Related papers: The fallacy of evidence based policy

In this paper, we propose standard statistical tools as a solution to commonly highlighted problems in the explainability literature. Indeed, leveraging statistical estimators allows for a proper definition of explanations, enabling…

With the relentless rise of computer power, there is a widespread expectation that computers can solve the most pressing problems of science, and even more besides. We explore the limits of computational modelling and conclude that, in the…

The seriousness of the current crisis urgently demands new economic thinking that breaks the austerity vs. deficit spending circle in economic policy. The core tenet of the paper is that the most important problems that natural and social…

The 2008 global financial crisis marked the beginning of a decade dominated by fiscal austerity policies in much of the developed world. This paper presents a qualitative narrative review of an extensive collection of academic literature to…

Evidence-based education has become a central concept in science education, with meta-analyses often regarded as the gold standard for informing practice. This emphasis raises critical questions concerning the applicability,…

The diverse views of science of security have opened up several alleys towards applying the methods of science to security. We pursue a different kind of connection between science and security. This paper explores the idea that security is…

Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing…

This book presents a methodology and philosophy of empirical science based on large scale lossless data compression. In this view a theory is scientific if it can be used to build a data compression program, and it is valuable if it can…

Causal and attribution studies are essential for earth scientific discoveries and critical for informing climate, ecology, and water policies. However, the current generation of methods needs to keep pace with the complexity of scientific…

The goal of Science is to understand phenomena and systems in order to predict their development and gain control over them. In the scientific process of knowledge elaboration, a crucial role is played by models which, in the language of…

Humans currently use arguments for explaining choices which are already made, or for evaluating potential choices. Each potential choice has usually pros and cons of various strengths. In spite of the usefulness of arguments in a decision…

We lay the groundwork for a formal framework that studies scientific theories and can serve as a unified foundation for the different theories within physics. We define a scientific theory as a set of verifiable statements, assertions that…

Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…

Statistical analysis is an important tool to distinguish systematic from chance findings. Current statistical analyses rely on distributional assumptions reflecting the structure of some underlying model, which if not met lead to problems…

We formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a "clash of narratives". Drawing on the "Bayesian Networks" literature, we model a narrative as a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection…

The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…

Behavioural economics provides labels for patterns in human economic behaviour. Probability weighting is one such label. It expresses a mismatch between probabilities used in a formal model of a decision (i.e. model parameters) and…

Statistical inferential results generally come with a measure of reliability for decision-making purposes. For a policy implementer, the value of implementing published policy research depends critically upon this reliability. For a policy…

Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…

Scientific fact-checking aims to determine the veracity of scientific claims by retrieving and analysing evidence from research literature. The problem is inherently more complex than general fact-checking since it must accommodate the…