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 Problem solving skills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Problem solving skills. Show all posts

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Robot cognition requires machines that both think and feel

Luiz Pessosa
www.aeon.com
Originally published April 13, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Part of being intelligent, then, is about the ability to function autonomously in various conditions and environments. Emotion is helpful here because it allows an agent to piece together the most significant kinds of information. For example, emotion can instil a sense of urgency in actions and decisions. Imagine crossing a patch of desert in an unreliable car, during the hottest hours of the day. If the vehicle breaks down, what you need is a quick fix to get you to the next town, not a more permanent solution that might be perfect but could take many hours to complete in the beating sun. In real-world scenarios, a ‘good’ outcome is often all that’s required, but without the external pressure of perceiving a ‘stressful’ situation, an android might take too long trying to find the optimal solution.

Most proposals for emotion in robots involve the addition of a separate ‘emotion module’ – some sort of bolted-on affective architecture that can influence other abilities such as perception and cognition. The idea would be to give the agent access to an enriched set of properties, such as the urgency of an action or the meaning of facial expressions. These properties could help to determine issues such as which visual objects should be processed first, what memories should be recollected, and which decisions will lead to better outcomes.

The information is here.

Friendly note: I don't agree with everything I post.  In this case, I do not believe that AI needs emotions and feelings.  Rather, AI will have a different form of consciousness.  We don't need to try to reproduce our experiences exactly.  AI consciousness will likely have flaws, like we do.  We need to be able to manage AI given the limitations we create.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Stop Posturing and Start Problem Solving: A Call for Research to Prevent Gun Violence

Kelsey Hills-Evans, Julian Mitton, and Chana Sacks
AMA Journal of Ethics. January 2018, Volume 20, Number 1: 77-83.
doi: 10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.01.pfor1-1801.

Abstract

Gun violence is a major cause of preventable injury and death in the United States, leading to more than 33,000 deaths each year. However, gun violence prevention is an understudied and underfunded area of research. We review the barriers to research in the field, including restrictions on federal funding. We then outline potential areas in which further research could inform clinical practice, public health efforts, and public policy. We also review examples of innovative collaborations among interdisciplinary teams working to develop strategies to integrate gun violence prevention into patient-doctor interactions in order to interrupt the cycle of gun violence.

An Ethical Obligation to Address Gun Violence

More than twenty survivors of the Pulse nightclub massacre traveled together to Boston, Massachusetts, in the days before the one-year anniversary of that horrific night. They met with a group of physicians, nurses, social workers, administrators, and others at our hospital to talk about their experience. They recounted their memories of the sounds of gunfire, the screams of those around them, and the moans from those felled beside them. They described the ups and downs that have characterized their attempts to rebuild in the year since gunfire shattered their sense of normalcy. They shared their stories in the hopes that if more people could understand what it means to be affected by gun violence, then we, as a nation, would be compelled to act.

The article is here.

Monday, March 12, 2018

Train PhD students to be thinkers not just specialists

Gundula Bosch
nature.com
Originally posted February 14, 2018

Under pressure to turn out productive lab members quickly, many PhD programmes in the biomedical sciences have shortened their courses, squeezing out opportunities for putting research into its wider context. Consequently, most PhD curricula are unlikely to nurture the big thinkers and creative problem-solvers that society needs.

That means students are taught every detail of a microbe’s life cycle but little about the life scientific. They need to be taught to recognize how errors can occur. Trainees should evaluate case studies derived from flawed real research, or use interdisciplinary detective games to find logical fallacies in the literature. Above all, students must be shown the scientific process as it is — with its limitations and potential pitfalls as well as its fun side, such as serendipitous discoveries and hilarious blunders.

This is exactly the gap that I am trying to fill at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where a new graduate science programme is entering its second year. Microbiologist Arturo Casadevall and I began pushing for reform in early 2015, citing the need to put the philosophy back into the doctorate of philosophy: that is, the ‘Ph’ back into the PhD.

