Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Habits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Habits. Show all posts

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Facebook Uses AI To Predict Your Future Actions for Advertizers

Sam Biddle
The Intercept
Originally posted April 13, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Asked by Fortune’s Stacey Higginbotham where Facebook hoped its machine learning work would take it in five years, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said in 2016 his goal was that AI “makes every moment you spend on the content and the people you want to spend it with.” Using this technology for advertising was left unmentioned. A 2017 TechCrunch article declared, “Machine intelligence is the future of monetization for Facebook,” but quoted Facebook executives in only the mushiest ways: “We want to understand whether you’re interested in a certain thing generally or always. Certain things people do cyclically or weekly or at a specific time, and it’s helpful to know how this ebbs and flows,” said Mark Rabkin, Facebook’s vice president of engineering for ads. The company was also vague about the melding of machine learning to ads in a 2017 Wired article about the company’s AI efforts, which alluded to efforts “to show more relevant ads” using machine learning and anticipate what ads consumers are most likely to click on, a well-established use of artificial intelligence. Most recently, during his congressional testimony, Zuckerberg touted artificial intelligence as a tool for curbing hate speech and terrorism.

The article is here.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Why willpower is overrated

Brian Resnick
vox.com
Originally published January 15, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

What we can learn from people who are good at self-control

So who are these people who are rarely tested by temptations? They’re doing something right. Recent research suggests a few lessons we can draw from them.

1) People who are better at self-control actually enjoy the activities some of us resist — like eating healthy, studying, or exercising.

So engaging in these activities isn’t a chore for them. It’s fun.

“‘Want to’ goals are more likely to be obtained than ‘have to’ goals,” Milyavskaya said in an interview last year. “Want-to goals lead to experiences of fewer temptations. It’s easier to pursue those goals. It feels more effortless.”

If you’re running because you “have to” get in shape but find running to be a miserable activity, you’re probably not going to keep it up. An activity you like is more likely to be repeated than an activity you hate.

2) People who are good at self-control have learned better habits.

In 2015, psychologists Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finding across six studies and more than 2,000 participants that people who are good at self-control also tend to have good habits — like exercising regularly, eating healthy, sleeping well, and studying.

“People who are good at self-control … seem to be structuring their lives in a way to avoid having to make a self-control decision in the first place,” Galla tells me. And structuring your life is a skill. People who do the same activity, like running or meditating, at the same time each day have an easier time accomplishing their goals, he says — not because of their willpower, but because the routine makes it easier.

The article is here.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Culture and Business Ethics

Marshall Schminke
www.ethicalsystems.com
Originally published October 3, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

What do most companies overlook when it comes to organizational design?

Supervisors. Despite some high profile missteps, organizations generally do a pretty good job of making ethics a front-and-center issue at the upper levels.  Likewise, they invest heavily in education and training at the level of the rank-and-file worker.  But as with so many strategically important issues, low-to-mid-level supervisors are often ignored.  This is troublesome, because research shows the single most important factor in driving employees’ ethical actions is not what top managers or coworkers say or do.  Rather, it is the immediate supervisor—and whether he or she is capable of creating an ethically supportive work culture that employees experience every day—that matters most.  Yet in most cases, these “sergeants and lieutenants” of the workplace receive relatively little attention when it comes to ethics and ethics training.

How can E&C teams better emphasize ethics vs. compliance?

Culture. It’s not that rules aren’t important.  They are.  And they must be understood and followed.  But complex business environments—and complex ethical rules and standards—cannot address every situation employees might encounter.  Therefore, the only real insurance organizations have for getting the best ethical effort possible from their employees is to bake it into the culture and climate, where it becomes second nature to employees trying to do their best in a tough business world.

What have you learned as a part of the ES culture measurement working group?

As a culture and climate researcher for years, this experience has been truly eye-opening for me.  It has introduced me to different perspectives on culture and, in turn, exposed me to completely different ways of thinking about how to create and maintain effective ethical cultures.  For example, of the eight components of ethical culture identified by the Ethical Systems culture measurement working group, I had only a passing familiarity with the ethical awareness and ethical leadership components.  This experience has not only improved my understanding of those components, but has also heightened my awareness of how they fit and interact with the other six components.

The information is here.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

How Unethical Behavior Becomes Habit

by Francesca Gino, Lisa D. Ordóñez and David Welsh
Harvard Business Review Blog
Originally posted September 4, 2014

When a former client’s secretary was arrested for embezzlement years before his own crimes were uncovered, Bernie Madoff commented to his own secretary, “Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.”

We now know that Madoff’s Ponzi scheme started when he engaged in misreporting to cover relatively small financial losses. Over a 15-year period, the scam grew steadily, eventually ballooning to $65 billion, even as regulators and investors failed to notice the warning signs.

The entire article is here.