Reschedule Wednesday visit since snow – done

See about moving records?

TiiS review!

Collective future thinking in Cultural Dynamics

• Humans think about the future to act in the present, not only personally, but also collectively. Collective future thinking (CFT) is an act of imagining a future on behalf of a collective. This article presents a theoretical analysis of the role of CFT in cultural dynamics. CFT includes collective prospection about probable futures and imaginations about utopian and dystopian possible worlds as the best- and worst-case scenarios. CFT motivates collective self-regulatory activities to steer probable futures towards utopias and away from dystopias, driving a cultural transformation while also acting as a force for cultural maintenance, animating cultural dynamics at the micro-psychological level. Empirical research showed that collective futures are often seen to involve progress in human agency, but a decline in community cohesion, unless collective self-regulation is undertaken. In line with the theoretical proposition, CFT consistently motivated collective self-regulatory activities that are seen to improve future community cohesion and to move the current culture closer to their utopian vision around the world despite significant cross-national variabilities. A macro-level cultural dynamical perspective is provided to interpret cross-national similarities and differences in CFT as a reflection of nations’ past historical trajectories, and to discuss CFT’s role in political polarization and collective self-regulation.

Good thing to use for the AI slop talk: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers

• The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices. We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so. Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.
• Which led to this little back and forth on Teams:
  • It just dawned on me that LLMs are way better at explaining things in a neurotypical way than I am.  I know you also said this before but it has become more real for me.
  • There is a weird mirror image to that thought too – when  an LLM does not describe your understanding of the world, you can be pretty sure that reflects the biases in the writings it was trained on. You can use that to zero in on exactly what the differences are, and between your perspective and that encoded in the LLM, articulate an understanding that includes both. I use that trick all the time.

GPT Agents

• Good progress over the weekend. Need to edit the J6 section next
• And this is a good example of “blast radius”: The NSA’s “Big Delete”
  • The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”
• Here’s what I need for website & announcements:
  • Title for the talk
  • Brief abstract (1-2 paragraphs)
  • Short bio (up to half a page)
  • Photo (headshot preferred)

SBIRs

• Reschedule Tuesday visit? Also snow – Now a virtual meeting
• Generate sets of data with varying amounts of train but keep the test set the same size. The goal is to find the smallest raining set that works. On hold
• <record scratch> Aaron’s sick, so I’m standing in for a few days
  • Dahlgren prep meeting. I think we are good to go. Need to read the proposal again
  • Working on IRAD slides – first pass is done
  • Reviewed Ron’s USNA email , which was very “AI slop”