My site has been filtered by most Iranian ISPs. It is a bit strange that the government have decided to censor my weblogs (Anti Memoirs (in Farsi) and Thesilog).
Insight into the processes of positive and negative learners
Insight into the processes of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ learners
… their detailed studies also found a difference in ERNs in “positive” and “negative” learners. The former are people who perform better at choosing the correct response than avoiding the wrong one, and the latter are those who learn better to avoid incorrect responses. The negative learners, they found, showed larger ERNs, suggesting that “these individuals are more affected by, and therefore learn more from, their errors. This notion makes the strong prediction that the feedback negativity should also be relatively larger in these participants to negative compared with positive feedback, which could potentially reflect the neural mechanism causing them to be more sensitive to their mistakes.”
Is there two different paths for avoiding something and selecting something? It seems that there are two different mechanism for processing negative and positive experiences. And it seems that it is (at least) due to reinforcement signal generator.
They explained that “In other words, positive reinforcement learners appear to have experienced greater conflict when choosing between two stimuli that were each previously associated with positive (compared with negative) feedback, whereas negative reinforcement learners may have experienced greater conflict when choosing among negative stimuli.”
(maybe) People do some kind of ordering evaluation instead of mere value comparison for their RL-based decisions. And/Or people have different sensitivity in different region of values, i.e. negative values are stored in coarser details comparing with positive values for some people and vice versa.
Theory of Jokes
Once ago, I became interested in the cognitive mechanism behind jokes. I find these articles about them. Do you have any suggestion on this topic?
Marvin Minsky, JOKES and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious, 1980.
Abstract: Freud’s theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental “censors” that make it hard for us to think “forbidden” thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs — ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.
David Chalmers, A Taxonomy of Cognitive Jokes, 1989.
I read it once. I must think more about it and see if our jokes obey the same categorization. However, it is not apparent if it reveals much about the cognitive process of understanding jokes and humors.
Theory of Humor
I don’t know the author of the text. But it may give us some ideas.
Some categorization of jokes. Might be useful to do the same in Farsi.
Fight Spam
Dynamical Behavior of Wikis
(naive idea!) Do Wikis have a fixed-point?! I guess depending on the content and the diversity of commonsense in that subject, they may have a vast range of dynamical behaviors, e.g. stable to a fixed-point (i.e. everyone agrees), limit-cycle (i.e. two diffent controversial belief about the subject), or even richer behaviors such as time-varying limit-cycle (i.e. dialectic dialog), or chaotic.
It is an interesting subject to work on. If you have any idea, please share it. If I find some interesting work, I will give a link to them.
Computing Chris blog
Look at this Computing Chris weblog. It is written by Chris Leonard, a publishing editor of Elsevier for theoretical computer science journals. Welcome Chris!