The article is here.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Baltimore Cops Studying Plato and James Baldwin

David Dagan
The Atlantic
Originally posted November 25, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Gillespie is trained to teach nuts-and-bolts courses on terrorism response, extremism, and gangs. But since the unrest of 2015, humanities have occupied the bulk of his time. The strategy is unusual in police training. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve never heard of an instructor using this type of approach,” said William Terrill, a criminal-justice professor at Arizona State University who studies police culture.

But he nevertheless understands the general theory behind it. He’s authored studies showing that officers with higher education are less likely to use force than colleagues who have not been to college. The reasons why are unclear, Terrill said, but it’s possible that exposure to unfamiliar ideas and diverse people have an effect on officer behavior. Gillespie’s classes seem to offer a complement to the typical instruction. Most of it “is mechanical in nature,” Terrill said. “It’s kind of this step-by-step, instructional booklet.”

Officers learn how to properly approach a car, say, but they are rarely given tools to imagine the circumstances of the person in the driver’s seat.

The article is here.

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Stress Leads to Bad Decisions. Here’s How to Avoid Them

Ron Carucci
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted August 29, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Facing high-risk decisions. 

For routine decisions, most leaders fall into one of two camps: The “trust your gut” leader makes highly intuitive decisions, and the “analyze everything” leader wants lots of data to back up their choice. Usually, a leader’s preference for one of these approaches poses minimal threat to the decision’s quality. But the stress caused by a high-stakes decision can provoke them to the extremes of their natural inclination. The highly intuitive leader becomes impulsive, missing critical facts. The highly analytical leader gets paralyzed in data, often failing to make any decision. The right blend of data and intuition applied to carefully constructing a choice builds the organization’s confidence for executing the decision once made. Clearly identify the risks inherent in the precedents underlying the decision and communicate that you understand them. Examine available data sets, identify any conflicting facts, and vet them with appropriate stakeholders (especially superiors) to make sure your interpretations align. Ask for input from others who’ve faced similar decisions. Then make the call.

Solving an intractable problem. 

To a stressed-out leader facing a chronic challenge, it often feels like their only options are to either (1) vehemently argue for their proposed solution with unyielding certainty, or (2) offer ideas very indirectly to avoid seeming domineering and to encourage the team to take ownership of the challenge. The problem, again, is that neither extreme works. If people feel the leader is being dogmatic, they will disengage regardless of the merits of the idea. If they feel the leader lacks confidence in the idea, they will struggle to muster conviction to try it, concluding, “Well, if the boss isn’t all that convinced it will work, I’m not going to stick my neck out.”

The article is here.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

What the Rise of Sentient Robots Will Mean for Human Beings

George Musser
NBC
Originally posted June 19, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

“People expect that self-awareness is going to be this end game of artificial intelligence when really there are no scientific pursuits where you start at the end,” says Justin Hart, a computer scientist at the University of Texas. He and other researchers are already building machines with rudimentary minds. One robot wriggles like a newborn baby to understand its body. Another robot babbles about what it sees and cries when you hit it. Another sets off to explore its world on its own.

No one claims that robots have a rich inner experience — that they have pride in floors they've vacuumed or delight in the taste of 120-volt current. But robots can now exhibit some similar qualities to the human mind, including empathy, adaptability, and gumption.

Beyond it just being cool to create robots, researchers design these cybernetic creatures because they’re trying to fix flaws in machine-learning systems. Though these systems may be powerful, they are opaque. They work by relating input to output, like a test where you match items in column ‘A’ with items in column ‘B’. The AI systems basically memorize these associations. There’s no deeper logic behind the answers they give. And that’s a problem.

Humans can also be hard to read. We spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing ourselves and others, and arguably, that’s the main role of our conscious minds. If machines had minds, they might not be so inscrutable. We could simply ask them why they did what they did.

The article is here.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

The Theory of Cognitive-Ethical-Development Can Solve Any Real-World Problem

Baris Bayram

Abstract

First, it is shown that evidence-based argumentations can demonstrate that anyone's real/ultimate self-interest is compatible with investing in a deliberate development of ethical systems, second, that scientific/causal determinism is not incompatible with ethical transformation efforts, third, that there is a crucial need for a developing a new ethical theory ("cognitive-ethical-developmental and ethical-possibility-enhancement": CED and EPE") that is integration of many scientific theories with a modified version of well-being and welfare ethics in order to effectively address any ethics-related issues for oneself and globally, and how it works. Also, according to this theory, it is primarily argued that both cognitive and ethical development of individuals, and systemic transformations are necessarily needed, and it is demonstrated that how such developments and transformations can be actualized thanks to "CED and EPE" approaches.

