Excessive Specialization Produces Excessive Derp

Science of War?

Then there was Warren Weaver, the eminence grise of Rockefeller and the OSRD, who was looking to preserve the wartime project of an across-the-board mathematical science of war. Weaver first coined the term “military worth” and pushed to have an interdisciplinary section structured around the…

The Neuroscientific Roots of Mirror Imaging

Interestingly, it has been suggested that people might use their own mental states as a starting point when inferring mental states of others, followed by an adjustment of these self-based inferences based on the perceived differences between the self…

Some Things Never Change

Again, physicists wanted to be paid by the military but not be in the military; physicists wanted to do social research for the military, but not be social scientists; physicists wanted to tell others what to do, but not be responsible for the commands given. To be granted these…

Origins of C3I

Fascinating, I had no idea.

Warren Weaver, by contrast, enjoyed a much more sanguine opinion of humanity and its foibles and, perhaps for that reason, was better suited to operate down in the trenches with scientists, rather than serve as remote bureaucratic figurehead like…

Deception

If an animal can purposefully deceive another, one could argue that it must be able to take the perspective of the other. Certainly, functional deception can be trained. Woodruff and Premack (1979) trained chimpanzees to point to the container that held food in order to receive the food. The chimpanzees then…