Beliefs as inner causes: the (lack of) evidence

Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle’s alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as patterns of living that contextualize behavior

Coming out of the woodwork

‘Coming Out of the Woodwork’ was a curatorial and installation art project, bringing together three artsits (Mark Selby, Richard Cramp and Joe Watling) who similarly identify with the exploration of architectural space in its formation and perception as a key component to their practice. The gallery space and its associated architecture, was entirely reformed through a series of installations and constructions. Each artist approaches new ways of engaging the viewer beyond a ‘static’ looking experience; encouraging the physicality of experience through their work. An accompanying publication and website was produced alongside the exhibition

Crowdsourcing complex workflows under budget constraints

We consider the problem of task allocation in crowdsourcing systems with multiple complex workflows, each of which consists of a set of interdependent micro-tasks. We propose Budgeteer, an algorithm to solve this problem under a budget constraint. In particular, our algorithm first calculates an efficient way to allocate budget to each workflow. It then determines the number of inter-dependent micro-tasks and the price to pay for each task within each workflow, given the corresponding budget constraints. We empirically evaluate it on a well-known crowdsourcing-based text correction workflow using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and show that Budgeteer can achieve similar levels of accuracy to current benchmarks, but is on average 45% cheaper

“If the Engine Ever Stops, We’d All Die”: \u3cem\u3eSnowpiercer\u3c/em\u3e and Necrofuturism

Applying Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” and Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee’s “necrocapitalism” to the study of sf, this article reads the post-apocalyptic French comic Le Transperceneige (1982) and its film adaptation Snowpiercer (2014) as critiques of necrofuturist visions of the future. Necrofuturism posits a future that is doomed to continue modern capitalism’s unsustainable and immoral practices even as those practices become more and more destructive and self-defeating; films such as Snowpiercer interrupt this well-rehearsed vision of a world of universal death to open the mind to new possibilities for alternative futures. Key to Snowpiercer’s critique of necrofuturism is its depiction of necrocapitalism as a deliberately constructed thing, rather than a law of nature, reminding us that someone chose to build this world of unhappiness and prompting us to recognize that other sorts of worlds might be built instead

Spartan Daily, April 18, 1975

Volume 64, Issue 39https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5972/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, April 18, 1975

Volume 64, Issue 39https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5972/thumbnail.jp