Hi, this is Chih-chou. Welcome to my channel. Now what I want to do in this video is show you five books that I came across on my bookshelf that I thought were worth the read. Basically what I'm doing right now is I'm in the process of putting together a short discussion, short if you can call it short, a short discussion on economics, which is directly going to tie us into mathematics, some of the stuff that we're doing regarding the mathematics of economics. And as I mentioned before, in a couple of previous videos I guess, that economics is directly related to politics. You can't really talk about economics without talking about politics and you can't talk about politics without talking about economics. So what I do when I try to organize my books, I try to organize them on my bookshelf, try to organize on my category or by author. And what I ended up doing was, I was looking in the economics section, some of the economics books just for reference for some little bit of research and the politics stuff was there so I started browsing the politics books. And I found five books that have stuck with me, that I read over the years, that have sort of provided additional information to me or gave me a perspective on politics which I may not have had. And I thought it'd be fun to share these five books with you guys. And what I'm going to do in no particular order of which one's more important than the other one, I'm just going to go in the order that, from oldest to the most recent that I've read. And the most recent obviously I know more, I know better. What I want to do is show you the oldest one that sort of gave me a perspective on politics in large part and in life to a certain degree. And the book is called Between Heaven and Hell by Peter Krift. And I read this in the 80s, I was in high school. So I've known politics, I've been involved in politics for a long time, followed politics for a long time, early days in high school. So this is one of the reasons I ended up reading this, which is the book is described as a dialogue somewhere beyond death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. And I've mentioned before that I've read a lot of C. S. Lewis, right? So I knew about Kennedy through politics, some stuff about Kennedy, whatever you could obtain, not even all of it in the 1980s regarding Kennedy and what took place with the assassination and stuff like this. And I've read a lot of C. S. Lewis by that time when I picked up this book. I'd read a lot of C. S. Lewis. So I knew about Kennedy, I knew about C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley's name had blown in the wind in my direction, right? So I didn't know too much about Aldous Huxley. And after reading this, you know, it got the juices flowing. It got me thinking. And it was a very good book for the time. I hadn't read it. I don't know what the dialogue was. I don't, you know, I don't know if I'll like it now, but it did influence me when I was in high school. And the description for this is, and I didn't know this, it didn't really trigger anything for me back then. But here's the sort of little write up at the back. And it says, on November 22, 1963, three great men died within a few hours of each other. C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. Wow. Three huge men, right? Through three icons, really. All three believed in different ways that death is not the end of human life. Suppose they were right. And suppose they met after death. How might the conversation go? So this is basically all three of these people, Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley, sitting down and talking to each other after they have died. And this is sort of a dialogue put together by Peter Krift. Interesting at the time for me. It stayed with me. You know, it's followed me around for 30 plus years, right? So it's probably overdue for reread. Another book that I read, and I don't know if I read this one before the next one or the other one before this one, but they came out of around the, I'm going to go by the date that they came out on. So the other book is Robert Anton Wilson's Wilhelm Reich in Hell. Wow. What a great book. And I knew about Robert Anton Wilson. I've read some of his essays, some of his articles and stuff like this. And I've listened to a lot of his lectures and discussions and conversations. And if you don't know Robert Anton Wilson, this might be a okay place to start. I don't know. The place that really got me hooked on Robert Anton Wilson is sort of a 13 hour or seven hour audio interview with Robert Anton Wilson and it's called Raw Explained. Robert Anton Wilson explains everything. Raw show was ignorant. I think it's a double title like certain things, right? And this book was fantastic really. And there's actually a musical of this available online, sort of along the lines of Rocky Horror Picture Show. I think I've watched the musical once all the way through, but I enjoyed reading it instead of watching the musical. I was being distracted by the extravagance of it, right? And this is basically sort of a play Robert Anton Wilson wrote about Wilhelm Reich's persecution. And if you don't know Wilhelm Reich, it's worth looking into. Okay, very much worth looking into. He's one of the few people, actually one of the only people that I know of, and I went through and I highlighted some of the stuff in this book. But Wilhelm Reich is the only person that I know of that both Nazi Germany and the US government have burned his books, right? And that's a serious title to have. And the US government basically threw him in jail for whatever reason, you can look that up if you want. For basically, well, whatever reason you might think they threw him in jail for, whoever you choose to believe. But basically a week before he was due to be released, he died of a heart attack in jail. So that really intrigued me about this book. And I read this book and it's fantastic. Okay, has a lot to do with our society, persecution, our perspective of the powers that be and whatnot, right? So Robert Anton Wilson's Wilhelm Reich in hell. And you can follow that up if you're interested because it's along the same theme is the third book is Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. This book was fantastic. It revealed a lot about what happened in Oklahoma City with Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City bombing, right? A lot of stuff. There's no way you would have got from mainstream media. You won't even get it now from the mainstream media, right? And it's very good. It doesn't give you everything that I believe that took place in my opinion. I did a little research into this. Oklahoma City bombing and Waco were two huge events in the 1990s. They, in large part, really shaped the present day United States. Huge, huge events. The Waco, what happened in Waco, I was in a comic book store at the time when that went down, the final fire and murder of multiple people, right? And multiple families. It was insane. It was incredible. And as you can imagine, the conversation, the comic book show when this went down was absolutely brilliant in an analytical kind of a way, right? I stayed in the comic shop for a few hours talking with people and browsing call max and checking out the news at the time. That's all we had on the internet, right? So this is a very good book if you want to get a good feel of the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh and one of the main events that has sort of shaped the United States. Okay, Gore Vidal's perpetual war for perpetual peace. How we got to be so hated. Very important book. Should be in curriculum, in schools, right? Now, another book that I read, it was a gift from some friends and it's a tourist book, really. But it's Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places. I read most of this. It was a good read. It took me a while to read it. I would read sections and stuff like that. So it's broken down. Which edition is this actually? This is the fifth edition. So I don't know when it came out. It came out early 2000s, I believe. It came out early 2000s because this is talking about, it's got September 11th forward in it. Okay, and the table of contents. Let me just read some of the stuff. The table of contents, just the main sections and it's broken down like an index, right? All the grays or the basically different sections. So it provides a list of maps, the author, what is dangerous, what is danger, what danger awaits the weary traveler, making the best of nasty situations, business travelers, tourist bribes, dangerous jobs, dangerous diseases, drugs, getting arrested, guns, intelligence, kidnapping, landmines, mercenaries, terrorism, adventure calls. So those are that's sort of the first section of the book, right? And then it goes to dangerous places and it covers a few different locations, right? So it gives dangerous places, dangerous places, short and sweet, sort of a summary description. And then it lists the places that they consider to be rated based on their rating system, the most dangerous places in the world. And this is in the early 2000s, right? Early mid 2000s. Afghanistan, Algeria, the Balkans, Chechnya, Colombia, Georgia, Great Lakes, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, so Central Africa, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Liberia, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, South America, Sudan, the United States of America, Yemen, Zimbabwe. Those are the most dangerous places in the world based on this book, certain locations. I didn't agree with, by the way, I didn't agree with everything that was written here, obviously. But I found the information informative, right? And there's a lot of stuff that I didn't know that had happened. And some stuff that was, in my opinion, could be looked at as misinformation or disinformation. I don't know, this up to you, however, when you want to think about it.  So, you know, it's got a little bit at the end of how to protect yourself, save the world, save yourself and whatnot. It was a good book, informative, good, I don't want to say a little summary about what's going on in the world, but good little perspective of some of the stuff that's going on in the world. Worth having, anyway. I don't know what edition it's in now. The internet provides everything you need to know that's in here, really, now. But at the time, it was worth having. And at the time, there's a lot of stuff available online as well, of course. To a certain degree, more so than now, because there's less sensors in play. The fifth book I want to show you is a more recent book that I read. And I read this basically when it first came out within a few months, so it's first coming out, I believe. And it came out in 2012. And you would have, if you watched my videos, you would have seen this book, me mention this book multiple times. We've read a little bit about this with Josako. But Days of Destruction, Days of Revolts by Chris Hedges and Josako. And it's basically, you know, text with comic pages, Josako being sort of the pioneer of comic book journalism and articles, essays written by Chris Hedges, where he travels around the United States and talks about basically sacrifice zones. Sacrifice zones being places that we've sacrificed for the economy, for our current economic system, right?  Chapter one is Days of Theft, Pine Ridge, South Dakota. If you don't know anything about Pine Ridge, look into it. Wow, wow, wow. And it's got Days of Siege, Camden, New Jersey. Chapter three is Days of Devastation, Welch, Virginia, West Virginia. Days of Slavery, Emokoli, Florida, I can't pronounce the names. Days of Revolt, Liberty Square, New York City. And that was Occupy Wall Street, right? During those times when they interviewed some of the people. And it's a very good book to read if you want to know what's going on presently in the United States, the present politics and geopolitics, foreign policy in the United States, and how it's played out in other parts of the world and come back to Ruse at home, I guess, is that the saying? Very good book if you want to know the mindset, the general theme, the feel of what's going on in the streets in the United States. Highly recommended, highly recommended. Lots of information, there are lots of statistics. And so those are the five books. And one other thing I'll mention is, as I mentioned before, I've read a lot of C.S. Lewis and I've read a lot of essays, not just by C.S. Lewis but multiple people. I've read a huge amount of essays. I love reading essays, which are basically sort of summaries of books to a certain degree if you want to think about it. That's why I love watching lectures and interviews and stuff like this, right? And there's been a lot of essays that have stuck with me and have influenced me. And there's been a lot of books that have stuck with me and influenced me. These are the five that have stayed with me this long. There have been others. There have been others that I wish I still had throughout the years, the moves, they didn't make it. But let me tell you about one essay that I read by C.S. Lewis that I read a few times in the 80s and 90s. I haven't read it since the 90s, early 90s, but it stuck with me and it influenced me and I liked it a lot. And it's a title of sort of a compilation of essays that book they put together and is Fern, Seed, and Elephants by C.S. Lewis and other essays. And this is sort of a paperback I picked up in 80s. And I think it's in the 80s, pretty sure it's in the 80s. And it's got multiple essays on here. It's got essays on membership, learning in wartime, on forgiveness, historicism, the world's last night religion and rocketry, deficiency of prayer. And the last essay is Fern, Seed, and Elephants and it's an address that he made. I forget where he made it. Might have been to a graduating class in a certain year or something like this. Okay. So that's five books and one essay that have stuck with me, that have influenced my political perspective on the world. And I like the way they modified or they amplified, improved, provided additional information to what I thought I knew or what I didn't know. Okay. Other than that, in the next few videos, we're going to talk a little bit about economics. I'm still putting this stuff together, going through my notebooks and condensing, compiling, and sort of organizing stuff that try to make it coherent and make it relevant to what we're going to do with ASMR math, some of the mathematics stuff that we're going to do, which is going to directly follow the economic stuff, which is a short little discussion on percentages. Okay. That's it for now. I'll see you guys in the next video.


