scholarly journals Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahault Albarracin ◽  
Daphne Demekas ◽  
Maxwell Ramstead ◽  
Conor Heins
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Epistemic Communities ◽  
Local Network ◽  
Active Inference ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
The World ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Degree Of Certainty

The spread of ideas is a fundamental concern of today’s news ecology. Understanding the dynamics of the spread of information and its co-option by interested parties is of critical importance. Research on this topic has shown that individuals tend to cluster in echo-chambers and are driven by confirmation bias. In this paper, we leverage the active inference framework to provide an in silico model of confirmation bias and its effect on echo-chamber formation. We build a model based on active inference, where agents tend to sample information in order to justify their own view of reality, which eventually leads to them to have a high degree of certainty about their own beliefs. We show that, once agents have reached a certain level of certainty about their beliefs, it becomes very difficult to get them to change their views. This system of self-confirming beliefs is upheld and reinforced by the evolving relationship between agent's beliefs and its observations, which over time will continue to provide evidence for their ingrained ideas about the world. The epistemic communities that are consolidated by these shared beliefs, in turn, tend to produce perceptions of reality that reinforce those shared beliefs. We provide an active inference account of this community formation mechanism. We postulate that agents are driven by the epistemic value that they obtain from sampling or observing the behaviors of other agents. Inspired by digital social networks like Twitter, we build a generative model in which agents generate observable social claims or posts (e.g. `tweets') while reading the socially-observable claims of other agents, that lend support towards one of two mutually-exclusive abstract topics. Agents can choose which other agent they pay attention to at each timestep, and crucially who they attend to and what they choose to read influences their beliefs about the world. Agents also assess their local network’s perspective, influencing which kinds of posts they expect to see other agents making. The model was built and simulated simulated using the freely-available Python package pymdp. The proposed active inference model can reproduce the formation of echo-chambers over social networks, and gives us insight into the cognitive processes that lead to this phenomenon.

Emotive Trending And Tracking of Tweets

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Sanjay Chhataru Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Complex Events

Popularity of the social media and the amount of importance given by an individual to social media has significantly increased in last few years. As more and more people become part of the social networks like Twitter, Facebook, information which flows through the social network, can potentially give us good understanding about what is happening around in our locality, state, nation or even in the world. The conceptual motive behind the project is to develop a system which analyses about a topic searched on Twitter. It is designed to assist Information Analysts in understanding and exploring complex events as they unfold in the world. The system tracks changes in emotions over events, signalling possible flashpoints or abatement. For each trending topic, the system also shows a sentiment graph showing how positive and negative sentiments are trending as the topic is getting trended.

The True Believers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This is the first data chapter. In this chapter, respondents who are described as true believers in the gender structure, and essentialist gender differences are introduced and their interviews analyzed. They are true believers because, at the macro level, they believe in a gender ideology where women and men should be different and accept rules and requirements that enforce gender differentiation and even sex segregation in social life. In addition, at the interactional level, these Millennials report having been shaped by their parent’s traditional expectations and they similarly feel justified to impose gendered expectations on those in their own social networks. At the individual level, they have internalized masculinity or femininity, and embody it in how they present themselves to the world. They try hard to “do gender” traditionally.

Can housing rights be applied to modern housing systems?

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Kenna
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Epistemic Communities ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Housing Systems ◽  
Effective Implementation ◽  
Housing Rights ◽  
The World ◽  
Effective Translation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline and examine the growing corpus of housing rights and assess their relevance and applicability to complex contemporary housing systems across the world.Design/methodology/approachThe paper sets out the principal instruments and commentaries on housing rights developed by the United Nations, regional and other bodies. It assesses their relevance in the context of contemporary analysis of housing systems, organized and directed by networks of legal and other professionals within particular domains.FindingsHousing rights instruments are accepted by all States across the world at the level of international law, national constitutions and laws. The findings suggest that there are significant gaps in the international law conception and framework of housing rights, and indeed, human rights generally, which create major obstacles for the effective implementation of these rights. There is a preoccupation with one element of housing systems, that of subsidized or social housing. However, effective housing rights implementation requires application at meso‐, micro‐ and macro‐levels of modern, dynamic housing systems as a whole. Epistemic communities of professionals develop and shape housing law and policy within these domains. The housing rights paradigm must be further fashioned for effective translation into contemporary housing systems.Research limitations/implicationsThe development of housing rights precedents, both within international and national law, is leading to a wide and diffuse corpus of legislation and case law. More research is needed on specific examples of effective coupling between housing rights and elements of housing systems.Originality/valueThis paper offers housing policy makers and lawyers an avenue into the extensive jurisprudence and writings on housing rights, which will inevitably become part of the lexicon of housing law across the world. It also highlights the limitations of housing rights implementation, but offers some new perspectives on more effective application of these rights.

