The Police Hunch: The Bayesian Brain, Active Inference, and the Free Energy Principle in Action

hello and welcome everyone this is active inference guest stream 77.1 we're here with Gareth stubs going to be discussing the police hunch so Gareth thank you very much for joining looking forward to your presentation and the discussion we'll have thank you so much for having me Daniel and um it's an absolute pleasure to be on the stream one that I've watched many times um and it's privileged to be able to talk through the paper um I'm hoping to give you a little bit of background as to why I wrote the paper where I've come from a little bit of History talk through the paper itself and then hopefully take some interesting questions um if there's anybody watching or um from Daniel himself who's always got some uh very insightful questions to ask um uh so if you're all right Daniel am I okay to start and get going yeah okay so um a little bit of background so I'm a relatively new academic um I was a police officer for 18 years uh in the UK I was in a Northern English Force um and during my career uh I did a wide range of stuff from like Frontline emergency response blue lights to uh community policing which is building relationships with the Community Gathering intelligence and then um uh working on long-term problem solving through to working in uh National strategy uh I worked for the College of policing and um more laterally the home office at the inspectorate and the inspectorate was an organization where we would inspect police officers and make sure that um uh the standards of policing and how they're recorded and monitored and all that was up to a particular level and for the last uh five years um of my policing career I was studying a part-time PhD uh on the side and you would think uh with me having written this paper it would be in a police decision making or similar and it and it wasn't I actually studied um uh using two theories which were uh representative bureaucracy and social embeddedness uh and it was actually about how uh new police recruits uh navigated the Police recruitment process via the use of their social network um it sounds complicated and convoluted and it was um I essentially spent a lot of time uh trying to figure out how people gained advantage or disadvantage through their current social networks whilst trying to get into the police uh with the Hope um of uh figuring out uh why our um uh recruitment process was so discriminatory um and and I've I've been working on publishing from that PhD uh I've only just finished actually uh over this last maybe two three years uh whereupon I went out to the Middle East to teach police officers now and there's two people that I want to discuss during this stream the first being um uh two different uh groups of people the first one being Professor friston who was just amazing when I contacted him uh and the other being two uh very well-known criminologists called uh Ken peas um and Jason roach and this entire like uh lane or path of study came out of a a discussion with them because I was talking about um very strange decision making that you make while in service so you make decisions that other people look at and say oh that's a very strange decision why did that police officer make that decision but when you speak to the officer they're often able to relate quite a complicated series of past experiences that have led to the decision that um they've made uh and it was K who's again a very well-known criminologist who said to me look you need to read about the Basi and brain he said look this what you're describing is is how the Bas and brain works you know um so he set me on this kind of Down The Rabbit Hole uh Journey if you like um and did a lot of uh reading of the foundational papers around the basing brain which I found very complicated because I didn't have a background in uh mathematics or Neuroscience or cognitive science so it was kind of like jumping in the deep end um but he recommended a really good book called Super forecasters by tlock um some…