All right. Hey Spartans.  I want to thank Miss Johnson and staff for reaching out and asking me to do this. I wish I could be there in person. If you all figure out a way to teleport or transport in a way easier way. Let me know. We can do more of these. But I'm very excited to be here tonight and let's go ahead and get started. Share this here. All right. So my credentials are licensed mental health practitioner and certified professional counselor. And what those basically mean is it just allows me to offer counseling and therapy to students faculty staff. Anybody that may need my service. And I am so very, very, very happy to be present in Boyd County supporting education and being able to work with kids and teachers. So this is a recent photo of me on a trip that I made to New York. And I think it's so funny because I did kind of a lot of touristy things and one of them was going to the Empire State Building. And the day that we picked it was rainy and snowy. And there was no view. There was absolutely no view on the lookout tower. And this is me just reminding everyone that even when you can't see the views life will go on it will be okay. It will be okay. All right. So let's dive in. We're going to talk about anxiety. So anxiety is essentially a mental and physical reaction to perceived threats. Those threats can be real or imagined. I think it's really important to know when we're talking about anxiety that it's a very real condition it's a very real thing that at some point in time I think everyone experiences and symptoms can range depending on what the person is experiencing. So but some symptoms can include uncontrollable worry, upset stomach, sleep problems, poor concentration, mental tension, avoidance of fear. Honestly, those symptoms can can be expanded. Avoidance oftentimes it presents itself as physical symptoms so upset stomach, headache, desire to want to go home, and avoidance of tasks, avoidance of things that may be anxiety provoking. So on the other side of the screen here I have this interesting upside down triangle looking thing. And a lot of my background is in trauma and understanding how trauma impacts the brain. And Dr. Bruce Perry, very, very formative man in terms of shaping my understanding of trauma in the brain. He developed this visual that I, I kind of use in all my presentations because I think it is so profound. And it is so important for us to understand how the brain is functioning to explain some of these symptoms that people experience. So I'm going to take a crack at explaining this to you all and I hope it makes sense. If not, shoot me an email and I'd be more than happy to expand on this. So we're going to start at the brainstem, the red part. This, this is the first thing to develop in the brain, and is the most essential for us to be alive, right. It performs all of those automatic functions that we don't have to think about so it reminds our heart to beat it reminds our lungs to breathe, regulates our body temperature, blood pressure, all of those really really critical parts to just simply staying alive. As we move up to the yellow area. This is called the mid brain, or sometimes the diencephalon. But this part of the brain is really helping us make sense of our environments, helping us kind of differentiate between what's happening on the outside world and the inside world. Other things that are really essential for that part of the brain are appetite and sleep we're going to talk about sleep in a moment, but very, very essential to meeting needs in that area of the brain as well. And then we move up to the green area in this area, you may have heard fight flight freeze, or the lizard brain, the limbic mid brain brainstem are often clumped together and referred to as the old brain or the lizard brain. Again, the functions of these parts of the brain is truly just survival, it is getting through. The brain part of the brain is where those essential elements that keep us safe reside. There's an important part called the amygdala. I always kind of refer to it as as the brave warrior in your brain, or the thing in your brain that's scanning for danger it's it's looking for perceived or real threat. And then if the brain responds to that, it will respond.  Okay, I know there's, they say you're not supposed to swerve, but it's, I always do I can't help it. Because the limbic part of my brain takes over. This is, whoa, danger, Sonia. I slam on the brakes, I try to avoid everything my heart is pounding outside of my chest, and my stomach drop drops to my toes. So, slowing that process down a little bit what is essentially happening is the limbic areas responding to true perceived threat, and immediately releases adrenaline to all of the functions in my body that is necessary for survival. It's sending adrenaline to my muscles to be strong. It's sending hyper focused my eyes to be able to truly see and and find a path towards safety. And it's, it's cutting out those functions that are not 100% necessary for survival in that moment moment. So it's slowing down or stopping digestion. Oh, and another thing it does is it speeds up your heart rate in order to increase your blood flow to your muscles get things working right. So if you can recall a time where you've experienced that you may be able to say, Wow, yeah, I definitely experienced some of those physical symptoms. And it takes a minute until my heart slows down and the tingling goes away from my muscles and my stomach doesn't hurt anymore. So that process is critical because it is for survival. But when we're talking about things in school, and how anxiety relates to school, the adults in the room can understand that school is truly a safe place for kids to be. It's an important place for kids to be. And if their limbic areas responding, such as we're seeing a deer out of the corner rides when we're driving. It's really important that that we're supporting students in being able to calm those perceived threats and help them perform at appropriate states of arousal right. So that's the limbic area. The finally the last area that makes us most uniquely human. It is truly the only area of the brain that we have control over is the cortical area. I always when I'm taught I teach this to kids a lot and I always kind of refer to this as the super smart part of the brain. So here we use logic and reason and abstract thoughts and it allows us to formulate opinions and the blue part of the brain is very essential to be online when kids are in school learning. Here's the tricky part though. The brain works from the bottom up. If there's something very, very active or escalated in the brain stone. The brain is going to go right down to survival mode. If there's something not making sense or a little wonky in the mid brain. Everything's going down to the mid brain. If we're having a perceived sense of threat.  Everything restricts access to the cortical part of the brain. If you have, if you can think about a time with your children where they they've done something and you're like what were you thinking and they're like I don't know. I mean the truth is if it was an intense situation they probably weren't thinking because they were really restricted in their cortical region. So that's the ability to use to use logical thought rational thought. Those higher brain elements so that is kind of brain function and nutshell and how anxiety and its function can really get in the way of learning and can also get in the way of daily operational things that that we need in order to be really well functioning people. So we can't talk about anxiety if we don't just touch on test anxiety okay. Test anxiety is a very real thing. People may experience this in different levels and capacities and may have different symptoms associated. But when you take a step back and you think about it. Test anxiety has a lot of elements. So first of all if there is underlying anxiety to begin with this is a perceived threat. Correct. It's it's an intense situation. There are some expectations. But if there isn't perceived threat prior to that and it's just simply the idea of taking a test. You can understand that there's some pressure to perform well. Not wanting to fail the test not wanting to do poorly wanting to do well wanting to demonstrate master mastery of the skills. Some uncertainty. So we are we are creatures of habit. So a little tip that we'll talk about also is predictability knowing what to expect helps us calm down and not every test is the same. In fact every test we take has different content different covering different measures and the uncertainty of that can also cause some anxiety. There are other things that can go along with with test anxiety but I think we can all understand some of the reasons of why it happens in the first place. Some of the physical symptoms that people can can report is feeling really sweaty really hot mind going blank. I'm sure heart pounding outside of their chest again makes sense based on our previous conversation of what happens in the brain when we're we're experiencing a perceived threat. So I want to take a moment to explain to you this triangle here. This is oftentimes referred to as a cognitive triangle. And I'm not trying to steal this this comes from therapist aid from a from a graphic or a handout that I use quite often there. I want to talk you through this because it's it's very simple to explain to kids, and you can do really simple coaching with them. If they're experiencing anxiety or testing anxiety to help them feel a bit more calm. So I'm going to explain this quickly. So our brain works in a nutshell of having thoughts feelings and we do things right. And I simply define each of these so thoughts are things we think thoughts are not always facts. That can get us into trouble sometimes if we're thinking something and it feels like a fact but in fact it's not a fact. So thoughts are simply just things that we think feelings are the emotions that we have or the emotions that we experience and actions are the things that we do. Each one of these can impact the other. So I always use this this example with kids so it right away in the morning my alarm clock goes off and my initial action is to press the snooze button, so I am not ready to get up. And as I'm pressing the snooze button I'm thinking, Oh, I'm so tired and then I'm checking with my feeling and I'm feeling tired.  