Related papers: Culture, Computation, Morality
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Motivated by Breiman's rousing 2001 paper on the "two cultures" in statistics, we consider the role that different modeling approaches play in causal inference. We discuss the relationship between model complexity and causal…
There is a bidirectional relationship between culture and AI; AI models are increasingly used to analyse culture, thereby shaping our understanding of culture. On the other hand, the models are trained on collections of cultural artifacts…
The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…
The global surge in social inequalities is one of the most pressing issues of our times. The spatial expression of social inequalities at city scale gives rise to urban segregation, a common phenomenon across different local and cultural…
We consider an extension of Leo Breiman's thesis from "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures" to include a bifurcation of algorithmic modeling, focusing on parametric regressions, interpretable algorithms, and complex (possibly…
Various moral conundrums plague population ethics: the Non-Identity Problem, the Procreation Asymmetry, the Repugnant Conclusion, and more. I argue that the aforementioned moral conundrums have a structure neatly accounted for, and solved…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems attempt to imitate human behavior. How well they do this imitation is often used to assess their utility and to attribute human-like (or artificial) intelligence to them. However, most work on AI refers…
Large language models (LLMs) are often described as multilingual because they can understand and respond in many languages. However, speaking a language is not the same as reasoning within a culture. This distinction motivates a critical…
This paper is a critical reflection on the epistemic culture of contemporary computational linguistics, framed in the context of its growing obsession with tables with numbers. We argue against tables with numbers on the basis of their…
The concept of intelligent software is flawed. The behaviour of software is determined by the hardware that "interprets" it. This undermines claims regarding the behaviour of theorised, software superintelligence. Here we characterise this…
Nadel's Paradox states that it is not possible to take into account simultaneously cultural and relational dimensions of social structure. By means of a simple computational model, the authors explore a dynamic perspective of the concept of…
There is much to learn from what Turing hastily dismissed as Lady Lovelace s objection. Digital computers can indeed surprise us. Just like a piece of art, algorithms can be designed in such a way as to lead us to question our understanding…
Working with stories and working with computations require very different modes of thought. We call the first mode "story-thinking" and the second "computational-thinking". The aim of this curiosity-driven paper is to explore the nature of…
Models of conformity and anti-conformity have typically focused on cultural traits with nominal (unordered) variants, such as baby names, strategies (cooperate/defect), or the presence/absence of an innovation. There have been fewer studies…
We describe a computational model of social norms based on identifying values that a certain culture finds desirable such as dignity, generosity and politeness. The model quantifies these values in the form of Culture-Sanctioned Social…
An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to…