Related papers: When intuition fails in assessing conditional risk…
The ``Gibbs Paradox'' refers to several related questions concerning entropy in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics: whether it is an extensive quantity or not, how it changes when identical particles are mixed, and the proper way to…
A sender persuades a strategically naive decisionmaker (DM) by committing privately to an experiment. Sender's choice of experiment is unknown to the DM, who must form her posterior beliefs nonparametrically by applying some learning rule…
The well-known Simpson's Paradox, or Yule-Simpson Effect, in statistics is often illustrated by the following thought experiment: A drug may be found in a trial to increase the survival rate for both men and women, but decrease the rate for…
Logical paradoxes and inconsistent information pose deep challenges in epistemology and the philosophy of logic. Classical systems typically handle contradictions only through external checks or by altering the logical framework, as in…
This paper addresses two main challenges facing systems neuroscience today: understanding the nature and function of a) cortical feedback between sensory areas and b) correlated variability. Starting from the old idea of perception as…
In the setting where a group of agents is asked a single subjective multi-choice question (e.g. which one do you prefer? cat or dog?), we are interested in evaluating the quality of the collected feedback. However, the collected statistics…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
This paper discusses the dual interpretation of the Jeffreys--Lindley's paradox associated with Bayesian posterior probabilities and Bayes factors, both as a differentiation between frequentist and Bayesian statistics and as a pointer to…
While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
Arguments in favor of injecting symbolic knowledge into neural architectures abound. When done right, constraining a sub-symbolic model can substantially improve its performance and sample complexity and prevent it from predicting invalid…
Possibility theory offers a framework where both Lehmann's "preferential inference" and the more productive (but less cautious) "rational closure inference" can be represented. However, there are situations where the second inference does…
The black hole information paradox is really a combination of two problems: the causality paradox and the entanglement problem. The causality paradox arises because in the semiclassical approximation infalling matter gets causally trapped…
Human concept learning is typically active: learners choose which instances to query or test in order to reduce uncertainty about an underlying rule or category. Active concept learning must balance informativeness of queries against the…
To collaborate well with robots, we must be able to understand their decision making. Humans naturally infer other agents' beliefs and desires by reasoning about their observable behavior in a way that resembles inverse reinforcement…
In 1967, Frederick Lord posed a conundrum that has confused scientists for over half a century. Subsequently named Lord's 'paradox', the puzzle centres on the observation that two different approaches to estimating the effect of an exposure…
This paper describes Simpson's paradox, and explains its serious implications for randomised control trials. In particular, we show that for any number of variables we can simulate the result of a controlled trial which uniformly points to…
In game theory, the notion of a player's beliefs about the game players' beliefs about other players' beliefs arises naturally. In this paper, we present a non-self-referential paradox in epistemic game theory which shows that completely…
As an important psychological and social experiment, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) treats the choice to cooperate or defect as an atomic action. We propose to study the behaviors of online learning algorithms in the Iterated…
We investigate how Simpson's paradox affects analysis of trends in social data. According to the paradox, the trends observed in data that has been aggregated over an entire population may be different from, and even opposite to, those of…