You have to get up. My action is get out of bed, feeling still tired, and I go back to actions I start my morning routine. Predictability right and routine, and then I'm thinking, Okay, all right, all right, we're getting busy we're getting getting awake, getting oriented to what the temperature is and starting to think about what I'm wanting to be comfortable those types of things. And then by like midway through my morning routine I am starting to think about coffee. I am a coffee junkie so that inspires an action, go to the coffee pot turn it on feeling good. So, with that example you can kind of see how it flows back and forth and how they can, they can interact with one another. And what happens with anxiety is, I think, our feelings and our thoughts get really stuck, and can result in either overaction or underaction. So, for example, if we're thinking on a test I am going to do poorly, or I am not ready for this test, or I am going to fail this test. Just thoughts, not facts. And then that may lead to feelings of anxiety or fear, or feeling very uncertain. What I encourage you to do or to talk to kids about is to challenge those thoughts, thoughts are so powerful. Thoughts can literally change the way that we feel. So, for instance, if you're noticing that a student is feeling nervous, you might say something to them like, I see that you're feeling a bit nervous, I can see that you're a bit nervous. I need you to remember that you have studied hard for this, you have prepared for this, and you will do the best that you can, I know that. Right, you're offering them reassurance. You are challenging that thought in a moment, because where they were originally thinking I'm going to do poorly on this, you're giving them every reason why they will do okay. Right. And going back to only tell them what's true, don't tell them they're going to get a 100 if you know that they're not going to get a 100 right. So, challenging some of those anxious thoughts and encouraging kids to be open about their feelings. They can be nervous or anxious or worried are oftentimes really hard feelings to share, and they can be very isolating feelings. So really encouraging kids to be honest about how they're feeling and take time to role model that. I think one of the coolest things to witness is when kids have those aha moments where they see adults doing something, which gives the students and permission to do that as well. So that's a really supportive skill. I think that's just really really really powerful. And as parents you guys can role model that all the time, whether it's anxious or all the feelings, essentially, you get to role model appropriate ways of handling those feelings and being honest that everybody has these feelings, and it's okay, it's okay to share them, and, and you can get supported in these feelings. It's a good triangle and a nutshell and again it's it's challenging some of those really negative thoughts that lead to anxious feelings or uncomfortable feelings and reminding them to challenge those thoughts to be what is accurate and true and reflect the facts. So I want to talk for a moment about some buffers to anxiety. These can be generalized to anxiety test anxiety any type of anxiety you're experiencing. The first one is regulatory opportunity and what I mean by that is essentially anything that is patterned predictable routines. So, examples might be chewing gum listening to music walking running. What's really behind this is that when babies are in utero growing and developing their senses are still developing but the ways that they can understand and know that they're safe is by their mother's heartbeat. It's felt and heard. And so then when babies are born, what do we naturally do to suit them. We might rock them we might pat their back, we might feed them, all of those things are predictable, repetitive and routine. So, think outside of the box, I mean we all do things right. I bet right now the I could, if I were there scan the room and somebody's tapping their knee, somebody's chewing gum. Somebody's maybe got a pen and they're twirling it. We've all kind of got things that we do. I would share this one. I cannot have pens with plastic caps as evidenced by the little thing that's broken off of this one. So, this is just something that I have gravitated towards naturally didn't really don't realize I'm doing it. But when I have pen caps with the steel little clip thing. I don't know why I do this. I mean I know why I do this but it's just it's regulating for me it makes me feel calm and it's patterned routine rhythmic, it works. So creating a lot of opportunities for kids to experience and engage in those things. So that's just a fancy way of saying challenging those negative thoughts, and asking kids what they're thinking asking them what their, what their thoughts are that are making them feel worried or anxious. And then supporting them through that process of the so that's what your thought is, but what are the facts here and what do we know for certain. And then really really helping them come up with some positive thoughts for what the truth is. Save connection with people that we love. I read a really great book this summer I would encourage you all to pick it up audio audio book at whatever you can. It's called what happened to you is a Bruce Perry and Oprah book. Bruce just talks, basically throughout the whole book about how how loving connection is truly medicine. Spending time with people that we love and care about in a safe way is the best way to help us regulate as human beings and when I say regulate I mean, come back to this state of calm come back to this state of being okay.  And so if I'm saying that word that's what I mean. I'm routine, again, having some predictable elements to their their daily life routine is all about knowing what to expect that is calming. I 100% need that I if I don't have a planner and if or if I don't have a sheet in front of me telling me what my day looks like even though I might have the exact same Thursday that I've had for months now. Good little anxious like I just need to see it to know what's going to what's going to come next, and it's a very calming thing. Offering reassurance offering reassurance whenever possible, and offering realistic reassurance if you don't know that it's going to be okay. Do not say that go off of factual things that you know to be true that can be reassuring statements like we will get through this together. I use that one a lot with kids, especially when they're having really big feelings because it is true, I will be with them until that feeling passes and until they are okay. I will get through this together. I am here to root for you. I love you so much, I will be thinking of you. I know that you will do the absolute best that you can do those types of reassuring thoughts can really do wonders for for calming some of those anxious thoughts. This next one man will I catch a lot of flak for this. I'm truly truly setting some limits on technology, especially on social media and video games. I know there's just not a super ton of research out there on lots of technology time. But professionally my position is less is better, just because our brains and our bodies were not built for the constant inflow of stimulation that technology offers, and especially for young kids. It's a lot. It's a lot and in it in itself, just recently Facebook got in trouble because they somewhat acknowledged that I think was Instagram is damaging for teens mental health, and I 100% see that in my daily interactions with students so I'm not saying that they that students can't spend time on those things but really truly just setting some appropriate limits for the age of your child. Next one is mindfulness. I love it when I ask kids if they know what this is and their response is always the home, which yeah that that's mindfulness but mindfulness is just so much more than that mindfulness can can just simply be being able to notice what's what's going on inside and outside of your body. Just being having this, this level of awareness, where you are increasing your awareness, right. So mindfulness might be recognizing when your heartbeat starts to increase and taking some deep breaths, or noticing when you are feeling anxious and telling a trusted and caring grown up guys tons and tons of stuff on mindfulness on the old internet internet. If you're looking for something specific please reach out to me and I would love to guide you and getting getting those resources but really good stuff out there. And focusing on balance. You know, I don't know why I might know why but I don't know why a lot of people will always ask my opinion about, you know, the best way to raise kids. And I think it all comes back to balance right. I don't think it's super helpful to have kids involved in every single activity. But I also think that being involved in those activities some of those activities is very beneficial for kids. So really truly finding balance and, and what is necessary appropriate for your child. You are experts of your kids and, although I could tell you one thing about your child. You are the experts. So, so know that and advocate for that.  And then finally, this may be the most important one. And that is just getting those basic needs in food, water and sleep. Safe shelter to sleep is the most underestimated tool. In terms of combating any type of emotional or behavioral issue with with a child. Sleep is just such an essential piece of our well being. So, I'll use an example of when we go to sleep. It is like the street sweepers coming through, and it's getting rid of junk that we don't need. And it's filing away or putting in the filing cabinets things that are really important. And when the sweet, when the street sweepers don't come through, then things start to pile up, and it gets really messy, and it doesn't flow it's good. And all of a sudden your streets are packed full of stuff and nobody can get through and then people are getting angry and it's just not a good scene. There are a lot of adults too guys. When we are getting inadequate sleep, our temperaments directly impact how our kids will think and feel and behave. So sleep is so essential. If you have any questions regarding sleep, the American sleep foundation their website has a ton of really great information and resources I would encourage you to check that out. And you can always talk to your pediatrician, they're really great guides of if you have sleep questions or your child is having sleep issues or anything like that. Water, man, it is so important in order for our brains to be at peak performance we need, we need a certain amount of water right. So, making sure that we're getting hydrated, it's just really important. Making sure that we're getting fresh food, making sure that we're getting a good balanced diet we're getting some fruits and veggies and some treats, right it's all about balance, all about balance. There are many many other anxiety buffers out there. But these I think are just some of the most important ones that can be easily navigated with you and your in your children. So, I want to end with some resources. I was going to flood this resources like Sonia you're silly like they are not going to write all down. So if I had top three top three resources for you. One would be a book called Hey Warrior by Karen young I purchased this book, and it does such a great job of explaining anxiety to kids and helping them develop ideas of how to calm that limbic area of the brain to be able to work in a hierarchical region much better. Another sites that I strongly recommends for anything child related really is child mind.org. It's kind of my encyclopedia whenever I have questions or need some guidance on something I'm always looking something up on child minds. They have a really great section on technology as well so if you're looking for what would be appropriate limits for my student, they have all that information on there so be really good. The link is probably my favorite video for teaching kids how to take a deep breath. Deep reading is the number one hated coping skill that I teach the kids, but the reason why I continue to teach it is because it is so helpful when it can be done. And let me explain the science behind it.  And the reason behind that is we have these kind of systems built into our body. So the sympathetic system is that green area fight flight you're slamming on the brakes when the deer is out of the corner your eye. We have the parasympathetic, which is the system in our body that helps put everything back in place it's helping us calm down. It's reminding our hearts it's okay we're safe or good. It sends cues to our stomach. It's okay you can you can digest food again because we're safe or good. So a deep breath is the number one thing that I think if I can teach everyone to do that as a society we would be much calmer. But this YouTube is a puffer fish and the puffer fish is taking equal equal counts breaths in and breath out which is which is fine. But I think it's just a really great visual to help people start getting in the practice of what a deep breath feels like what a good deep breath feels like it's super fun to watch kids are pretty entertained by this. So with that. If you guys have any questions, maybe offer those to Cindy and she can get them to me or city feel free to offer my email to folks I want to make sure that I'm answering any questions that that exist out there. I am in Boyd County every Thursday. And I'm pretty busy. So if you stop by, I can't guarantee that I'll get to chat with you. But anyway, again I want to thank Cindy and stuff for inviting me to come and do this and I hope this presentation was helpful and useful and in a good resource for you so thank you everyone and have a good rest of your evening. Bye.


