I’ve gone quiet for two weeks, and I’m sure some of you (1%) are wondering if everything is OK (while the other 99% are wondering when the hell did I sign up for the newsletter). This week will be my sixth and final week serving jury duty and a felon trail in Oakland, California. For now I cannot talk about the case, but I can say that jury duty is important and, given my unusual background, the opportunity to actually serve was something I didn’t want to pass up. My talk at the University of Toronto’s AI day became a remote talk from my office; no newsletters or research posts were written; all of the book writing and publishing negotiations had to happened between 6-8 am every morning; and  my companies…well they needed to take care of themselves for a few weeks.

I did squeeze in one exciting new role: I’ve joined the advisory board for UCSD’s Cognitive Science department, my undergraduate alma mater. If you aren’t familiar with the first ever congestive science department, note this might be the most impactful academic community of the modern era. The Parallel Distributed Processing working group of psychologists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, HCI and design researchers, and more launched the field of cognitive sciences and brought us the AI-rich world we live in today. Deep neural networks, LLMs, image generation, and much of reinforcement learner owns its dominance today to people like David Rumelhart, Geoff Hinton, Terry Sejnowski, Jeff Elman, Jay McClelland, Don Norman, Ruth Williams , and so many more who all just happened to be together in San Diego in the later 70s and early 80s. Now I get to pay forward what I inherited from them to the next generation of graduate and undergraduate cognitive scientists looking to change the world.

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Research Roundup

A backbone doesn't require a spine

We ape apes, but we should cuddle cuttlefish…at least as far as delayed gratification goes.

When given a choice between a smaller immediate reward and a large later one, “orangutans, bonobos, and gorillas tended to act impatiently”. But they are truly individuals “with considerable variability” in their reward discounting. Just like humans, however, forcing them to delay before choosing increases both their willingness.

It seems to me humans and bonobos need better metacognitive strategies for self motivating those delays. Even the (not so) lowly cuttlefish show a clear pattern in a series of experiments: those that “delayed gratification for longer had better learning performance.” It’s the cuttlefish marshmallow experiment!

Nurturing Neuroticism

With the recent US election and the raft of presidential degrees that followed (I didn’t like it when Obama and Bush did it; I like even less from Trump), I am reminded of a paper from a couple years ago that was provocative, if much in need of replication. The authors claimed that the “left-right political spectrum can be explained by differences in preferences for nurturant (Democrats) and disciplinarian (Republican) parenting styles”. They found that “parenting attitudes strongly predict paternalistic policy attitudes—more than ideology, party identity, or any other measured demographic variables”. In comparison, “helicopter parenting does not influence policy preferences”.

Further they “identify a latent variable that predicts preferences for paternalism in parenting, policy, and a host of other domains such as business, medicine, and education”. (By “lantern variable” they mean a personality factor that it’s directly observable.) Whether they are aware of it or not, do a sizable portion of American voters, and voters around the world, just want a stern father figure to step in and spank everyone who’s different?

With an upcoming book titled “How to Robot-Proof Your Kids?”, I’d like to say that my research says much nurture paired with meta-discipline: give your child the emotional and metacognitive tools to make good choices via endogenous motivation.

Inequality Erodes Tolerance

Research shows the successful pluralistic societies include regular productive interaction across the political, cultural, socioeconomic divides that make up their communities. New research suggests that those interactions should also be as equals.

When 2,454 individuals in Mexico collaborated in pairs across a partisan divide, only interactions as equals increased tolerance both in the moment and 3 weeks later. So, only productive and equitable interactions drive prosocial ties.

There is a fascinating parallel here to my findings on collective intelligence: the smartest teams have flat hierarchies and complementary diversity. It seems that the smartest communities share those qualities as well.

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SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

Pony Confidential was fun. Not perfect…but definitely fun. It is the choice for those of you who want a murder mystery(ish) with a big dollop of mouthy pony. Does it qualify as scifi or fantasy? I don’t know what else you’d call it.

Stage & Screen

• I had a wonderful time speaking at Univ. of Toronto's "AI Day" on Jan 25th
• and then at UCSD, where I have formally join the Advisory Board of the Cognitive Science Department.
• February 18, Dublin: A private event but I know we'll do much more
• February 21, Athens: Medical school education
• March 11, Atlanta: "How to Robot-Proof Your Kids"
• March 21, Diablo Valley: Entrepreneur Day
• May 7, Chicago: Innovation * Collective Intelligence
• May 8, Porto: Talking about entrepreneurship at the SIM conference in Portugal
• May 14, London: UCL
• June 12, SF: Golden Angels
• June 9, Philadelphia: "How to Robot-Proof Your Kids"
• June 18, Cannes: Cannes Lyons
• Late June, South Africa: Finally I can return. Are you in SA? Book me!
• October, UK: More med school education

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming