Related papers: The fallacy of evidence based policy
It is the role of the scientific community to provide for the knowledge of scientific facts and technical capabilities as a background for political decision-making. The reasons are given why governments are sometimes not ready to accept…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
Statistical science (as opposed to mathematical statistics) involves far more than probability theory, for it requires realistic causal models of data generators - even for purely descriptive goals. Statistical decision theory requires more…
Scientists need to compare the support for models based on observed phenomena. The main goal of the evidential paradigm is to quantify the strength of evidence in the data for a reference model relative to an alternative model. This is done…
We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the…
A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of independent experimental trials, propositional axioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a…
While Evidence Theory (also known as Dempster-Shafer Theory, or Belief Functions Theory) is being increasingly used in data fusion, its potentialities in the Social and Life Sciences are often obscured by lack of awareness of its…
This article aims to show the weakness of the current scientific assessments, based on a set of contradictory pseudo-axioms. The six pseudo-axioms are deeply analysed. From the analysis are derived several conclusions. In spite of the…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
In the same way as the Hilbert Program was a response to the foundational crisis of mathematics, this article tries to formulate a research program for the socio-economic sciences. The aim of this contribution is to stimulate research in…
Bad statistics make research papers unreproducible and misleading. For the most part, the reasons for such misusage of numerical data have been found and addressed years ago by experts and proper practical solutions have been presented…
Analyzing decision problems under uncertainty commonly relies on idealizing assumptions about the describability of the world, with the most prominent examples being the closed world and the small world assumption. Most assumptions are…
We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalized decision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Only the outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical…
Belief systems are often treated as globally consistent sets of propositions or as scalar-valued probability distributions. Such representations tend to obscure the internal structure of belief, conflate external credibility with internal…
The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and while it…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…