Hello, everyone. Today, we will discuss computable philosophy, a proposal Lengy and Hong and me made out of our book. So in this proposal, there are tricky ideas is that computing judgments and information are more interlinked than people think of them. The second proposal is that computing and making judgments by programming and setting rules does not scale. So we need to complement them with learning, with inference from observations. So that is like first axis is computation, judgment and information. The second axis is learning how to infer laws and rules from observations. And the third axis is probabilistic thinking, which we'll see is inevitable if we want to do correct inference and robust inference. Those three axes are well-studied within computer science and information science. What we believe is that there, as we discussed in the video on what I was on paper, is that there are more philosophical aspects to be discussed. In particular, when it comes to questions like AI ethics or law itself, if we look at it from an algorithmic perspective and even the scientific method from an algorithmic perspective, there are many illustrations we have in the book for why these three tools could help us discuss aspects like moral philosophy, the value alignment problem we want to align the objective function of an AI with human preferences, et cetera. The side effects of algorithmic decision-making, the good heart slows, what happens, what goes wrong when we maximize a metric and preference and volition learning how to learn not only what people prefer, but what they would want to prefer if they had more time and information. Social choice theory, which was researched by game theory and economics in the past century, but that is increasingly important in algorithmic decision-making and aggregation of preferences between many users, adversarial computing, decentralization, also as an aspect that needs a new toolbox of probabilistic thinking, learning and how to look at computation as a form of judgment and finally like all the questions that are relevant for AI safety, like reward, hacking, credibility, et cetera. We will not discuss all of these, so we'll discuss just the three key aspects of computation, judgment, information, learning and probabilistic thinking and in the end we'll illustrate how they could be useful just by discussing privacy and fairness which are two important questions in algorithmic decision-making. Yeah. Yeah, so this is I think a big program that we have in mind and I think it's very interesting. Like it's really an interesting insight that computer science can give us into what it means to provide a judgment, good judgment, reliable judgment and to command this with more philosophy and stuff like this. And in particular, maybe you can describe a bit by what you mean by computational in general but one important feature is like really this idea of step-by-step reasoning, like very clear steps and also if you explain ahead of time what all these, what the steps are going to be, then this can allow them to analyze the step-by-step procedure, the algorithm that will be used and you can analyze them in many, many respects and arguably also, this is something that has been extremely popular in the history of mankind and that really has changed a lot of the way we do a lot of things, maybe you want to detail this. Let's take a concrete case. It's like something people don't think as a moral issue. If you just type in a search engine, COVID-19 vaccine. So what came first as a result or like what came in the first 10 pages of results, what to show you in the first 10 pages of results is a decision that is algorithmically made with the search engine ranking algorithm but which entails enormous moral consequences because how you would notch 3 billion people about resisting or accepting vaccines for COVID would have consequences on human life. So this is a moral question, this is a philosophical question and it has a very short deadline, half a second, like few milliseconds, the search engine should answer it in a few milliseconds and we tend to think of this as a technical question. Oh yeah, we just show what's most relevant or we just show what's most people are discussing. Is this really what we want to show people in the pandemic? For example, if there's a minority of people initiating a conspiracy against vaccine, should we amplify it just because this minority of people are super active on the platform? Yeah, and also an interesting thing is that when we raise these sort of dilemmas, like I think a very common reaction to all of this is to say that if it's a very difficult dilemma, we tend to postpone the decision for this, we just say that it's a difficult dilemma and we need to be discussing this. And it's a good point that we cannot make a decision right now, but what we can do as of right now is try to think of how we're going to come up with a decision just like saying, we'll have to discuss it. It's not really an algorithm that has the right properties of coming up with eventually a decision and a good decision possible. When we have this dilemma, it's important not just to leave the question open like this, but to, and it's also important not to just take this decision like with our intuition right now, but instead like we should try to think of a future step-by-step procedure and algorithm and propose different algorithms that will eventually make a decision because we need to eventually make a decision especially for problems like results to search queries. Yeah, I think a good illustrative example of that is something we discussed previously concerning the Milchian Bandit problems and clinical trials. So here we are in a case where continuing as algorithms are right now is an ethical problem because all this decision by algorithms have ethical implications. And also the solution we implement to figure out how to do better. We'll have to be done. So we'll have to come up to a satisfactory answer as quickly as possible while certainly making modification to these algorithms. So it's very important to correctly decide what procedure we implement to reach this sort of ethical agreement for social networks. Interestingly, historically this has been, like for a long time you could imagine that this was difficult to think about these things because like an algorithm has to be described at least and to be explained to another. So like I guess back in the old days like it was more like transferred as traditions from one to another. But at some point like Menkant invented writing and the invention of writing completely revolutionized the game in the sense that people would be able to write down the algorithms to be followed. And these algorithms by now we call them the text of growth. So they are not like very rigorous algorithms as the ones you would tell your computer to execute. But they are like the beginning of this algorithmic approach to decision making in particular to judgments in the case of the law. What by having this algorithm written down you have several nice properties like one of them is that the same law can be applied to different settings. So you have the same law. So we sometimes call the procedure or fairness to apply the same algorithm to different people. But you also have other properties like for instance now that the law is written like the algorithm is written, you can analyze it, you can verify it. So you can say to the judge, well, wait a minute you did not judge me according to the algorithm. You can talk about this. You can also improve upon it. They can say, oh yeah, the current version of the law has this flow that this it makes this decision in this case. And like most people maybe think it's not good. So we can change the law. We can improve the algorithm. So these are all features of written laws and of algorithms that have been a major breakthrough in the history of judgment. So maybe the takeaway message from this part is that if someone tells you they don't want to be judged by an algorithm, ask them if they prefer to be judged by law or by the mood of a judge that does not tell them on which basis they judged. Like if the judge tells you like, you are guilty because I think you are guilty. And if a judge tells you, you are guilty because in the law of this country if you put your car in front of the police station for more than three hours and then there is an accident in the police station then you have to go to jail. So if this is an algorithm, if then you realize like most people prefer to be judged by an algorithm that is transparent stated public that you can know in advance ideally or that you are assumed to know in advance. So actually being judged by an algorithm is historically a progress that we made thousands of years ago.  