OLDaily

Epistemic Styles
Carolina Flores, PhilPapers, 2021/12/27

People interact with evidence in different ways, writes Carolina Flores. "Epistemic styles are ways of interacting with evidence that express unified sets of epistemic values, preferences, goals, and interests." This paper (22 page PDF) describes a few epistemic styles as examples:  the paranoid style, expressive of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”; the rationalist style, "characterized by adhesion to Bayesian reasoning and by a 'scout mindset', rooted in curiosity and willingness to change one’s mind"; and a lived experience style "preferring testimony from people with relevant experiences... and testimony that is conveyed with emotion over coldly expressed points. They are disposed to seek out and value a wide range of distinctive perspectives." Image: Winther.

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Watch a Tesla Owner Blow up His Car Rather Than Pay Expensive Repairs
Josh Hendrickson, ReviewGeek, 2021/12/27

This is why I won't buy a Tesla. And why we should be careful in general about buying things that can be easily repaired, or that the dealer makes extra money by repairing (this also applies to Apple products).

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Parts of the body — back and waist; slicing up reality
Victor Mair, Language Log, 2021/12/27

On the surface this post is about why people confuse the word for "back" in Mandarin, bèi 背, and the word for "waist", yāo 腰. This sort of confusion happens all the time in translations between the two languages. The lesson we should take from this (and it's important) is that while the back and the waist are real things, "people divide reality in different ways with the words they apply to it; we cannot always assume that what we see and experience is the same as what others see and experience."

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Effectiveness of embodied conversational agents for managing academic stress at an Indian University (ARU) during COVID-19
Shreeya Nelekar, Amal Abdulrahman, Manik Gupta, Deborah Richards, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2021/12/27

An 'embodied conversational agent' (ECA) is a fancy name for an AI avatar. It is "a digital system that supports conversational interaction with users by means of speech or other modalities" and features "computer-generated visual virtual characters capable of both empathic verbal and nonverbal communication." This survey tests for effectiveness "for mAnaging stRess at University (ARU)... ARU, a Hindi language word which literally translates to 'Beautiful like the Sun'".In particular, ARU uses explanation to address stress; "Explainable agents (XAs), particularly, belief-desire-intention (BDI) agents, have been introduced to simulate the human natural way of behaviour explanation." The study concludes, not surprisingly, that "users reported a significant reduction in their stress levels for all explanation groups."

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