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Scoop.it!
Sennett's latest book, "Together" is useful for those interested in multiple points of view regarding cooperation, especially in regard to politics, history, work, and craftsmanship -- Howard
“The theme of the lecture addresses a question: how can we design spaces in the city which encourage strangers to cooperate? To explore this question, I’ll draw on research in the social sciences about cooperation, based on my book, and relate this research to current issues in urban design.” 
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"Trinity College researchers have constructed an artificial neural network model that demonstrates that human intelligence evolved from the need for social teamwork. The high levels of intelligence seen in humans, other primates, certain cetaceans, and birds remain a major puzzle for evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and psychologists. It has long been held that social interactions provide the selection pressures necessary for the evolution of advanced cognitive abilities (the “social intelligence hypothesis”), and in recent years, decision-making in the context of cooperative social interactions has been conjectured to be of particular importance."
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From
arxiv
"Cooperation is crucial for the remarkable evolutionary success of the human species. Not surprisingly, some individuals are willing to bare additional costs in order to punish defectors. Current models assume that, once set, the fine and cost of punishment do not change over time. Here we show that relaxing this assumption by allowing players to adapt their sanctioning efforts in dependence on the success of cooperation can explain both, the spontaneous emergence of punishment, as well as its ability to deter defectors and those unwilling to punish them with globally negligible investments. By means of phase diagrams and the analysis of emerging spatial patterns, we demonstrate that adaptive punishment promotes public cooperation either through the invigoration of spatial reciprocity, the prevention of the emergence of cyclic dominance, or through the provision of competitive advantages to those that sanction antisocial behavior. Presented results indicate that the process of self-organization significantly elevates the effectiveness of punishment, and they reveal new mechanisms by means of which this fascinating and widespread social behavior could have evolved."
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"Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, visits the RSA to investigate our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community."
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"With the private sector and government stumbling into the 21st century, it's crucial that we learn the cooperative lessons of the 1800s and empower social-purpose ventures to build a bridge connecting profit to social good. In the 1820s, a nascent mutualist movement began percolating among working people in America, built on the uplifting power of cooperative businesses and collectivist organizations. They were coming together to create cooperatives for plumbing, leather-working, even newspaper publishing. By the 1880s and 1890s, this movement was solidifying into sturdy institutions."
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"THE ability to share knowledge and learn from each other may be the key difference between people and chimpanzees that helped humans to dominate the modern world, scientists suggest.
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"Cash mobs are perhaps one of the more interesting things to happen to small businesses in the United States in the past year. The idea is so new that as of writing, no one has made a Wikipedia page on it. Urbandictionary.com on the other hand, is more up-to-date. For who didn’t bother to click that link, you can think of cash mobs as “flash mobs” with a socio-economic slant. Cash mobs semi-spontaneously organize people into spending money in small businesses in their community. These groups often target local businesses that have fallen prey to major retail chains moving into their home towns."
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"Statements on human nature are always a bit tricky because of the complexity of the subject matter. This does not prevent the obvious fat that the capitalist system operates according to a very one-sided and unflattering view of human nature. As a result, our most deeply entrenched social structures, our top-down business models, our punitive legal systems, our market-based approaches to everything from education reform to environmental regulation, have been build on the premise that humans are driven only by self-interest, programmed to respond only to the invisible hand of the free markets. In “The Penguin and the Leviathan”, Yochai Benkler, Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard University, explains that “in the last decade this fallacy has finally begin to unravel as numerous studies across dozens of cultures have found that most people will act far more cooperatively than previously believed. He draws on cutting-edge findings from neuro-science, economics, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, and a wealth of real-world examples to debunk this long-hold myth and reveal how we can harness the power of human cooperation to improve business processes, design smarter technology, reform our economic systems, maximize volunteer contributions to science, reduce crime, improve the efficacy of civic movements, and more.”"