That's the real problem. It's not being judged by an algorithm. It's being judged by an intractable by a non-readable, very long complex algorithm. Yeah. And this is already the case for the law as well. Like the tests of law have become like they are transparent in the sense that the text is fully written somewhere but they're not transparent in the sense that it's very hard to interpret the law correctly. And also just because it's long but also that because it's, you see the terms. And by the way, like even if you go to this example we like to give thousands of years ago in all cases you were judged by an algorithm. This algorithm is either the if else if you steal one cow you have to pay the equivalent money of one cow. So this is an algorithm. And then there is the other algorithm which we call the mood, mood of the crowd the mood of the judge. It's not transparent. It is an algorithm. It is a decision-making process. It's very chaotic. You can't predict it. You can't anticipate it. So you always prefer the short clear transparent algorithm if this, then this, if this, then this. So there's nothing, actually there's nothing new. We always preferred transparent clear stated algorithms to obscure chaotic, non-transparent algorithms. Yeah. Yeah. And also sometimes for certain algorithms you can prove properties. So for instance, if you take the Gale-Cher player algorithm that's used to judge whether a student will go to this university or this other university then we know like mathematicians have been studying this algorithm. And we know that, for instance, it has some nice properties. For instance, it leads to so-called stable matching. So I won't go into the details, I guess, but essentially it has these nice properties like incentive compatibility as well if it's going the right way. And this can only be done if you have a known algorithm. It's very hard to predict the properties of the mood of the crowd of a single human. Yeah. Now, having said this, there's one limitation to the law which is the fact that it has to be written by humans and we humans are very smart and all but we also are limited in our connection and we often have trouble imagining cases that have never occurred before in the past and also like the world is getting more and more complex or it's getting harder and harder to design the right algorithm to judge in case in societies. And that's where instead of just writing things down we often rely rather on the brain of a judge than on the law as it is written. And this has an explanation again in terms of computer science, particularly in terms of what is known as the Solomonov complexity, sometimes also known as the Kolmogorov complexity which is defined as the shortest algorithm in terms of like the description of the algorithm. So the shortest texture of law that is able to do what we want to be doing. And there are some strong arguments like from Turing in particular that there are many things that cannot be shortened like there are probably a good texture of law does not fit in a book of two or 300 pages and maybe it does not even fit in a 1000 book of 1000 pages because the world is just really complex in a very meaningful sense. In this case, we cannot have written laws that contain everything. We have to do something else. And this was proposed by Turing in 1950 and it's the idea of doing learning. So instead of writing everything's down we bring you to learn through experience what ought to be done. And this also occurs in the case of the law and it's known as choice prudence. And by the way, this occurred also in science and it's known as the scientific method. Like before the revolutionary idea that we call the scientific method started to be of course it existed for at least 10 centuries but it took off, it took off with the Galilean revolution Kepler, Newton and so on and then we started inferring rules of nature from observations. And this is where human knowledge took off because it just scales more than having someone sitting down like a wise philosopher and then stating the rules of the universe. Yeah, it doesn't scale. Yeah, so the case of science is interesting because you have the text of the laws of nature that have been written down more and more and we have improved these algorithms as we move. But then we also went further, we asked ourselves how should the text of the laws of nature be written? Like how should we come up with the right laws of nature? And this led to sort of meta-algorithm or there are still algorithms but they are learning algorithms. They are algorithms about how to find out about the laws of nature. And this is also known as epistemology. So that's why there's also a natural link here between computer science and especially learning theory and epistemology and philosophy. Learning is, well, it took off. The bottleneck of learning was really to have a lot of data because you need a lot of data to do learning but you also need a lot of computational power to do the computations of the learning algorithms. And also you need like a large memories and stuff like that in machines to do these things. But once you have all of these things, it turns out that learning is much more efficient than well, you can do this in human brain as well but like learning is much more efficient than just writing down the text of laws because writing down by humans is just too hard. But it also comes with some disadvantages like you compare it to the empty set sometimes. So there's no algorithm that humans have written that's able to recognize a cat with 99% accuracy for instance. So when you're saying that the algorithm to recognize cats has some flaws for instance, it's not as transparent. It's not really transparent. Well, you're actually comparing this to the empty set in a sense. But still they could say now we have these algorithms or these judges that learned from past experiences what they should, how they should judge in the future. And these algorithms are now too complex to be studied using the mathematical tools that we usually use for small algorithms. And so it's harder like there are more black boxes there are harder to understand. And this is a limitations but it's a limitation that's inherent to learning and that's like you cannot do without learning at least for some tasks. And like this creates just new challenges. Yeah, and that needs to be to be faced the verification of learning algorithms of algorithms that have learned is much harder than of algorithms that we designed to be analyzed. Maybe again here. I don't know if Louis wants to say something about the learning. Go ahead. No, no. Just wanted to conclude this part with like again a simple takeaway message if you're just like first time exposed to these ideas is that like maybe the takeaway you should keep here is that hand programming rules does not scale. Like that's maybe the main key insight of Turing is that we could not sit down and start writing rules like if this do that, if this do that, if this do that and produce a smart set of rules, a smart algorithm. Our reason is a set of rules. So Turing realizes that if we want to speed up the programming of an intelligent algorithm we need this algorithm to be adaptable. So it has like if this or this or this and this like those conditions are could be tweaked could be modified. Depending on what observations have been made. So modifying the conditions of the if and s with respect to the observe like I observed that when I do this four times I get this results but then I had a new experience where I only need to do it three times. So maybe this four, the parameter four could be moved a bit down. And then I realized that 3.5 is on average better. So the algorithm needs to have some parameters that can be modified depending on the observations or the experiments. And Turing argued that this is faster, more efficient and this is realistic. We can have a program within our lifetime that becomes intelligent in some sense of intelligence like realizing an objective if we let it learn from data. And if we want to hand program it it will take us a very, very, very, very long time of writing rules. And this is more or less what happens like you take a task like image recognition for four decades or five decades people were trying to come up with handwritten rules. Okay, if there's a polygon like this and then you look at the shape and this is the nose, et cetera, then this is a nail.  Then it is probably a one and this did not work. But if we feed an algorithm many data points and let the algorithm like have what we call a learning algorithm so that it can change the parameters. Now we achieved, of course we're not yet there but we have, for example, algorithms in Facebook that recognize faces and they recognize that this is Louis and this is Katrina and this is et cetera. And those algorithms clearly we could not have obtained them by handwriting if this do that, if this do that. But then we just let them learn from data and this idea is very old. It's from 1950, it was stated by Alan Turing. And this is the key idea behind learning. Learning just scales better than programming. So if we want to write algorithms, if we want to write laws, we need to complement programming by learning and sometimes we mainly need learning. And arguably in the context of law, it happened also. We call this jurisprudence. I think in English also jurisprudence in French where like you observe cases and you make up rules based on cases that pleased everyone so to say. We observe that when we punish a killer with this punishment, there is no riot. They're like, everyone is happy with this punishment or almost everyone. When we punish the killer with this punishment, people are not satisfied, the family of the victim are not satisfied, clearly this law need to change. So this is a learning process, writing law itself is a learning process. And this is again another point where law and algorithmics meet just like they met initially thousands of years ago. Another point I'm thinking of would correspond much to the first section of the podcast, but is that no, I'll give you two ways to think about the way we write laws. This is a discussion I've had with Gilles Dewey who told me this which I find very interesting. Like essentially you can think of the law as either an algorithm, that's what we've been discussing so far. Another way that people sometimes feel like writing the law is as specifications, like this must happen, this must happen, this must happen. This is not an algorithm. Like this is just the things that you want your decision to satisfy. And the annoying thing with this law with specifications, but the good thing is that it's arguably easier to write specifications like you can just say, oh yeah, this should be like this. But the trouble with the specifications is that well, sometimes the set of specifications describe an empty set meaning that all the specifications want to put, you want the law to satisfy means that there's no decision that can satisfy all of this decision. And that's why, yeah, I think it's at least interesting to not just stop at specifications, which arguably is a lot of what people are doing when they discuss guidelines for AI or if you call it AI constant, they will say that the good AI needs to satisfy this, this, this, this, and this. And I think it's useful, but it can only be seen as a first step because like eventually I think we need an algorithm to know what should be decided and not just like what the specifications are. Yeah, it's something I find interesting. Also like if you have an algorithm, you can also analyze like other things like it's computation time because we know from like enjoying enjoying the hearting point that just determining if there is a solution to a set of specifications, if there is a decision X such that this and this and this, this is a statement, it's a conjecture. And we know from Turing that determining if this conjecture is true or not or has a proof or not is undecidable in general. Meaning that there's no algorithm that achieves this all the time. So that's another argument for why we should think in terms of algorithms rather than just specifications. The third tone to discuss is probabilistic thinking which is clearly critical in the case of the court of law. Even though it's been forbidden in the UK after some, the thing is the problem is that a lot of people are including myself are very hard, have a very hard time thinking probabilistically, so it is just very, very