Related papers: Apocalypse Now? Reviving the Doomsday Argument
Ambiguity-averse decision makers typically dislike not only the presence of ambiguous events but also their increase, contrary to what standard ambiguity models predict. We axiomatically study such a decision maker. She avoids ex ante…
By positing a universe where all events are determined by initial conditions, superdeterminism as conceded by Bell frames correlations observed in quantum measurements as the consequence of an inherently predetermined cosmic order that…
Bayesian inference gets its name from *Bayes's theorem*, expressing posterior probabilities for hypotheses about a data generating process as the (normalized) product of prior probabilities and a likelihood function. But Bayesian inference…
As observers of the universe we are quantum physical systems within it. If the universe is very large in space and/or time, the probability becomes significant that the data on which we base predictions is replicated at other locations in…
The concept of a random Lagrangian is proposed. It is considered as a basis for a new view of the old problems such as renormalization, nonzero vacuum energy and the anthropic principle. It gives rise to nontrivial consequences both in…
Consider a predictor who ranks eventualities on the basis of past cases: for instance a search engine ranking webpages given past searches. Resampling past cases leads to different rankings and the extraction of deeper information. Yet a…
For a stochastic process reset at random times, we discuss to what extent the probabilities of some orderings of observables associated with the intervals of time between resetting events are universal, i.e., independent of the choice of…
If two physical timescales are independent, i.e. they depend on different physics, then (statistically) there is no reason to believe that their values should be equal, even to an order of magnitude. The timescale for abiogenesis…
The replication crisis has prompted many to call for statistical reform within the psychological sciences. Here we examine issues within Frequentist statistics that may have led to the replication crisis, and we examine the…
One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when variables are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been…
Using a temporal version of the Copernican principle, Gott has proposed a statistical predictor of future longevity based on present age [J. R. Gott III, Nature 363, 315 (1993)] and applied the predictor to a variety of examples, including…
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
Integrating information gained by observing others via Social Bayesian Learning can be beneficial for an agent's performance, but can also enable population wide information cascades that perpetuate false beliefs through the agent…
Many modern data analysis problems involve inferences from streaming data. However, streaming data is not easily amenable to the standard probabilistic modeling approaches, which assume that we condition on finite data. We develop…
In this article, we survey some controversial problems concerning the idea of erasing Which Way information proposed in recent years. A statistical examination of these proposals suggests that whenever the Bayesian rule is taken into…
The anthropic principle is one of the possible explanations for the cosmological constant ($\Lambda$) problem. In previous studies, a dark halo mass threshold comparable with our Galaxy must be assumed in galaxy formation to get a…
(l) I have enough evidence to render the sentence S probable. (la) So, relative to what I know, it is rational of me to believe S. (2) Now that I have more evidence, S may no longer be probable. (2a) So now, relative to what I know, it is…
Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…
The classical Bayesian posterior arises naturally as the unique solution of several different optimization problems, without the necessity of interpreting data as conditional probabilities and then using Bayes' Theorem. For example, the…