Ethnoarchaeology and Behaviorism: Comments on Gilman's Review of Ethnography by Archaeologists

1985 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 878-878 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Hampton Adams
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
American Antiquity ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Behavior

AbstractBehaviorism is but one part of the broader scope of ethnoarchaeological research and must be joined with historical approaches for proper understanding of the past.In her review of Ethnography by Archaeologists edited by Elisabeth Tooker {American Antiquity 49:442-443), Patricia Gilman emphasized one aspect of ethnoarchaeology, behaviorism, and faulted many of the contributors for not presenting general explanations of human behavior. Gilman primarily stresses the synchronic study of modern behavior as an analog for past behavior. While this is certainly a worthwhile endeavor for ethnographers, to equate such research with all of ethnoarchaeology is, I think, unduly restricting the definition. Such research is simply ethnography, because it places the researcher as an observer and interviewer in modern communities, examining behavioral and physical relationships among modern data. Rarely do such studies place this research in any evolutionary or historical framework.

Reputation and Gossip in Game Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-229
Author(s):  
Charles Roddie
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Strategic Behavior ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Behavior ◽  
Future Behavior ◽  
The Game Theory ◽  
Shed Light

When interacting with others, it is often important for you to know what they have done in similar situations in the past: to know their reputation. One reason is that their past behavior may be a guide to their future behavior. A second reason is that their past behavior may have qualified them for reward and cooperation, or for punishment and revenge. The fact that you respond positively or negatively to the reputation of others then generates incentives for them to maintain good reputations. This article surveys the game theory literature which analyses the mechanisms and incentives involved in reputation. It also discusses how experiments have shed light on strategic behavior involved in maintaining reputations, and the adequacy of unreliable and third party information (gossip) for maintaining incentives for cooperation.

scholarly journals Unamuno on making oneself indispensable and having the strength to long for immortality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Buben
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Material Substance

AbstractUnamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all of human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to what he calls mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach to this issue resembles, in a few significant ways, Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about the eternal recurrence, I think he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of seeing the contemporary analytic debate about the desirability of immortality. Building on Unamuno’s position, one could argue that pessimism about the value of immortality is actually indicative of a flawed character and an impoverished relationship with life.

Chapter 7.1 Deception Island

2021 ◽  
pp. M55-2018-56
Author(s):  
A. Geyer ◽  
D. Pedrazzi ◽  
J. Almendros ◽  
M. Berrocoso ◽  
J. López-Martínez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Ground Deformation ◽  
South Shetland Islands ◽  
Deception Island ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Volcanic Unrest ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Shetland Islands ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Disciplines

AbstractDeception Island (South Shetland Islands) is one of the most active volcanoes in Antarctica, with more than 15 explosive eruptive events registered over the past two centuries. Recent eruptions (1967, 1969 and 1970) and volcanic unrest episodes in 1992, 1999 and 2014–15 demonstrate that the occurrence of future volcanic activity is a valid and pressing concern for scientists, logistic personnel and tourists that are visiting or are working on or near the island. Over the last few decades, intense research activity has been carried out on Deception Island to decipher the origin and evolution of this very complex volcano. To that end, a solid integration of related scientific disciplines, such as tectonics, petrology, geochemistry, geophysics, geomorphology, remote sensing, glaciology, is required. A proper understanding of the island's evolution in the past, and its present state, is essential for improving the efficiency in interpreting monitoring data recorded during volcanic unrest periods and, hence, for future eruption forecasting. In this chapter, we briefly present Deception Island's most relevant tectonic, geomorphological, volcanological and magmatic features, as well as the results obtained from decades of monitoring the island's seismic activity and ground deformation.

scholarly journals Free Will in Human Behavior and Physics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasil Dinev Penchev
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Quantum Information ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
Quantum Bit ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The One

If the concept of “free will” is reduced to that of “choice” all physical world share the latter quality. Anyway the “free will” can be distinguished from the “choice”: The “free will” involves implicitly a certain goal, and the choice is only the mean, by which the aim can be achieved or not by the one who determines the target. Thus, for example, an electron has always a choice but not free will unlike a human possessing both. Consequently, and paradoxically, the determinism of classical physics is more subjective and more anthropomorphic than the indeterminism of quantum mechanics for the former presupposes certain deterministic goal implicitly following the model of human freewill behavior. Quantum mechanics introduces the choice in the fundament of physical world involving a generalized case of choice, which can be called “subjectless”: There is certain choice, which originates from the transition of the future into the past. Thus that kind of choice is shared of all existing and does not need any subject: It can be considered as a low of nature. There are a few theorems in quantum mechanics directly relevant to the topic: two of them are called “free will theorems” by their authors (Conway and Kochen 2006; 2009). Any quantum system either a human or an electron or whatever else has always a choice: Its behavior is not predetermined by its past. This is a physical law. It implies that a form of information, the quantum information underlies all existing for the unit of the quantity of information is an elementary choice: either a bit or a quantum bit (qubit).