The paper is here.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Vignette 27: To Skate or Not to Skate


Dr. Logan Earthski works with adolescents and their families.  During the course of treating one adolescent male, the parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hawk, expressed frustration with their son Tony’s lack of involvement with sports.  The Hawks detailed how Tony enjoyed team sports in the past, but has not enjoyed participating due to anxiety and constantly comparing himself to others.

In order to bond and connect with the family, Dr. Earthski explained from his experience with teens, some male teens function better with individual sports.  Dr. Earthski disclosed that he grew up skateboarding and taught lessons for several years.  A few of the children and adolescents he taught fit the description of Tony.  In those cases, the adolescent tried soccer or baseball, but did not really like it because they felt too anxious and overly competitive. 

When it came to individual sports, like skateboarding, teens that became involved with individual sports usually showed a decrease in anxiety and an increase in self-confidence.  However, sometimes, when adolescents first show up at the skate park, they may experience a similar level of anxiety and heightened self-awareness that Dr. Earthski helped remediate during his coaching sessions. 

Dr. Earthski also revealed that he worked with one particular teenager who became very anxious and experienced episodes of panic related to going to the skate park.  That adolescent did not think he was good and was weary of other kids watching and judging him.  Dr. Earthski gave him some coaching on anxiety reduction techniques and worked through those negative, anxiety-provoking emotions.  Further, he did very well at skateboarding once he conquered his symptoms of anxiety and panic.  The teenager's self-confidence grew as he performed better at the skate park.  Based on Dr. Earthski's revelations, the parents seemed reassured.

Prior to the next session, Dr. Earthski received a voicemail message from Mrs. Hawk asking if he could coach Tony on skate boarding.

After thinking about this request, Dr. Earthski calls you for a consult.  Dr. Earthski puts forward the following concerns:

1.  Is coaching a teenager-patient on anxiety-related issues in context of a skate boarding lessons definitively a dual relationship?

2.  What if the coaching is time-limited, informed consent is given, and this activity is viewed as the exception rather than the rule?  (“Time-limited” means between one and six sessions, depending on his response to treatment.)

3.  Can time-limited skateboard coaching be incorporated as part of an in-vivo anxiety reduction technique and billed as therapy services?

4.  Would Dr. Earthski’s malpractice insurance likely cover this activity?

5.  What would happen if the teen-patient injured himself as part of coaching?

6.  Dr. Earthski asks about the use of self-disclosure.  What feedback might you give to Dr. Earthski about what he disclosed about himself?

7.  Given everything you know about the case, what is/are the final recommendation(s) about this scenario?

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Team Decisions Better for the Weary

by Robert Preidt
MedicineNet.com

Teamwork can help tired people avoid making poor decisions, a new study indicates.

Pilots, doctors and others in demanding professions can make dangerous errors when they're weary. But, fatigued people who work as a team have better problem-solving skills than those who work alone, British researchers report.

They asked 171 army officer cadets, aged 18 to 24, at a weekend training exercise to solve a series of math problems. Some were tested before they began the training session and were rested, while others did the math problems at the end of the weekend when they were exhausted.

Individual cadets who were fatigued did far worse on the tests than those who were rested. However, teams of exhausted cadets did just as well as teams of rested cadets.

The study appears online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

"Teams appear to be more highly motivated to perform well, and team members can compare solutions to reach the best decision when they are fatigued. This appears to allow teams to avoid the inflexible thinking experienced by fatigued individuals," study author Daniel Frings, a senior lecturer in social psychology at London South Bank University, said in a journal news release.

In situations where fatigue is a concern, decisions should be made by teams rather than individuals if possible, the study concluded.

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This research supports the idea that group consultation can be very helpful for tired and overworked psychologists, especially when working with high risk or clinically challenging patients.