hard. But arguably it's also very critical. So the way sometimes things are phrased in the context of law and of science is people would talk about proofs. And if you think about this, well, proofs are only well-defined in mathematics but in the context of science or in the context of law, what we have is more evidence like we have data essentially. And based on this data, we can infer we do the learning from this data, we infer what is more likely to have occurred or not. But you never get to any point of certainty because it's always possible that there's some like explanation that we have no thought about that's much more complicated. And actually these more complicated or unforeseen explanations are arguably quite frequent in the case of the law. So you need to take into account this uncertainty and you need to reason with uncertainty to come up with decision. So instead of saying if the person is guilty then we should do this and saying if the person is innocent then we should do this, which sounds very good. But in practice, you never get to this state. Like you should think in terms of like, well, even how likely it is that he has done this and this, what should be decided for this person? This would be much more probabilistic thinking. And you might think it's very weird in the text in context of law, but yeah, sometimes you just don't have enough data and it becomes even more critical in many params. For instance, that involve a lot of uncertainty, for instance, for the COVID situation. So what should be answered when someone is searching COVID vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine on Google, for instance, this is a very, very complicated question because also we don't know so far like how long it's going to take to have the vaccine, how dangerous the vaccines are going to be. Are they going to be produced a border at scale? There are lots of open questions and what you're going to reply today to these questions is very important to prepare the population for what's coming next. And so you need to make a decision right now, despite the huge uncertainty on what's going to come around like in the next month. Yeah, one example for this one was the, one of the latest study on the hydroxychloroquine that was retracted a few weeks after. So because there is a possibility that when you see a study, it was actually not the high-quality information that you expected, but sometimes quite often it is actually the high-quality information that you expect. But basing a decision based on this kind of evidence, which as Lesse is not a clear proof that will tell you 100% what is the behavior to adopt. So you should treat this as an evidence knowing the possibility that it was actually, there was actually mistakes on the process of creation of this evidence. And that's why also a much stronger evidence that we should look at is things like meta-analysis or the global context in which the whole science is produced. And without this probabilistic thinking in mind, then we get into a mistake either being absolutely convinced that the authors of this study are trying to manipulate the result due to conflict of interest or being on the other side fully convinced that the hydroxychloroquine treatment is absolutely bullshit. So there should not be any, we should not be at any end of these extremes. Like we should consider every piece of evidence as something that moves slightly our probability estimate of what are right decisions to take a given the situation. Yeah, yeah, so there's a lot of work and it's very hard to be fair that we need to improve these are kids really critical for better decision-making to improve in terms of probabilities, probabilistic thinking in particular estimating more correctly the probabilities of different events. And then there's this other side of probabilistic thinking which is now that you have this in society, what should you do? And one thing that is very hard but you really should really be done is to not reflect only in terms of the most likely scenario. Like it's very tempting to say, well, I believe this and you forget that you doesn't mean that you fully believe it and there may be like a 5% chance that the alternative scenario occurs. And this is particularly critical in the case of pandemics, for instance, because if you were back in February or January, let's say, 2020 for those who watch this in the future, then there were different scenarios and maybe you could imagine that the more likely scenario for the COVID-19 outbreak but then not yet a pandemic was that it would not be a pandemic. And maybe right now you could say that maybe in 2021 there's like probably the most likely scenario is that there's not going to be a pandemic of another virus or another disease that's much worse than the COVID-19. That's the most likely scenario. But we should not think in terms only of the most likely scenario and we should prepare for the possibility that things go bad. And particularly we should prepare for this if the probability of this thing going very bad is not too small. If it's one person, arguably, of something extremely bad, it's already huge. But if it's like 10 to the minus 20, well, it's negligible. And there's a big difference between 10 to the minus 20 and one person, but it's very hard for us humans to make this distinction because we tend to confuse, to consider that these two are just unlikely scenarios. Yeah, maybe to illustrate the difference. If something that has one person chance to happen every year out of 1,000 years, it will nearly happen for sure. But something that has 10 to the minus 20 chance to happen every year out of 1,000 years, it will nearly not happen for sure. Yeah. Nearly for sure, not. Yeah, yeah. And so the decision-making has to exist into account and sometimes the safety mindset, trying to make sure that you compute the probabilities of very, very bad scenarios. And if this probability is not that small, then you should prepare at least a plan for if it occurs, and maybe even plans to reduce this probability. Mm-hmm. Maybe also, so one thing about probabilistic thinking that is really overlooked, including a people who work in probabilities. The same thing we keep saying about us, people working in computer science, we neglect how epistemologically deep concepts we have in computer science can be and can be applied outside computer science. So I would recommend the book of Brian Christian and Tom Griffith's algorithms to live by, in which illustrates this fact. Actually, for probabilistic thinking to live by, there is a 200 years old book written by Simon Laplace, which is called Essay Philosophiques sur les probabilités, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. And it's like in some chapters, you could see the preliminary version of, for example, a lot of the works that has been done in the 20th century about cognitive biases, for example. And Laplace called, like today we call them cognitive biases, Laplace calls them illusions in estimating probabilities. And he illustrate that with Leibniz, for example, being biased towards what is common and what is familiar to him and what has been told to him in his childhood and trying to see it in phenomenons that has nothing to do with the, like Leibniz once wrote to the Chinese emperor, with the Chinese emperor like Max, and tried to convince him of Christianity using a phenomenon in series, like sums of series by telling him, look at like you can have one out of zeros and this is creation. Just like, and then Laplace goes on more brilliantly than what I just have said, like I'm totally not reflecting how clear the statement of Laplace was, just like showing like how much when we're like used to something and exposed to something during our childhood or during our life, we tend to be biased for it, for confirming it and seeing it everywhere we look. He could also like, and then also like he's giving examples, like for example, he's given the example of slavery and ghasts in India as something like people normalize because it's common and then he goes on to expose why frequency, commonality are not valid epistemic arguments. So if something is frequent or if something is common, that doesn't mean it is okay, either morally or epistemic. It's like commonality is not valid epistemic as an epistemic argument or as a moral argument. And of course he also does a lot of connections with moral philosophy. And unfortunately this work is really overlooked by people who work in polities. I was never told this course. I discovered it 10 years after my, more than 10 years, 12 years after my undergrad, where I studied polities. Yeah, maybe I'm not going to make a lot of friends by saying this, but I think this is the best book in philosophy ever written. It's really, really fantastic. Like I really highly, highly recommend it. And I just want to say to quote, well, let me choose two sentences. I was going to say one, but I mean people put two sentences from this book. The first one is, the theory of probabilities is basically just good sense reduced to computation. Wait. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. But it's a very bold claim, if you think about it. Like hear more good judgment than good sense or common sense. Yeah, maybe good judgment. Translate it into common sense. Translate it into good sense. Well, good judgment maybe is better, but yeah, it's a matter of transition. But I think this quote is like really, really, like it's really, really bold. Like I think it's, and I think it's very, very accurate. I think it's like really a lot of food for thought. It's really also aligned with what we've been saying. Like it's computation. You can reduce things to computation. You've done like 99.99% of a job in a sense. Well, it still had to reduce it to effective computation, I guess. But it's really, really important, I agree, this book and the theory of probabilities and his insight. And just like the other quote I wanted to give is that there is no science but other than the sense of probabilities, more worthy of our meditations and whose results are more useful. Yeah, it says better what I think. So maybe just to conclude, we'll illustrate all of what have been said now with the, well, of course, like we will be superficially discussing fairness and privacy. There are very, very, very complex problems. Like, and unfortunately, some researchers tend to feed them as like, just like we can just tackle them with some solution and then they are solved. They're like privacy and fairness are not as tractable as, I don't know, let's say, proving convexity of a loss function. Like, yeah, sometimes we, like, those are very, very complex topics. So obviously we're not broadly discussing them or just like superficially discussing them just like through a narrow angle, which is how probabilistic thinking helped us in the past decade, improve the way we think about privacy and fairness. So maybe we can start by differential privacy, which is maybe more mature now, 10 years old or more than 10 years, like 12 years old at least. And then we can move to fairness, which is even more, even younger. But it builds up on some of the reasoning that has been made in differential privacy. So I don't know if you want to go with that, Lulee or Lulee? Yes, the idea of differential privacy is that when some of your data is, or it's going to be like, instead