Locke—Religion—Equality

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Proper Understanding ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Philosophical Writings

Jeremy Waldron's much noted book, God, Locke, and Equality, has put the topic of “God and Equality in Locke” at the center of many perhaps most, discussions of Locke these days. I am going to raise some critical objections to Waldron's interpretations, but all the more reason to begin by noting the very many things about this book that I admire.First, he rejects the insistence by many of the most outspoken Locke scholars that a proper understanding of Locke—or any philosopher of the past—must be purely historical—that it must have nothing to do with us or our concerns, questions, or problems. Professor Waldron cuts through this claim as mere arbitrary assertion.Second, many Locke scholars, often some of the same ones, insist that Locke's political writings must be understood in isolation from his philosophic writings, especially from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke's editor, Peter Laslett, set the tone long ago when he pronounced judgment: “Locke did not write as a philosopher, applying to politics the implications of his views of reality as a whole.” Rather, according to Laslett, Locke appealed to or drew off of preexisting “modes of discourse.” This approach makes it very difficult to understand Locke as an integral personality, much less as a coherent author or as a thinker to be taken seriously. Waldron thus reopens the lines of communication between Locke's political and his philosophical writings and makes Locke a significant thinker, not just a corpse for the historians.

Merits and caveats of propensity scores to adjust for confounding

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (10) ◽  
pp. 1629-1635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edouard L Fu ◽  
Rolf H H Groenwold ◽  
Carmine Zoccali ◽  
Kitty J Jager ◽  
Merel van Diepen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Observational Data ◽  
Propensity Scores ◽  
Cooperative Study ◽  
Dialysis Patients ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
The Past ◽  
Using Data

Abstract Proper adjustment for confounding is essential when estimating the effects of treatments or risk factors on health outcomes in observational data. To this end, various statistical methods have been developed. In the past couple of years, the use of propensity scores (PSs) to control for confounding has increased. Proper understanding of this method is necessary to critically appraise research in which it is applied. In this article, we provide an overview of PS methods, explaining their concept, advantages and possible disadvantages. Furthermore, the use of PS matching, PS adjustment and PS weighting is illustrated using data from the Netherlands Cooperative Study on the Adequacy of Dialysis (NECOSAD) cohort of dialysis patients.

The Everyday Archaeologist Matters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Price ◽  
Philip J. Carr
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Southeastern Archaeology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Future

Archaeology has many goals, and those goals may differ depending on your theoretical paradigm. These aims vary from bringing order to an incomplete and imperfect record of people in the past, to distilling the actions of the past in order to understand not only cultural changes but also the reasons those change occurred, to synthesizing this information to predict human behavior through laws, and to using the past to better the future of humanity. Thinking about the everyday broadens perspectives, posits new questions, presents testable hypotheses, and, perhaps because it is measured on a shared scale, brings some level of consilience to southeastern archaeology. In this chapter, the authors discuss three opportunities for making archaeology relevant: writing palatably, scaling interactions, and engaging people with their past by bringing archaeology into their everyday lives.

Human Behavior in Chatrooms

2012 ◽  
pp. 148-156
Author(s):  
Shawn Loewen ◽  
Jiawen Wang
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Written Communication ◽  
Technological Advancement ◽  
Internet Relay Chat ◽  
Web Based ◽  
The Past

The development of new technologies has had an impact on human behavior and communication from time immemorial. With the growing rate of technological advancement during the past 100 years, the changes have occurred even more rapidly. In an effort to understand the effects of one medium on human behavior and communication, this article explores and synthesizes research that has been conducted over the past 30 years, in what has come to be known as the chatroom. The chatroom, in the form of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), was developed in the late 1980s, and has been growing in popularity ever since. Chatrooms are Web-based platforms that allow synchronous, written communication between two or more interested participants in a forum that is potentially open to other interested participants.

The Fragmentation of Reputation

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gautam Bose
Keyword(s):  
Principal Agent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Behavior ◽  
Credit History ◽  
Reputation Mechanisms ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Parameter Values

This paper investigates the use of reputation in an economy where principals hire agents for two different kinds of tasks, in which the agents have differing aptitudes. Principal-agent matches are remade every period, but a principal can acquire some information on the past behavior of her current agent. I consider two different reputation mechanisms—one in which an agent's past record of defections makes no reference to the kind of task (Integrated Reputation), and another in which information about past defections is available separately for each task (Fragmented Reputation). The two kinds of reputation can be interpreted as "personal honor" and performance record (e.g. credit history) respectively.I first characterize the equilibria under the two mechanisms and make some welfare comparisons, showing that IR strictly welfare dominates FR over a significant range of parameter values. I then show that, when both mechanisms are available, integrated reputation will not be used in equilibrium by principals. Thus if the economy is in equilibrium using only the IR mechanism, and the FR mechanism becomes subsequently available, then IR will become obsolete. In the appropriate ranges of parameter values, this change reduces welfare.

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