Why you make terrible life choices

You seek evidence that confirms your beliefs because being wrong sucks. Being wrong means you’re not as smart as you thought. So you end up seeking information that confirms what you already know.

When you walk into every interaction trying to prove yourself right, you’re going to succumb to confirmation bias-the human tendency to seek, interpret and remember information that confirms your own pre-existing beliefs.

Researchers studied two groups of children in school. The first group avoided challenging problems because it came with a high risk of being wrong. The second group actively sought out challenging problems for the learning opportunity, even though they might be wrong. They found that the second group consistently outperformed the first.

Focus less on being right and more on experiencing life with curiosity and wonder. When you’re willing to be wrong, you open yourself up to new insights.

Lakshmi Mani

Genuine beginnings

Genuine beginnings depend upon inner realignment rather than on external shifts, for it is when we are aligned with deep longings that we become powerfully motivated. -William Bridges

6 Ethical Questions to Think about if you use Generative AI

1. The image below recently won one of the world’s most prestigious photography competitions.

The artist said it was “co-produced by the means of AI (artificial intelligence) image generators.” He wrote, “Just as photography replaced painting in the reproduction of reality, AI will replace photography. Don’t be afraid of the future. It will just be more obvious that our mind always created the world that makes it suffer.”

Do you agree? What role should AI have in the creation of images, not only in contests but by those producing media for companies, schools, and even churches?

2. If a painting, song, novel or movie that you love was generated by an AI, would you want to know? Would it change your reaction if you knew the creator was a machine?  

3. Would it be ethical for a chatbot to write a PhD thesis, as long as the student looks over and makes refinements to the work? What percent of rewriting would be the minimum to make this acceptable?

4. Is it OK for AI to brainstorm ideas for projects or products that you later claim as your own? Would it change your answer if you came up with the original question? What if you fine-tuned some of the ideas? What if you give the AI some credit for helping you?

5. If you use AI and it plagiarizes an artist or writer, who should be blamed? Would your answer change if you were not aware the AI had committed the plagiarism? How might you prove that you were unaware?

6. How do you draw the ethical line for using a chatbot like ChatGPT? Would it be OK for writing an email to schedule a meeting? A sales pitch to a client? A religious sermon? A conversation in an online dating app? A letter to a friend going through depression?

There are more ethical questions for AI in this Wall Street Journal Article

Making people confirm our favored conclusions

Most of us have ways of making other people confirm our favored conclusions without ever engaging them in conversation. Consider this: To be a great driver, lover, or chef, we don’t need to be able to parallel park while blindfolded, make ten thousand maidens swoon with a single pucker, or create a pâte feuilletée so intoxicating that the entire population of France instantly abandons its national cuisine and swears allegiance to our kitchen. Rather, we simply need to park, kiss, and bake better than most other folks do. How do we know how well most other folks do? Why, we look around, of course—but in order to make sure than we see what we want to see, we look around selectively.

For example, volunteers in one study took a test that ostensibly measured their social sensitivity and were then told that they had flubbed the majority of the questions. When these volunteers were then given an opportunity to look over the test results of other people who had performed better or worse than they had, they ignored the test of the people who had done better and instead spent their time looking over the tests of the people who had done worse.

The bottom line is this: The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Motivated by stress

I very much was a person who was motivated by stress; I would use a deadline as a motivator. I think a lot of people do that, where they're like, "I'll just wait until the last minute, and that'll light a fire underneath me and I'll get it done." And I just kept thinking, "Well, that's a terrible way to live. Why am I building a house and lighting a fire in the basement just to see if I can finish the roof before it burns down my whole house?"

Dan Deacon speaking to NPR

Keeping & Losing Friends

Are your friendships driven by your preferences or more by your social opportunities? It’s the latter, according to a study out of the Netherlands. Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst interviewed more than 1000 people and interviewed them again seven years later. His finding: Our personal networks are not formed solely based on personal choices.

Mollenhorst says you’ll have a turnover of about half of your closest friends at least every seven years. But don’t blame it on fickleness or disloyalty. Circumstances will play a major role in who stays in the inner circle as your favorite discussion partners and practical helpers. When parts of your friendship network move away or change jobs or have babies, you replace them. As you make life-changing decisions about marriage and divorce, your best mates will be determined largely by the happenstance surrounding the decision. 

Friends come and go. But you should hold on to some of them. Who makes you a better person just for hanging around with them? Who expands your world and helps you to define yourself better? It takes extra effort but hang on to these friends. They're worth it.

Stephen Goforth

Kids and Careers

The thing about kids is that they get in the way of careers. They stand firmly between us and validation from our work. While making space for children in our lives is uncomfortable, even painful, the effort will put us in a better place—because we arrive as different people.

Stephen Goforth

The skeleton in your closet

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance. -George Bernard Shaw

A new approach to lie detection

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam's Leugenlab (Lie Lab) have developed a new approach to lie detection through a series of lab experiments.

Participants were free to use all possible signals—from looking people in the eye to looking for nervous behavior or a particularly emotional story—to assess whether someone was lying.

In this situation, they found it difficult to distinguish lies from truths and scarcely performed above the level of probability. When instructed to rely only on the amount of detail (place, person, time, location) in the story, they were consistently able to discern lies from truths.

Bachelor's students from the UvA and Master's students from the UvA and the UM carried out data collection, control experiments and replication studies for the research in the context of their theses. 

