Optimising for Cultural Learning - Velocity EU 2013

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Optimising for Cultural Learning

Chris Read

An Experience Report

Friday, 15 November 13


Learning

•We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. (Aristotle)



Learning

•To know and not to do is not yet to know. (Zen Saying)



Cultural Learning

•Learning through observation or interaction with others. (Lehmann, Feldman & Kaeuffer, 2010)



Cultural Learning

•Allows individuals to acquire skills that they would be unable to independently gain over the course of their lifetimes. (Van Schaik & Burkart, 2011)



3 Recent Biology Research Papers...

Cumulative cultural dynamics and the coevolution of culturalinnovation and transmission: an ESS model for panmictic andstructured populations

L. LEHMANN*, M. W. FELDMAN! & R. KAEUFFER"*Institute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland

!Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

"Department of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Introduction

Learned traits and in particular cultural traits are non-genetically determined phenotypes that are acquiredduring an individual’s lifespan. They are not onlycharacteristic of humans but are also expressed by manyvertebrates (Laland & Janik, 2006). For instance, chim-panzees use sticks to catch prey and stones to crack nuts;and macaques wash potatoes and apples, unwrap andconsume caramels, and can learn a whole spectrum ofother feeding behaviours (Lefebvre, 1995; Whiten et al.,1999; Dugatkin, 2004). Some birds are able to learn newsongs but they can also acquire techniques to bait fish,batter or drop different types of prey on differentsubstrates, use caps to carry water, use twigs to push

nuts, and pull fishing lines to get fish under water(Lefebvre et al., 2002).

There are two basic ways by which an individual maylearn a new trait (Rogers, 1988). First, the trait can belearned individually. Here, an individual interacts withits environment and learns the trait by trial-and-error,lucky accident, insight, or deduction. This can be viewedas cultural innovation, and this process may also dependon the number of traits already carried by the individualsin the population. Alternatively, a trait can be learnedsocially, in which case an individual obtains the trait byimitating or copying it from another individual in thepopulation. This is cultural transmission. This second caseis likely to involve social interactions between individualsin the population, and errors in transmission may furtherincrease the rate of innovation of cultural traits.

Cultural innovation is to cultural evolution whatmutation is to biological evolution: without innovation,cultural traits and therefore cultural transmission wouldnot exist. In humans, these features may have led to the

Correspondence: Laurent Lehmann, Institute of Biology,

University of Neuchatel, Switzerland.

Tel.: 032 718 2234; fax: 032 718 3001;

e-mail: [email protected]

ª 2 0 1 0 T H E A U T H O R S . J . E V O L . B I O L . 2 3 ( 2 0 1 0 ) 2 3 5 6 – 2 3 6 92356 J O U R N A L C O M P I L A T I O N ª 2 0 1 0 E U R O P E A N S O C I E T Y F O R E V O L U T I O N A R Y B I O L O G Y

Keywords:

cultural accumulation;

cultural transmission;

individual and social learning;

innovation;

kin selection;

relatedness.

Abstract

When individuals in a population can acquire traits through learning, eachindividual may express a certain number of distinct cultural traits. These traitsmay have been either invented by the individual himself or acquired fromothers in the population. Here, we develop a game theoretic model for theaccumulation of cultural traits through individual and social learning. Weexplore how the rates of innovation, decay, and transmission of cultural traitsaffect the evolutionary stable (ES) levels of individual and social learning andthe number of cultural traits expressed by an individual when culturaldynamics are at a steady-state. We explore the evolution of these phenotypesin both panmictic and structured population settings. Our results suggest thatin panmictic populations, the ES level of learning and number of traits tend tobe independent of the social transmission rate of cultural traits and is mainlyaffected by the innovation and decay rates. By contrast, in structuredpopulations, where interactions occur between relatives, the ES level oflearning and the number of traits per individual can be increased (relative tothe panmictic case) and may then markedly depend on the transmission rateof cultural traits. This suggests that kin selection may be one additionalsolution to Rogers’s paradox of nonadaptive culture.

doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02096.x

, published 28 February 2011, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0304366 2011 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B Carel P. van Schaik and Judith M. Burkart hypothesisSocial learning and evolution: the cultural intelligence

Supplementary data

ml http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/suppl/2011/02/28/366.1567.1008.DC2.ht

"Audio Supplement"ml http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/suppl/2011/02/25/366.1567.1008.DC1.ht