of releasing your data, you're releasing some noisy version of the data, such that any observer would be like unable to infer with high probability what your true data were. Well, it's not exactly that, but it has more to do with how much he can change his beliefs, like how much he can update his beliefs by having seen the data that you are releasing. So that would be like the probabilistic interpretation of the concept called differential privacy, which has been the leading, one of the leading concepts for privacy over the last 15 years. The other one being this concept, well, the other big line of thoughts in terms of privacy being this complexity related, like you cipher your message such that no observer that has limited computational power can learn anything from your message. Yeah, so what's important to see here is how actually probability has come up into a corrective, this very interesting definition of privacy. And not only as we were discussing previously, the binary definition of private or not private, but something that is as much private as possible by showing as few as possible bits of information about yourself, bits of information, meaning how does someone change what he thinks of me based on the data he has in coming from me and the less bits of information, the less someone is able to update the probabilities of what he think about me. Yeah, it's also interesting because you can then think in terms of trade-offs. And there's a lot of research about like, if all data remains private in differential privacy terms, then well, you cannot learn anything from the population and this can be a problem in the case of the pandemic. You do want to know like things like what is the fraction of the population that currently has the COVID-19? This is really important information to have to know whether you do log down or whatever. But this information for individuals or for every individual can be also a cause of concern for this individual. So you want to learn but not too much about your population in a sense and differential privacy gives you a way to write down this trade-off and to compute depending on how much you care on controlling the pandemic and avoiding deaths and how much you care about privacy and surveillance. Like, yeah, you have a natural framework to choose your trade-off. Yeah, it is an additional argument against simply having least of specifications for algorithms. And so if you have two specifications, like the algorithm should avoid depth and the algorithm should remain private, then what happened when some specific decisions can avoid depth but by being intruding towards privacy? Should we take these kind of decisions that don't fit one specification but are imposed by the first specification? And the right answer to this, I believe, is to think of it in terms of trade-off. So somehow having an estimation of how important it is to avoid depth, how important it is to avoid privacy and it's great to have a measure of how much actually are we invading privacy with this differential privacy definition to allow, to take decision in a proper way when facing these kinds of dilemmas. So what's interesting also in terms of fairness is that the basic idea of fairness is typically you'd want to guarantee that for two different sub-populations, like some, for instance, the same rate of job offers is done. So the probability of having a job, of receiving a job offer, for instance, given that you're from this population or given that you're from this other population, maybe should not be too different. So this is called group fairness, where you compare fairness between two groups. And there's another idea of fairness which you can think of, which is individual fairness, which essentially means that you are treated given all your data, so every picture of you is rightfully taken into account. And so this would be more about your probability of getting a job given what is known about you, what is publicly known about you, for instance. And it turns out that, and you may say, yeah, like every individual should be judged based on his competence, for instance. And you say, also, like there should be no discrimination between different groups. So you may want both individual fairness and group fairness. So there will be a specification approach. And it turns out that you can prove mathematically that in many cases, or in both cases, these two are incompatible. So the specification approach to fairness would be, well, they cannot have all versions of fairness at least simultaneously. So then you need to specify this more. And again, like to compute the trade-offs and what we will mean by fairness, the language of probability has to be very, very relevant. I had like a few things to add, but I think like just like maybe the takeaway from this part is that it's like, again, we're like very superficially tackled especially fairness because people are just realizing that it is a scientific question. So, of course, it is a socially very important question. But also that it is a very highly scientific question that could be tackled with the scientific method. Maybe just like a side note, sometimes we still like in some communities of the topic is not as highly regarded and as I don't know, proving some conversion speed of stochastic gradient descent on a convex loss function. And I believe this is not, this is something that is not okay. For example, in the machine learning community, to like disregard research in fairness as non-technical, actually it's a, first of all, it's a very highly technical question. And if we go back to the beginning of the podcast, algorithms, like the researcher that gave us the name algorithms was actually trying to improve law. He was a lawyer and he was trying to make law more rigorous, more transparent and this is how we invented algebra and algorithms by trying to improve law. So working on fairness is extremely relevant for computer science and it's extremely, it's an extremely interesting research topic. So just like if there are like grad students watching this podcast, please don't disregard this topic. You shouldn't, it's not like just like, about like please don't do it. Like if you are doing it, you are wrong. Like if you are doing it, you are really disregarding a research question that is highly technical, highly subtle, highly complex and unfortunately seem like very respected researchers disregard the topic. And that's not, that's a bit sad and unfortunate. I hope like now it's just a generational problem. Personally, I didn't experience that with younger researchers mostly. The old generation of computer scientists didn't question, didn't look at these questions as maybe what's happening today. So maybe it's just a generational problem that is going to improve itself with time. There is a very good book written by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns. If my memory is good, Aaron Roth was a PhD student of Sinti Advok. Sinti Advok is the researcher to which we owe differential privacy. So Aaron Roth also worked on differential privacy and Aaron Roth and like she did, so Sinti Advok had a lot of very relevant research and actually has a very broad portfolio of questions that she tackled. She worked in distributed computing. Initially, they were typically computer science but she also gave us the formalism of differential privacy. And now with the researchers like Aaron Roth and others, I'm not sure there is no growing community around the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference by Etienne. We could list, we could go on with the biggest of research, like you just like the conference and look at the proceedings. I don't want to name a few and not name the others but this is obviously like this is a question where probabilistic thinking is very helpful. If you look at the statement of differential privacy, it is a probabilistic statement. So I think we have a video on, at least there is a zeta by video on differential privacy, you could look it up. And the same now applies for Fairness. It's not something you define in a binary way or in a formally like it's not something you can do with first order logic. It's something where probabilities are not a luxury or a necessity. So with that, I think we can just drop up and go. Good. So we'll see you next time. Bye.


Finding your way around How you find your way around a Moodle site depends on the administrator settings, the theme or background used and how up to date your version of Moodle is. This video shows Moodle version 4. Some Moodle sites have attractive front pages, Moodle Cloud sites simply have the login box. Let's log in. Once logged in, you can edit your profile by clicking top right, for example to add a profile image. You can also access any messages and set your own message preferences and notifications and set your notification preferences from the two icons at the top. Often when you log in, you're directed to a personal page called your dashboard. Your admin might have set a different first page or they might let you specify your own choice of page from your preferences. From the dashboard, you see a timeline of any deadlines due from courses you're enrolled in, along with a calendar and from the expandable block draw on the right, a block showing you course items you last accessed. Our Moodle user, Sam, doesn't yet have any activities in her timeline so let's go to another site and look at student Paula. In her timeline, she can view activities by due date or by date or activity type or name. She can quickly see what's overdue and what she needs to do to complete activities and from the expandable block draw, the items she's recently accessed. By enabling edit mode, top right, our student and any Moodle user can add extra blocks if desired and blocks may be moved from the side into the central area and up and down there. Also at the top of the screen is a link home back to the site front page and my courses. Clicking here takes you to the courses you're enrolled in either as a student as here or as a teacher. You can see all courses, those in progress, future or past and starred courses are ones you've bookmarked or favorited from the three dots. You can sort by course name or last accessed and courses can display in list view, summary view or as here, card view. If we click into a course as a student we can access useful links from the question mark icon bottom right which also shows a link to site support. A course index on the left can be collapsed to free up more space. It scrolls independently of the central area and activity completion indicators display at a glance what our student has completed and still has left to do. If she clicks on an item in the course index that activity opens up in the central area. If blocks have been added to the course the block draw can be expanded to access them. From the central area student Paula can access participants grades and competences. Her teacher can also access extra course settings, reports and from more some other useful features we explore in other videos. As you move down the central area the course index follows the path and highlights the location. Activities and resources are neatly defined within cards and the activity completion conditions are positioned on the right of each item. Sections may be collapsed and expanded in the central area and or from the course index.


