Related papers: When intuition fails in assessing conditional risk…
The Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes show that the expected utility hypothesis and Savage's Sure-Thing Principle are violated in real life decisions. The popular explanation in terms of 'ambiguity aversion' is not completely accepted. On the…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…
There has been an upsurge of interest in the consequences for quantum physics of the so-called Wigner's Friend Paradox. In its original formulation, the paradox has been turned inside out, and virtually every aspect of it has been looked…
The goal of this article is to introduce some beautiful known riddles in intuitive topology; hoping to make at least some fun for the reader.
It is astonishing how rapidly general-purpose AI has crossed familiar thresholds in introductory physics. Comparing outputs from successive models, GPT-5 Thinking moves far beyond the plug-and-chug tendencies seen earlier: on a classic…
Jeffreys-Lindley paradox is a case where frequentist and Bayesian hypothesis testing methodologies contradict with each other. This has caused confusion among data analysts for selecting a methodology for their statistical inference tasks.…
Traditional symbolic reasoning engines, while attractive for their precision and explicability, have a few major drawbacks: the use of brittle inference procedures that rely on exact matching (unification) of logical terms, an inability to…
Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
As with a Bell inequality, Hardy's paradox manifests a contradiction between the prediction given by quantum theory and local-hidden variable theories. In this work, we give two generalizations of Hardy's arguments for manifesting such a…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
This paper is concerned with the well known Jeffreys-Lindley paradox. In a Bayesian set up, the so-called paradox arises when a point null hypothesis is tested and an objective prior is sought for the alternative hypothesis. In particular,…
We present a formal measure of argument strength, which combines the ideas that conclusions of strong arguments are (i) highly probable and (ii) their uncertainty is relatively precise. Likewise, arguments are weak when their conclusion…
When aggregating logically interconnected judgments from $n$ agents, the result might be inconsistent with the logical connection. This inconsistency is known as the doctrinal paradox, which plays a central role in the field of judgment…
We give a new proof for Godel's second incompleteness theorem, based on Kolmogorov complexity, Chaitin's incompleteness theorem, and an argument that resembles the surprise examination paradox. We then go the other way around and suggest…
It is often difficult to hand-specify what the correct reward function is for a task, so researchers have instead aimed to learn reward functions from human behavior or feedback. The types of behavior interpreted as evidence of the reward…
Decisions in a group often result in imitation and aggregation, which are enhanced in panic, dangerous, stressful or negative situations. Current explanations of this enhancement are restricted to particular contexts, such as anti-predatory…
Meta-analysis is an important tool for combining results from multiple studies and has been widely used in evidence-based medicine for several decades. This paper reports, for the first time, an interesting and valuable paradox in…
Parrondo's paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version…
The two envelopes paradox is discussed. By calculating the conditional probability, we arrive at a conditional expectations which differs from existing results.