A rather belated plug for this book. The follow up is currently being edited.
The Caricatured Hayek
August 14, 2008There’s an article in The Australian taking Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to task for his rather crude take on Hayek. Oliver Hartwich does a good job in rebutting Rudd’s views. Of course we expect the vulgarization of first-order thinkers by politicians. There are still many in academic circles who fall into the same stance when it comes to Hayek.
Scribd platform
August 13, 2008I want to give a plug to the Scribd platform. I have papers listed with several document repositories and none are as flexible, easy to negotiate and as “good looking” as Scribd. It has some nice features including tracking traffic for each document and the ability to leave comments (which I’ve chosen to disable). I would highly recommend Scribd as part of a strategy to get your work out there – subject of course to the usual copyright restrictions. To see an example, check out my Scribd holdings.
Andy Clark and Cyborgs
August 12, 2008Fans of the work of Andy Clark and in particular his views on cyborgs will be pleased to note that his writing about cyborgs is the focus of a special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
The Expert Mind
August 10, 2008There’s a nice article in Scientific American entitled “The Expert Mind: Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well.” What struck me was the excerpt below which seems to be grist for the connectionist mill in that the expert is not confronted with absolute novelty, unlike the weaker player that inevitably searches a “storehouse” of options. The expert through experience has a relational memory thereby not only coming up with a resolution quicker but by-passing a whole swarth of less salient options. This also brings to mind the Heidegger-Dreyfus line of our well-honed tacit expertise as opposed to explicit inferential capacity.
Recent research has shown that de Groot’s findings reflected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A position in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, experienced physicists may on occasion examine more possibilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.
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