scholarly journals A Taxonomy for the Social Agents of Scientific Change

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Nicholas Overgaard
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Community ◽  
Epistemic Community ◽  
Epistemic Communities ◽  
Scientific Change ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
Social Agent ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of

Although we accept that a scientific mosaic is a set of theories and methods accepted and employed by a scientific community, scientific community currently lacks a proper definition in scientonomy. In this paper, I will outline a basic taxonomy for the bearers of a mosaic, i.e. the social agents of scientific change. I begin by differentiating between accidental group and community through the respective absence and presence of a collective intentionality. I then identify two subtypes of community: the epistemic community that has a collective intentionality to know the world, and the non-epistemic community that does not have such a collective intentionality. I note that both epistemic and non-epistemic communities might bear mosaics, but that epistemic communities are the intended social agents of scientific change because their main collective intentionality is to know the world and, in effect, to change their mosaics. I conclude my paper by arguing we are not currently in a position to properly define scientific community per se because of the risk of confusing pseudoscientific communities with scientific communities. However, I propose that we can for now rely on the definition of epistemic community as the proper social agent of scientific change.Suggested Modifications[Sciento-2017-0012]: Accept the following taxonomy of group, accidental group, and community:Group ≡ two or more people who share any characteristic.Accidental group ≡ a group that does not have a collective intentionality.Community ≡ a group that has a collective intentionality. [Sciento-2017-0013]: Provided that the preceding modification [Sciento-2017-0012] is accepted, accept that communities can consist of other communities.[Sciento-2017-0014]: Provided that modification [Sciento-2017-0012] is accepted, accept the following definitions of epistemic community and non-epistemic community as subtypes of community:Epistemic community ≡ a community that has a collective intentionality to know the world.Non-epistemic community ≡ a community that does not have a collective intentionality to know the world.[Sciento-2017-0015]: Provideed that modification [Sciento-2017-0013] and [Sciento-2017-0014] are accepted, accept that a non-epistemic community can consist of epistemic communities.

scholarly journals Visualizations of personal social networks on Facebook and community structure: an exploratory study

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Gkini ◽  
Alexios Brailas
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Community Structure ◽  
Single Point ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Structure Pattern ◽  
Diffusion Of Information ◽  
Qualitative Interpretation ◽  
Network Topologies ◽  
Personal Social Networks ◽  
And Diffusion

We studied the community structure pattern in the visualizations of ten personal social networks on Facebook at a single point in time. It seems to be a strong tendency towards community formation in online personal, social networks: somebody’s friends are usually also friends between them, forming subgroups of more densely connected nodes. Research on community structure in social networks usually focuses on the networks’ statistical properties. There is a need for qualitative studies bridging the gap between network topologies and their sociological implications. To this direction, visual representations of personal networks in social media could be a valuable source of empirical data for qualitative interpretation. Most of the personal social networks’ visualizations in the present study are very highly clustered with densely-knit overlapping subgroups of friends and interconnected between them through wide bridges. This network topology pattern seems to be quite efficient, allowing for a fast spread and diffusion of information across the whole social network.

scholarly journals LINGUÍSTICA E PUBLICIDADE: UM OLHAR ENUNCIATIVO SOBRE UMA CAMPANHA PUBLICITÁRIA DO CITIBANK.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Cristina Gerner Siqueira
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Financial Institution ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
People’S Daily ◽  
The World ◽  
People's Daily ◽  
The Way