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"The problem is context. Competition certainly works in the short term, and it certainly works among individuals. Over the long term, however, and among groups, competition alone does not work. It has to be balanced by cooperation. That’s where innovation comes in. Take the ever-fascinating problem of the prisoner’s dilemma (which I won’t describe here, in the interests of saving space). In the short term, “defectors,” or cheaters, beat cooperators as individuals. But if “cooperators” form clusters or groups, they thrive, and cheaters do not.
A new book entitled SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed, by the Harvard mathematical biologist Martin A. Nowak (with Roger Highfield) makes just this case, and argues not only that cooperation is central to innovation, but that it is central to the entire process of evolution itself: “cooperation, not competition, has always been the key to the evolution of complexity.” In other words, cooperation is not just a conscious strategy we might adopt to get something we want, it is actually behind the evolution of all forms of life on earth from the origin of life to the present: “Cooperation—not competition—underpins innovation. To spur creativity, and to encourage people to come up with original ideas, you need to use the lure of the carrot, not fear of the stick. Cooperation is the architect of creativity throughout evolution, from cells to multicellular creatures to anthills to villages to cities. Without cooperation there can be neither construction nor complexity in evolution” (xvii)."
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Secret secrets are no fun— except when they help protect people from others' bad behavior. New research suggests certain kinds of gossip may have important social and benefits.
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"It is well-known that leadership is crucial in the initiation of collective action. Collective action, in turn, can be an important route to successful and sustainable management of natural resources. The specific roles of leadership, however, have not been studied extensively. In particular, the way leadership can facilitate the early phase of collaboration, and the problems created by lack of a leader to deal with the many diverse players involved in later stages of collaboration, deserve further work. We plan to examine these issues and add a quantitative dimension."
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"Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being honoured lead to greater cooperation? We test this hypothesis with anonymous six-player public goods experiments, an experimental paradigm used to investigate problems related to overusing common resources. We instructed the players that the two individuals who were least generous after 10 rounds would be exposed to the group. As the natural antithesis, we also test the effects of honour by revealing the identities of the two players who were most generous. The non-monetary, reputational effects induced by shame and honour each led to approximately 50 per cent higher donations to the public good when compared with the control, demonstrating that both shame and honour can drive cooperation and can help alleviate the tragedy of the commons."
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"By developing computer simulations of neural networks that evolved over 50,000 generations, scientists at Trinity University have concluded that intelligence is an evolutionary byproduct of social teamwork. Each neural network, or 'brain', took part in two social dilemmas in which "two players must choose between cooperation and defection during repeated rounds. Upon completion of either game, each 'brain' produced 'offspring' with other 'brains' that made more advantageous choices during the games. ... After 50,000 generations, the model showed that as cooperation increased, so did the intelligence of the programmed brains.""
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"“Cities are the original sharing platform” — dense spaces in which shared services such as transit, public libraries and parks are already heavily used, Nath said. With the current wave of startup sharing companies, he added, the city has the chance to be the first to “modernize the regulatory environment” to benefit new forms of economic exchange, such as car sharing, formalized couch surfing and temporary micro-jobs. These activities could make money for city residents, improve their quality of life and help save the environment, too.
But Nath and Lee suggested that these businesses need both changes in local law and economic incentives to thrive.
They spoke at a packed panel discussion Tuesday night at SPUR (the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association), that was co-sponsored by TechCentralSF, sf.citi ( ); (San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology & Innovation) and Shareable.
Joining them were representatives from some of the city’s most successful new sharing businesses: Getaround, a peer-to-peer car-sharing system; Airbnb, a platform allowing anyone to rent or swap homes to strangers; TaskRabbit, a service allowing individuals and companies to parcel out one-time jobs; and Vayable, a tourism website that connects travelers with local experts.
While its scope and powers have yet to be defined, Nath said, the most urgent task of the Sharing Economy Working Group is to listen to the concerns of some of these companies. They say regulations written decades ago could stifle new types of economic exchange."
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"When Stony Brook University Sociology Professor Arnout van de Rijt and graduate student Michael Restivo decided to find out what makes Wikipedia work, they knew they faced quite a challenge. After all, neither monetary compensation nor formal work relations explain the success of this all-volunteer online encyclopedia. The team reasoned that expressions of appreciation by other Wikipedia contributors, including awards, helped to fuel what they called a “spirit of generosity.”"
