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There has been a flurry of research in recent years on notions of fairness in ranking and recommender systems, particularly on how to evaluate if a recommender allocates exposure equally across groups of relevant items (also known as…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
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 St. Petersburg paradox provides a simple paradigm for systems that show sensitivity to rare events. Here, we demonstrate a physical realization of this paradox using tensile fracture, experimentally verifying for six decades of spatial…
Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms are ubiquitous and necessary to explore the extensive catalogs of media providers. To avoid the user examining all the results, its preferences are used to provide a subset of relatively small size. The…
Why are some events more surprising than others? We propose that events that are more difficult to explain are those that are more surprising. The two experiments reported here test the impact of different event outcomes (Outcome-Type) and…
This paper reconsiders the problem of the absent-minded driver who must choose between alternatives with different payoff with imperfect recall and varying degrees of knowledge of the system. The classical absent-minded driver problem…
As far as human perceptions and rational thinking are concerned, contradictions constitute a non negligible part of our reality. We often refer to these phenomena, in a more informal way, as the chicken or the egg causality dilemma.…
A quite old problem has been recently revitalized by Leonard Mlodinow's book The Drunkard's Walk, where it is presented in a way that has definitely confused several people, that wonder why the prevalence of the name of one daughter among…
Providing natural language explanations for recommendations is particularly useful from the perspective of a non-expert user. Although several methods for providing such explanations have recently been proposed, we argue that an important…
We show that G\"odel's negative results concerning arithmetic, which date back to the 1930s, and the ancient "sand pile" paradox (known also as "sorites paradox") pose the questions of the use of fuzzy sets and of the effect of a measuring…
There is a sudden surge to model human behavior due to its vast and diverse applications which includes modeling public policies, economic behavior and consumer behavior. Most of the human behavior itself can be modeled into a choice…
The standard iterated prisoner's dilemma is an unrealistic model of social behaviour because it forces individuals to participate in the interaction. We analyse a model in which players have the option of ending their association. If the…
Unmeasured confounding is a threat to causal inference and gives rise to biased estimates. In this article, we consider the problem of individualized decision-making under partial identification. Firstly, we argue that when faced with…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
Not only correctness but also self-confidence play an important role in improving the quality of knowledge. Undesirable situations such as confident incorrect and unconfident correct knowledge prevent learners from revising their knowledge…
Good storytelling involves surprise -- unpredictability in how the story unfolds -- and sense-making, the requirement that the story forms a coherent sequence. However, to date, these two qualities have largely been addressed in isolation.…
We study how fads emerge under social learning in a changing environment. We consider a simple sequential social learning model where rational agents arrive in order, each acting only once, and the underlying unknown state constantly…
A classic account of the quantification of semantic information is that of Bar-Hiller and Carnap. Their account proposes an inverse relation between the informativeness of a statement and its probability. However, their approach assigns the…
The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability extraterrestrial civilizations' existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations. In general, solutions to Fermi's paradox come down to either estimation…