Imagination Activism — Moral Imaginations

The term is ‘Imagination Activist’ and ‘Imagination Activism’ is protected by a Creative Commons licence, CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED.

Imagination: A Manifesto

A Manifesto

Philosophy Experiments — Interactive Thought Experiments

Explore 27 interactive philosophy experiments that challenge your moral intuitions, test your logical reasoning, and probe the boundaries of belief.

Misreading as Foraging: How Systems Get Used for Things They Weren't Made For - Astral's Blog

Moral Code

Moral Code Moral Code is a working moral philosophy wiki: a place to refine a living theory of morality and test it against life, history, current events, readings, and imagined future judgment.

The Irrational Decision

How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment

A large-scale investigation of everyday moral dilemmas

Abstract. Questions of right and wrong are central to daily life, yet scientific understanding of everyday moral dilemmas is limited. We conducted a data-d

AI language model rivals expert ethicist in perceived moral expertise

People view AI as possessing expertise across various fields, but the perceived quality of AI-generated moral expertise remains uncertain. Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) perform well on tasks designed to assess moral alignment, reflecting moral judgments with relatively high accuracy. As LLMs are increasingly employed in decision-making roles, there is a growing expectation for them to offer not just aligned judgments but also demonstrate sound moral reasoning. Here, we advance work on the Moral Turing Test and find that Americans rate ethical advice from GPT-4o as slightly more moral, trustworthy, thoughtful, and correct than that of the popular New York Times advice column, The Ethicist. Participants perceived GPT models as surpassing both a representative sample of Americans and a renowned ethicist in delivering moral justifications and advice, suggesting that people may increasingly view LLM outputs as viable sources of moral expertise. This work suggests that people might see LLMs as valuable complements to human expertise in moral guidance and decision-making. It also underscores the importance of carefully programming ethical guidelines in LLMs, considering their potential to influence users’ moral reasoning.

The marketplace of rationalizations

Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their characteristics and behaviour, and I highlight their implications for understanding motivated cognition and misinformation.

Creating Scientific Theories with Online Communities using Gut Instinct

People's lived experiences provide intuitions about their health. Can they transform these personal intuitions into scientific theories that inform both science and their lives? My research introduces social computing architectures and system principles for people to brainstorm and test causal scientific theories. These ideas are instantiated in the Gut Instinct system (gutinstinct.ucsd.edu). 344 voluntary online participants from 27 countries created 399 personally-relevant questions about the human microbiome, 75 (19%) of which microbiome experts found potentially scientifically novel. To test their theories, end users design structurally-sound experiments, improve them via community reviews, and run them with other participants. Controlled experiments show that participants create better hypotheses and experimental designs when they have access to procedural training. My research illustrates a novel way to tackle complex, creative tasks online by building expertise in online volunteer communities.

Redecentralization

A thought experiment! Let's reimagine the web with r-selected thinking.

By Humans, For Humans – Mindful Design

Now, more than ever, we need to consider the real, human impact of the work we do. This is a fundamental principle of Mindful Design.

Cory Doctorow: Stories Are a Fuggly Hack - Locus

I've mentioned before, stories are weird. I mean, really, really weird. Nothing that happens in a piece of fiction has any consequence in the real world. Romeo and Juliet did not live, did not die, and the ''tragedy'' they represent is objectively less important than the tragedy of the live yogurt culture I digested at the breakfast table this morning. My theory is that the parts of our brains that …Read More

Living in the Simulacra

Despite a twenty-first-century plethora of images and our collective understanding that digital tools may alter the truth, human beings have a strong belief ...