Related papers: The liar paradox is a real problem
Feld's friendship paradox states that "your friends have more friends than you, on average." This paradox arises because extremely popular people, despite being rare, are overrepresented when averaging over friends. Using a sample of the…
Consider the following story: A teacher announces to her students a test for the following week, such that the test will be ``surprising''. The students use this as the basis for a ``logical derivation'' and reach a contradiction, which…
Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…
We present a novel paradox in special relativity together with its solution. We call it the four particles paradox. The purpose of this paradox is pedagogical and therefore directed towards students and lecturers of physics. Even if most…
Recent papers in explainable AI have made a compelling case for counterfactual modes of explanation. While counterfactual explanations appear to be extremely effective in some instances, they are formally equivalent to adversarial examples.…
I distinguish between two versions of the black hole information-loss paradox. The first arises from apparent failure of unitarity on the spacetime of a completely evaporating black hole, which appears to be non-globally-hyperbolic; this is…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly mediate global information access for millions of users worldwide, their alignment and biases have the potential to shape public understanding and trust in fundamental democratic institutions,…
Well known Simpson's paradox is puzzling and surprising for many, especially for the empirical researchers and users of statistics. However there is no surprise as far as mathematical details are concerned. A lot more is written about the…
An increasingly common socio-technical problem is people being taken in by offers that sound ``too good to be true'', where persuasion and trust shape decision-making. This paper investigates how \abr{ai} can help detect these deceptive…
It is mostly agreed that Popper's criterion of falsifiability fails to provide a useful demarcation between science and pseudo-science, because ad-hoc assumptions are always able to save any theory that conflicts with the empirical data…
There are many examples in the literature that suggest that indistinguishability is intransitive, despite the fact that the indistinguishability relation is typically taken to be an equivalence relation (and thus transitive). It is shown…
The problem of fake news has gained a lot of attention as it is claimed to have had a significant impact on 2016 US Presidential Elections. Fake news is not a new problem and its spread in social networks is well-studied. Often an…
The treatment of systematic errors is often mishandled. This is due to lack of understanding and education, based on a fundamental ambiguity as to what is meant by the term. This note addresses the problems and offers guidance to good…
Paradoxes are a very frequent phenomenon in processes of thought which strive towards the intelectual and cognitive shifts. They occur in all areas of human spiritual activites. What we are interested here in, are the paradoxes in physics.…
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be…
We discuss some recent work by Tim Maudlin concerning Black Hole Information Loss. We argue, contra Maudlin, that there is a paradox, in the straightforward sense that there are propositions that appear true, but which are incompatible with…
Deception is a fundamental issue across a diverse array of settings, from cybersecurity, where decoys (e.g., honeypots) are an important tool, to politics that can feature politically motivated "leaks" and fake news about candidates.Typical…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
In this article, we present several apparent paradoxes of special relativity and their respective solutions. These paradoxes have appeared since the advent of relativity in 1905, and in fact they are never paradoxes. From a didactic point…
Hardy's paradox was originally presented as a demonstration, without inequalities, of the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and the hypothesis of local causality. Equipped with newly developed tools that allow for a quantitative…