We offer a proposal aimed at studying the model of the religious behavior and form of the religiosity related to the Iberian society, the worship and rituality, with folks overattaching on the worship spaces in caves, important in the religiosity of these prehistoric societies. They form an active part in the territory with an evident role in community identification. We look at diverse territories and contests between the province of Castellón and the Alto Guadalquivir, which is our spatial area of reference. Our chronological framework is equally broad. However, we focus mainly on the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. We are faced with a diverse map as a fundamental feature. In another vein, in a traditional way, the term cave santuari in Iberian societies has been used globally. This has led to worship spaces in different territories and with different features. We aim to break with this idea. In this way, our approach will be based on two variables. First, as cave spaces in the territory of collective participation, integration, and religious identifications, as multi-sensorial contests with special traits that facilitate the recreation of rituality charged with symbolisms. The in-depth study of ritual aspects linked to this type of space needs to contextualize the role of the landscape. We have talked about this this morning in the religious structure of the Iberian societies. In those societies, the religious system is well connected and tied to nature. The territories have a clear symbolic dimension that was created through landmarks, which were integrated into and even participated in the mythological narration and the construction of the worldviews. It's basic that we integrate the political territory into the study of these liminal spaces. In this way, we believe that ritual mobility is a fundamental variable as it can be incorporated as a social action important to make inference on self-definition, territorial definition, and of course symbolic religious aspect. The pilgrimage was yet another way of appropriating the sacred landscape as a space chart with traditional cultural meaning of the memory of the community. In the Iberian societies, that ritual mobility have included the movement of a large number of people and a large scale of mobility. As such, it's what's necessary to involve the class of mobility in the construction of the collective identity relations in which a strong emotional component would have been involved. In this context, we place the pilgrimage as an initial phase in the complex religious performance and we analyze it as another stage in the ritual process. Thus, the pilgrimage is to sacred spaces and landscapes in suit communication with the divine and turn those places into territories of grace. To analyze the modus of religiosity, as we said, it's necessary to incorporate a study of the case as multi-sensorial spaces. The spaces were the opposite to day-to-day life. They provoked intense emotional responses visiting these natural spaces caused expectation and fear. Sensorial sensibility also creates a feeling of community. This is a change of experience created this and feeling that reinforced the cohesion of the group. Thus, the worship community were emotional communities and emotions motivated the ritual and helped to connect to the specific supernatural powers. Interpretative tendencies such as archeology of senses provide us with a basic source of information. Following this tendency, we must look at the sensorial and emotional experience in the ritual practices. If we analyze this type of Iberian context, we must evaluate first the symbolism of the journey connected ritual that not only took place on way to the sacred space but also at the destination. Secondly, the multisensoriality that is observed in the restricted space of a cave in which sensorial impressions are span, permitting a connection with the hereafter. But there are no universal experiences in the same way as the sensation we experienced when we entered a cave today but independent of our age or our life experience, it's no easy matter to understand how those people in the fourth and third centuries must have a feeling inside the caves. Therefore, we defend the need to contextualize those experiences. As Hamilakis point out, both of the affective sensorial and temporal components must be analyzed alongside the political and other elements in the archeological records. All this sensorial history can be read in the context and in the offering or ritual elements of the archeological record. Emotion and experience, we are also important to analyze the survival of the centuries so as to make them multi-temporal. As Van Dijk remind us, experience is fundamental to memory and it's the memory that legitimizes the continuity of the ritual practices. Okay, so based on the heterogeneous map of the religious manifestation in caves, we wish to approach the models of religious behavior perceptible in these spaces. To our context, we apply recent proposals constructed from the social anthropology that focus on the identification of modes of religiosity. In particular, we base our analysis on one of the most far-reaching theories proposed by Harvey Whitehouse that focus on the differentiation of two models, doctrinal and imagistic. Looking mainly at variables in form, participation, frequency, dissemination, and memory. These models are either contrasting or complementary as ways of measuring religious and ritual actions. The first model, doctrinal, alludes to those practices that correspond to reiterative patterns. And the second model, imagistic, is characterized by the intervention of an intense emotional charge, magnificent in case represented by a small number of people. The heterogeneity of the billion religious landscape allows us to apply identification and classification tests following this theoretical guidance. In this way, we analyze how they were incorporated into the cave religious space, whether they were exclusive models or in contrast, they could be read as complementary. We begin with the idea that the worship spaces in caves were largely governed by the imagistic modes of religiosity. Here we will take a brief look, really brief, look at some examples, all of them on the limits of their territories and distance from the places of habitat. La Piedra de la Aguila, late 4th, 2003 BC, is an example of a ritual space that marks the territorial limits of the Palame in the Sierra de Segura mountains. The worship in this cave was associated with agricultural appropriation rituals, where plant offerings, cereals, and legumes were carbonized and deposited in pottery vessels and spartor saxophones. The repetition of the offerings reflected eternal return to the right and cyclical behavior linking to the recultural calendar. However, the composition of the deposits, not two are the same, tell us that the mechanisms were regulated up to a certain point. The memory was built on the basis of multiple voices and it is not possible to define social hierarchy to the right. Contests such as these reveal strong social cohesion processes on a local scale based on animatistic model. La Cualesapo and La Coamerinae, frequented between the 5th and the 3rd century BC, are ritual spaces in caves located on the southwestern border of the Opidum of Edeta, Valencia. The worship of Covalesapo was organized around a hunting ritual and an offering of deer and obi caprits. The hand and the subsequent offering of animas which are the space and time with an atypical illumination symbolized a key initiation ritual for the Iberian aristocratic societies, which is materializing the pottery image of various territories we have in the image. The ritual practice carried out in Merinel revolved around the repeated offering of animas, cranial parts of young pigs and obi caprits, most of which were deposited in pottery vessels and on plates. This practice may have been related to a wide diversity of rites of facets and protagonists. Although the types of offerings show a certain degree of reiteration, characteristic from the doctrinal mode, the ritual density of the two spaces implies a limited frequency that provides unique experience for certain social groups, thus entering again into the animatistic model. Finally, La Cualesapo is a ritual cave located in Serra del Mariola, in Salicante, in one of the main communication corridors of the central area of Contestania, which marked the border between the territories of La Cobalta and Cabello de Mariola. This cave, frequented between the 5th and the 4th century BC, contained a deposit with a variety of pottery. It stands out a large red pig group where amphora with a sense of juvenile initiation and the assemblage of around a hundred cooking pots, linked to commensality practices or the offering of cultivated products. Also interesting is the small collation of brown rins and hooves, hooves possibly related to the transformation of the body image. When elements of childhoods such as rites were abandoned, the repetition and standardization of the offerings is a good example, again, of the doctrinal model. However, other elements are more related to the animatistic mode, thanks to the sensorial experience produced in some exceptional areas of the cave. Other examples open up diverse possibilities in which properties of both modes of religiosity may have been combined, and the doctrinal mode prevailed over the matistic mode. This is not a contradiction, since they are not two forms of religiosity, but ways of organizing the religious experience and its actions. One example of this combination will be the vast territory of Castulo and its sanctuaries that were worshipped at, after a pilgrimage of several days, Collado de los Cardines a la cual al obera, and contributed to organizing a very large religious community. Different practices with huge importance to the society were held held in them, rites of passage, non-scient rites, aggregation rites, couple and fertility rites. There are variables that define this context from the doctrinal model, but nothing, sorry, from the doctrinal model. So we have the scale of participation on frequentation, which is very large community making several thousand offerings, for example, only spotless, we have like seven thousand, for example, the repeated types of behavior expressed through the bronze iconography, and a clear class distinction. However, from our point of view, these features do not invalidate intense emotional experiences, in which diverse mechanisms were also involved. One example is the person in this context, documented in Castellar of visual phenomena, such as gyrophonies, as César Esteban will show us later, that will have magnified the intense and surreal experience. So the regardings we can make based on the application of these theories on modes of religiosity and rig the analytical perspective, at least within. This reaffirms the need to overcome the passive concept of the materiality and to study in depth aspects to go beyond mere visual representations, investigating the channels of sensorial and emotive empathy. This task involves approaching the cognitive geographies that are fruitful source of analysis in the religious space. The heterogeneity of the very unritual landscape allows us to appreciate how both forms of organizing the religious experience were manifested in contemporary context. In the case, therefore, it is necessary to apply an analysis to different scales that explain their functionality in the territorial context, at the same time as their role in identity building on social level. This is a line of study that we have very outlined here. We are working Carmela, Carmen Reda, and me, Nasi Grau and Ivana Moriz, you can say hi. But we think that we possess a huge potential in the very unritual space we're just starting right now. Thank you. Thank you.