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(Video) "Whether you are part of a family, organizational team or business in a supply chain, systems thinking is a valuable approach to understanding the complexity of today's world. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, Senior lecturer at MIT and Founder of the Society for Organizational Learning shares his perspectives on leadership and systems thinking with IBM. Senge focuses on the problems that are most difficult to solve and the mental models today's leaders need in order to build a smarter planet. Leaders today need to be able to be prepared reassess their strategies, work across multiple groups to find solutions and have the vision to work through high leverage solutions over time. Working smarter means working in ways that are collective and are based on collective intelligence across cities and supply chains to produce social, ecological and economic well being."
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"I was trying to understand the essential principles behind emergent processes like Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search, the World Café and others. I figured if more of us understood how to engage with people different than ourselves, we’d all be better off and get better results. As our current assumptions of how things work break down, I think we can break through to a higher-order of human functioning. This depends on an understanding of how to work with emergence."
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Rescooped by Howard Rheingold from An Eye on New Media |
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To understandinternet communities, we must understand the danger of 'tradgedy of the commons" Peter Kollock share more in this passionate lecture with his students.
KM
In 2005, Peter Kollock spoke about social dilemmas to the Stanford seminar on "A new literacy of cooperation" that was conducted by Andrea Saveri and Howard ...
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"Triumph of the Commons is a collaborative book from fifty-five artists. It resurrects a disparaged, yet newly valuable, cultural narrative. Presented as fifty-five theses, this narrative challenges notions of prosperity:
what it means and how to achieve it. Readers will find that each thesis offers practical implications for a range of concerns emerging
in the 21st century."
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"I’ve been thinking about some of the major obstacles to online collaboration, and how currency design might be able to help overcome them. As Guillaume Lebleu has pointed out, a currency can be thought of as a tool for enabling collaboration between a group of people. Markets would be unable to function without money, which provides a unit of account and a way for people to agree on the relative value of different goods and services. The ability to exchange, in turn, allows specialisation and the creation of economy: a very large, complex collaboration between millions of agents who do not necessarily know each other.
The idea that we need currencies to catalyse collaboration between people implies that, left to their own devices, they probably wouldn’t collaborate as much, if at all. Obviously though, collaboration between individuals likely existed long before the invention of money, or even writing. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin believed that “mutual aid” – the ability of a species’ members to cooperate with each other – has always been a significant factor in natural selection and evolution:"
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"Anyone interested in emergent self organising processes that occur when diverse individuals assemble for a common cause, cannot fail to be impressed by how the Occupy movement has demonstrated a capacity for well structured engagement through the working group protocol. Combining the use of such online platforms to share grassroot practices, such as shown here at How to Occupy and the in-person General Assemblies, helps co-ordinate the competencies of Occupiers into pragmatic groups.
When the General Assembly is at its best, it supports and holds the working groups accountable to their self-assigned remits and the needs of the community. A representative chronicles all activities and records them faithfully on the web, as with this one from Occupy Edmonton."
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"Ancient humans may not have had the luxury of updating their Facebook status, but social networks were nevertheless an essential component of their lives, a new study suggests."
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"The Naval Postgraduate School, the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (OASD-NII) and
several industry leading vendors answered the call for disaster relief communications a few days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the US Gulf Coast. This team combined real world prior experience in disaster response communications activities with the most current technologies to wirelessly enable Bay St Louis and Waveland Mississippi—providing the ONLY means of voice and data communications in the region while awaiting additional government support."
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"RICHARD SENNETT'S Together is the second in a planned trilogy of books about "the skills people need to sustain everyday life". The first instalment, The Craftsman, proposed and explored the notion of an innate human impulse to do things well. Together is about the craftsmanship of cooperation.
Sennett, a sociologist, worries that humans suffer from a deeply ingrained tribalism that "couples solidarity with others like yourself to aggression against those who differ". "