Read more online at The Univeristy of Amsterdam 

The Most Effective Therapeutic Approach to Serious Emotional Issues

We are on a road to significant life disruptions when we cling to what we wish the world was like instead of what it really is like. As M Scott Peck wrote, “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” 

Like it or not, we are all neurotic to some degree. If the wrong set of circumstances comes along, and if they are combined with unhealthy attitudes encouraged by poor parenting and genetic tenancies, any of us can tip over into the abyss. 

Mental clarity is fundamental to emotional health. That's why, despite the biological component of mental illness, our therapeutic approaches should be holistic and address cognitive issues. A cognitive-focused approach has a history of greater effectiveness than drugs (except when dealing with extreme psychotic breaks, schizophrenia, etc.). After an initial physical exam rules out disease and general illness, an eclectic approach that is focused on cognitive therapy is the most effective direction. For most issues, drugs are best regulated to use as a tool allowing a person to find a place of stability in order to deal with fundamental unhealthy cognitive issues.

Stephen Goforth

A Sickness unto Death

A person begins as an it and must become an I. The fact that they are not necessarily so is the source of their misery. Sin leads to a disrelationship, a separation of people from themselves called despair. Kierkegaard says this disrelationship of the self to the self, this despair, this spiritual sickness unto death reveals not only our separation from ourselves ... but our separation from God. To be rid of the despair, one must choose it. A person will be enabled to overcome it if they recognize the sickness, accept it, and through an act of free will, makes a leap of faith past it. The cure is to choose the good, to choose one's self, Kierkegaard tells us. It is in the act of becoming one's self a person moves from an it to an I.

Stephen Goforth

God & the Dance

God is not a static thing not even a person but a dynamic pulsating activity a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost if you will not think me reverent, a kind of dance.  –CS Lewis

Dear God

Dear God. No use tryin' to kid You ... You know I done it.  -Denise the Menace

Avoiding the Transitions

Individuals will walk out of relationships, rather than letting go of the approach to the relationships that made them unsuccessful and unsatisfying in the past. Individuals will look for new jobs rather than face the attitudes and behaviors toward work and toward authority-figures that made them unsuccessful in all of their past jobs. They don’t ask what it is time for them to let go of. Instead they say they need to start over. Individuals will decide to move to a new house or a new town, rather than letting go inwardly of the old way of living that lacked meaning. They make a change rather than making the more profound transition, which would put them on a genuinely new life-path.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Genuine love

Genuine love is an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love. -Eric Fromme

Determination

Determination is often the first chapter in the book of excellence.

How instead of Why

When life is hard, we often find ourselves harping on “why” questions: “Why is this happening to me?” In those moments, Elaine Fox (author of Switch Craft: The Hidden Power of Mental Agility) suggests letting go of the “why” and asking “how” instead: “How can I change this situation?” Or perhaps you’re already asking a “how” question, but the wrong one: Instead of “How do I stop working so much?,” she explains, try an easier question: “How can I find time to go to the gym?”

Kira Newman writing in Greater Good

The Present with a Twist?

Because time is such a slippery concept, we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today. The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes … we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

The Inbetween Times

Unexpected solutions to difficult problems and creative ideas in general come out of a murky state where purpose and focus are temporarily suspended. Many of the decisions that change the direction of our lives are made during in-between times, after something has ended but before our lives have taken a definite new shape.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

29 Data Science & Geospatial Articles from March 2023

Smaller, simpler neural network models are always more suitable for real-world applications

“Russia has expressed its willingness to target space assets, including commercial communications systems, adding to the U.S. urgency of developing warfighting tactics.”

US vs China—a video about the race to launch the next generation of space telescopes

China is preparing to launch its first satellites for a national low Earth orbit broadband megaconstellation to challenge SpaceX’s Starlink

Pentagon Prepares for Space Warfare as Potential Threats From China, Russia Grow

“The ideal size and intricacy of neural networks remain a matter of debate in the AI community, raising the question: Does neural network complexity matter?”

Remote sensing companies try to capture bigger piece of satellite imaging market

What data scientists need to know about machine learning

A list of free data science courses—from web scraping, statistics/probability, data analytics, SQL to business intelligence

The value of predictive models — cartography when data is very scarce

Quantum computers are a security threat before they even exist thanks to the encryption-breaking threats it posses

Space Force Wants $60 Million for Ultra-Quick Satellite Launches—with just 24 hour notice  

“The era of small satellites in Low-Earth Orbit is upon us”: Satellite manufacturers look to benefit from a multi-orbit future

China launches second classified high resolution remote sensing satellite

China’s secret naval base in Cambodia, through satellite imagery

Four machine learning trends to watch in 2023

Valuable GitHub repositories for data engineering

OpenAI’s price cut is “a warning sign that this may be a business with few producers"

“The launch of ChatGPT & Whisper APIs is expected to have a profound impact on the community of developers”

Documents detail 65-year effort to monitor an increasingly crowded orbital environment: A report on the US space surveillance network

Chinese research institutes are working to construct a quantum communications network using satellites in low and medium-to-high Earth orbits

The paradox that explains why “too much aggregation of data can become useless and start to introduce bias”

31 Generative AI Tools for text, images, & more with descriptions

A Chinese satellite launched in 2018 has been inspecting other nations' spacecraft high above Earth in geostationary orbit

Debating the rules of a conflict in orbit

Data Cleaning with Python Cheat Sheet

Diving into the world of quantum machine learning by exploring an advanced project utilizing a sample dataset

A systematic approach to retraining deep-learning artificial intelligence algorithms to deal with different situations

The difference between the roles of questions versus decisions in data science