O discurso publicitário está presente no cotidiano das pessoas por meio de diversos tipos de mídia: anúncios na TV, impressos, outdoors ou nas redes sociais. Entre os recursos utilizados pela publicidade para convencer as pessoas sobre os produtos, serviços ou ideias que se deseja vender nos interessa estudar o uso da linguagem verbal, mais especificamente a maneira com que a publicidade constrói sentido por meio da linguagem. Assim, este artigo pretende analisar alguns enunciados de uma campanha publicitária realizada pela instituição financeira Citibank sob o olhar da teoria enunciativa desenvolvida por Oswald Ducrot. A campanha serve como  exemplo do jogo argumentativo que pode ser criado por meio da linguagem verbal, enredado em si mesmo, onde o locutor não fala sobre o mundo, mas fala para construir o mundo e explicitar a sua verdade por meio de argumentação linguística e não, necessariamente, retórica. Abstract: Advertising speech is present in people's daily lives through various types of media: TV ads, print ads, billboards, or social networks. Among the resources used by advertising to convince people about the products, services or ideas they want to sell we are interested in studying the use of verbal language, more specifically the way in which advertising builds meaning through language. Thus, this article intends to analyze some statements of an advertising campaign carried out by the financial institution Citibank under the view of the enunciative theory developed by Oswald Ducrot. The campaign is a great example of the game of argumentation that can be created through verbal language, entangled in itself, in which the speaker does not speak about the world, but speaks to build the world and to explain its truth through linguistic argumentation and not , necessarily, rhetoric.

scholarly journals The crisis of content verbality in Internet discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 224-228
Author(s):  
Марина Михайловна Молчанова ◽  
Патимат Абдулаевна Лекова
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Computer Technology ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The World ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
Media Texts ◽  
Active Visualization ◽  
First Time

Исследуется кризис вербальности контента в интернет-дискурсе, его активная визуализация, связанная с новыми открытиями в области компьютерных технологий. Цель работы - дать полиаспектную характеристику этому явлению и обозначить перспективы его влияния на речемыслительную деятельность подрастающего поколения, составляющего большую часть пользователей социальных сетей. Актуальность данной проблематики обусловлена обеспокоенностью филологической общественностью тем, что мир становится все менее лингвистическим. Новизна заключается в том, что впервые интернет-дискурс рассматривается в контексте кризиса вербальности контента. При таких темпах визуализации медиатекстов вполне вероятно обострение кризиса вербальности, последствия которого могут негативно сказаться на мыслетворческой деятельности у подрастающего поколения, которая возможна только при высокой языковой компетенции. The paper examines the crisis of content verbality in the Internet discourse, its active visualization associated with new discoveries in the field of computer technology. The aim of the work is to give a multi-aspect characterization of this phenomenon and outline the prospects of its influence on the speech-thinking activity of the younger generation, which makes up the majority of users of social networks. The relevance of this issue is due to the concern of the philological community that the world is becoming less and less linguistic. The novelty lies in the fact that for the first time Internet discourse is considered in the context of the crisis of content verbality. At such a rate of visualization of media texts, it is likely that the crisis of verbality will aggravate, the consequences of which can negatively affect the thinking activity of the younger generation, which is possible only with high linguistic competence.

scholarly journals Transforming Confirmation Bias to Generate Critical Consciousness in News/Information Literacy and Social Science Courses

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Wittebols
Keyword(s):  
Information Literacy ◽  
Flipped Classroom ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Social World ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Education ◽  
Science Courses ◽  
The World

This paper synthesizes theory and research on confirmation bias (CB), curiosity, and news/information literacy education with the goal of understanding how helping students critique their tendency to engage in CB spurs curiosity and critical consciousness about learning. Curiosity about the self is spurred when people realize their CB tendencies. Curiosity about the larger social world is spurred when students learn how CB affects the way they look at the world. A flipped classroom approach reflects the work of Paulo Freire, who argued critical education should be experiential with faculty playing a facilitating, rather than an “expert” role.

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