#human factors

[humanfactorsguru]

The Active Reset: Stripping Away Friction When Travel Disrupts Your Routine

You step off a flight, lug your bag into a temporary room, and look at the clock. It’s the start of a short duty assignment in Alabama, packed with weekend work obligations and tight timelines. Your body feels the subtle lag of travel, and your brain is already processing the demands of an unfamiliar operational environment. In moments like these, the standard reaction is either total abandonment…

The Active Reset: Stripping Away Friction When Travel Disrupts Your Routine

[thewinningweekendwarrior]

"The Psychology of Design"

“The Psychology of Design”  I worked at IBM, all told, about 28 years. During that time, management put increasing pressure on us to make our work “relevant” to the business. In fact, the pressure was always there, even from the beginning. Over the years, however, we were “encouraged” to shorten evermore the time gap between doing the research and having the results of that research impact the…

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[thewinningweekendwarrior]

Career Advice from Polonius

Photo by Ott Maidre on Pexels.com Career Advice from Polonius: To Thine Own Self be True “To thine own self be true.” This advice comes from Polonius who is giving advice to his son in Act I, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Polonius says: “This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”Let’s focus on the first…

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[humanfactorsguru]

The Active Reset: Why Speed Needs a Slow Down

You just crushed a hard workout. Your heart is pumping, your legs burn, and you feel like you can take on the world. Today, I did a 10K run and pushed the pace on my very last mile. It felt great to move fast. But if you jump straight from a hard run back into a mountain of work, you are missing out on a huge win for your brain. The Power of the Cool Down Your mind cannot stay in high gear all…

The Active Reset: Why Speed Needs a Slow Down

[abrahamhaskins]

Art: A Unifying Model (The Autonomic Honeypot)

Let’s talk a little bit about aesthetics now. I’m going to define this, but first, an interesting perspective that might help make sense of it.

What if there is no free will?

Seriously, most philosophical arguments and cognitive models are equally valid in a world with and without free will. Annoyingly, so is this one.

When you think of things from this perspective, you often come to weird conclusions where individual people act like information distributors in a semi-collaborative node network or something. You act in accordance with your neural programming, pretty much a robot. In this case, we could see a person come by a piece of art, stare at it, and just for reflexive reasons, try to learn how such a thing was created. Then, with that new capability, they can (when useful) create a similar tool, perhaps leaving it aside for someone else to see and copy. Art is passing from brain to brain, slowly evolving in concept. We’re into memetic theory at this point.

Strategically including memes as an artifact of your model to justify sprinkling them throughout your essay.

Effectively, this is an informational or memetic virus. It is a meme that infects your mind and forces you to learn how to make copies of it in the hopes that you might, in the future, propagate it further. Obviously "hope" is the wrong word here, but this idea of memetic theory is not new. Of all people, it was Richard Dawkins in the 70s that pioneered it [28].

Oh, and just to complete the thought with something cool: if art is a memetic virus, artists are the people who specialize in creating the most viral memes. They are teachers, soothsayers, nature's marketers, maybe even plague doctors. Pick your favorite.

Attention-grabbing, no? Why did you look at that picture at all?

What possible value could an AI-generated picture of honey give this post?

It is the word for how much an object forces you to stare at it. It is a clever manipulation of your mental shortcuts, heuristics, background processes, and overall subconscious – things like the tendency for movement in your periphery to catch your attention . It is something attention-grabbing (but not necessarily attention-keeping). It is an invitation to force you to appreciate something, to learn from it, and to absorb the knowledge that went into its creation so that you can be a little bit better at creating something similar, thus passing it on.

(Continued on my website with hoverable citations throughout and academic preprint attached - or continued here on Thursday)

[abrahamhaskins]

Model Math Update and Alignment!

I updated the formal architecture in the preprint today from Bayesian reasoning to Variational Inference after some... rather assertive mathematical critique from ML experts on Discord. So happy the model survived that review. In fact, the math's even cleaner now!

But now I am cognitively fatigued. I'm going to go read with the chickens until my brain stops steaming.

Generative AI inherently triggers a computational failure mode in human observers—a "generative crash"—due to a lack of latent intentionalit

[abrahamhaskins]

Generative AI is leading us towards a cognitive crisis. I worked the math out on the neurological basis for this (preprint below), but we need a solution now. So, I designed the Ghost Scale. I built a Figma UI kit to help with some of the early lifting in using this (intentionally simple) scale. Here are some screenshots from the Figma community file. Links below.

[abrahamhaskins]

Art: A Unifying Model (The Graveyard of Idiosyncracies)

Part of communication relies on the fact that everyone has their own idiosyncratic mechanism for disrupting data, for changing the environment. You, as a particular artist, may hold the brush with your left hand upside down, and that gives you a particular style. That decision-making tree is your particular set; it is well-explored and becomes your artistic style. This kind of idiosyncratic order is a level of personalization that comes in part from you and in part from your subconscious.

AI art is a direct removal of this.

One fish, two fish, your fish, slop fish.

The latent space is a graveyard of idiosyncrasies, ground down into a frictionless paste of human expectation [1].

By definition, this removes the connection. It makes it harder to identify who you are. It makes it harder to empathize, not just because you made very few decisions, but because you used a tool that fills in the gaps not with your idiosyncrasies, but with the decisions of everyone else. It makes the least interesting thing in the space.

It is, in a mathematical way, anti-art.

If art is compressed evidence of your decisions, then AI is everyone else’s decisions in conflict with your own. It is utterly uninteresting by definition [2].

It is a "sanding down" of the most interesting parts of any creation—the parts that allow you to see a little bit of the artist, the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and to see the originality. AI art sands all of that away and returns us to a world of the world’s average [3].

[Citations available, attached to quotes on my website]