Related papers: Economics cannot isolate itself from political the…
Economic complexity reflects the amount of knowledge that is embedded in the productive structure of an economy. It resides on the premise of hidden capabilities - fundamental endowments underlying the productive structure. In general,…
What does it mean for a machine learning model to be `fair', in terms which can be operationalised? Should fairness consist of ensuring everyone has an equal probability of obtaining some benefit, or should we aim instead to minimise the…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
Accepting a proposition means that our confidence in this proposition is strictly greater than the confidence in its negation. This paper investigates the subclass of uncertainty measures, expressing confidence, that capture the idea of…
Statisticians and data scientists find insights that help lead to better understanding and better outcomes. When clients and managers come to us for help (and even when they don't), we want to share our advice. While we should be free to…
Engineering needs mathematics, but the converse is also increasingly evident. Indeed, mathematics is still recovering from the drawbacks of several "reforms". Encouraging is the revived interest in proofs indicated by various recent…
When statisticians quarrel about hypothesis testing, the debate usually focus on which method is the correct one. The fundamental question of whether we should test hypothesis at all tends to be forgotten. This lack of debate has its roots…
The paper argues that attracting more economists and adopting a more-precise definition of dynamic complexity might help econophysics acquire more attention in the economics community and bring new lymph to economic research. It may be…
In recent years economic complexity has grown into an active field of fundamental and applied research. Yet, despite important advances, the policy implications of economic complexity remain unclear or misunderstood. Here I organize the…
I argue that, contrary to the standard view, one cannot understand the structure and nature of our knowledge in physics without an analysis of the way that observers (and, more generally, measuring instruments and experimental arrangements)…
Highly Principled Data Science insists on methodologies that are: (1) scientifically justified, (2) statistically principled, and (3) computationally efficient. An astrostatistics collaboration, together with some reminiscences, illustrates…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
A policy compass indicates the direction in which an institution is going in terms of three general qualities. The three qualities are: suppression, harmony and passion. Any formal institution can develop a policy compass to examine the…
We review an emerging body of work by physicists addressing questions of economic organization and function. We suggest that, beyond simply employing models familiar from physics to economic observables, remarkable regularities in economic…
This paper outlines a critical gap in the assessment methodology used to estimate the macroeconomic costs and benefits of climate policy. It shows that the vast majority of models used for assessing climate policy use assumptions about the…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners, blindly…
Data analyses are often constructed in an imperative manner, where commands representing actions taken on the data are issued sequentially. The publication of these commands, along with the data, is essential to the reproducibility 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…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…