"Data Supplement"

References

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1567/1008.full.html#related-urls Article cited in:

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1567/1008.full.html#ref-list-1

This article cites 77 articles, 13 of which can be accessed free

Subject collections

(646 articles)evolution (462 articles)behaviour

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DOI: 10.1126/science.1184719 , 208 (2010); 328Science

et al.L. Rendell,Learning Strategies TournamentWhy Copy Others? Insights from the Social

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

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(this information is current as of April 9, 2010 ):The following resources related to this article are available online at www.sciencemag.org

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5975/208version of this article at:

including high-resolution figures, can be found in the onlineUpdated information and services,

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5975/208/DC1 can be found at: Supporting Online Material

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5975/208#otherarticles, 9 of which can be accessed for free: cites 30 articlesThis article

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: subject collectionsThis article appears in the following

registered trademark of AAAS. is aScience2010 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved. The title

CopyrightAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published weekly, except the last week in December, by theScience

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Cumulative cultural dynamics and the coevolution of cultural innovation and

transmission

• Developed Game Theory Model “for the accumulation of cultural traits through individual and social learning”

• “...in panmictic populations, the ES level of learning and number of traits tend to be independent of the social transmission rate of cultural traits and is mainly affected by the innovation and decay rates.”

• “By contrast, in structured populations, where interactions occur between relatives, the ES level of learning and the number of traits per individual can be increased (relative to the panmictic case) and may then markedly depend on the transmission rate of cultural traits.”

J. EVOL. BIOL. 23 (2010) 2356–2369



Social learning and evolution: the cultural intelligence hypothesis

• “The evolutionary version of the hypothesis argues that species with frequent opportunities for social learning should more readily respond to selection for a greater number of learned skills. ...The cultural intelligence hypothesis can also account for the unusual cognitive abilities of humans, as well as our unique mechanisms of skill transfer.”

• “...subjects acquire particular behaviours or skills faster when exposed to skilled role models than they do in a control situation, in which they can independently explore and eventually learn the skill individually”

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2011 366, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0304, published 28 February 2011



Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament

• “...it remains unclear why copying is profitable and how to copy most effectively. To address these questions, we organized a computer tournament in which entrants submitted strategies specifying how to use social learning and its asocial alternative (trial and error)...”

• “However, social learning can also cost time and effort, and theoretical work reveals that it can be error-prone, leading individuals to acquire inappropriate or outdated information in nonuniform and changing environments”

• “The winning strategy (discountmachine) relied nearly exclusively on social learning and weighted information according to the time since acquisition.”

Science 9 April 2010: Vol. 328 no. 5975 pp. 208-213, DOI:10.1126/science.1184719



Summary for us non Biologists:

• Humans are built for Cultural Learning

• Age of what we’ve learnt matters

• We’ve got to put our learning in to practice

• Without direction and guidance, humans will probably go in the wrong direction



Business Environment

• Team Structure (Belbin, etc)

• Team Lifecycles (Tuckman, Linstead)

• Team Interactions

• Business Unit Interactions

• Group Training

• Common Goal & Language



Flat Org Structure •No “corporate ladder”

•No pre defined pay bands.

•Teams Organised Around

•Service

•Business Unit

•Upper Management Access

•Incentives based on

•Individual <

•Team <

•Organisation



Mobility

• Make it easy to change roles

• Colocate related teams and individuals

• Make it easy to access the right people



Knowledge Sharing•“Borrowing” people

welcomed

•Working with vendors (mainly hardware)

•Telepresence & office visits

•Conference Attendance

•Open Source



Specific Examples



Tickets

• Introduced by new IT management team to establish order

• Actively blocked communication between teams

• Reduced visibility of service teams of needs of the clients

• Now used internally by some teams to track backlog - conversations are primary interface



Breaking Down Silos

• Adding social interactions and new groups around concepts breaks things down

• Shared automation/dev team for those too small for their own

• Communities of Practice - Wikis, Discuss

• Embedded Planted Engineers

• Encourage flow across communities in synthetic groups



Do Not

• Spend all your time learning - you need to apply what you’ve learned

• Take anything to extremes



Innovate to Survive



Focus on the Goal

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ronnie_O%27Sullivan_PHC_2011-2.png





Don’t Limit Learning

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_Way_Galaxy.jpg





Thank You


Technology

Optimising for Cultural Learning - Velocity EU 2013