped-up on medication at the moment so do take my reply with some degree of skepticism. Still, I’ll try!
Most of my own work has been on the recognition of self-regulation, willpower, and metacognition in individuals through behaviour observation. So, the problem space includes willpower, attention and attention foci, arousal, and learning outcomes over time. The solution space is made up of various metrics we have at our disposal , the observations we can make about the individual. We hypothesize that our answer (e.g. “Is the student actually learning the thing that is being taught?”) is represented somewhere within the range of those metrics. All of the crazy methods and procedures and algorithms involved are just ways to strike out areas of the solution space that we find to be invalid.
Rule-based systems are incredibly important in my work. There are a number of systems out there – the one I’m working with at the moment is a rete network, which is a fancy-pantsy algorithm that matches observations to the rules which can apply to them. With small rule sets you can just look at each rule, but we tend to operate with millions of rules of various stripes, so using a rete network is pretty much required.
I’m not familiar with Damasio, but from what I’m seeing from reviews of their work, it sounds like it is working from a solid foundation! Makes me think a bit of Daniel Dennett. The concept of a “Frame” in my work is a little more like a “Stereotype” or preset way of behaving in a given scenario, mind you. But that is of no difference really!
Oh, certainly. Math is a language, music is a language; they’re all extensions of our social interaction systems. To varying degrees of course! But I don’t think it’s really possible to pull those things apart!
(The dream was all about the construction of the natural numbers from the nullspace, and how it’s nothing but varying classifications of nothingness, and yet the same natural numbers, when projected into the reals, each represent infinity in their way, and how it all collapses back to null. It was sort of trippy, but, well. Discrete math is trippy. Maybe that’s what got poor Cantor in the end)
All languages are built from a grammar and a vocabulary, this is a basic foundation of set theory and mathematics. Introductory set theory teaches how to construct these languages, how to define the interaction of symbols within the grammar, and all the other fun stuff involved. If you’ve never investigated it, you might enjoy it. You get to do some fun things with logic, like find out what happens to mathematics if you take the infinite number series and wrap it into a ring, or make it so that numbers can’t be added, or things like that. I found it super enlightening to learn those things.
Best of luck! If you put in good work, you should write it up as a white paper and find some good journals to submit to. That sort of a paper is hot stuff these days, and it could be a very nice feather in your cap.
Oops. I meant “I have never seen someone complain about things like voices and language the way you describe respond in a way that did not require me to suppress thoughts of child behavior modification techniques.” Dalillama! That was a very bad typo. I should have just said you talked to voice bigots.