Related papers: Ignorance can be evolutionarily beneficial
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
We study a repeated information design setting in which the receiver, who is also the decision-maker, updates beliefs in a systematically biased way. More specifically, a distorted posterior in our model can be written as a convex…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
We introduce a model of persuasion in which a sender without any commitment power privately gathers information about an unknown state of the world and then chooses what to verifiably disclose to a receiver. The receiver does not know how…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Biological and living systems process information across spatiotemporal scales, exhibiting the hallmark ability to constantly modulate their behavior to ever-changing and complex environments. In the presence of repeated stimuli, a…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
We investigate the strategic behavior of a large population of agents who decide whether to adopt a costly partially effective protection or remain unprotected against the susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic. In contrast with most…
In financial markets valuable information is rarely circulated homogeneously, because of time required for information to spread. However, advances in communication technology means that the 'lifetime' of important information is typically…
Beneficial reversals of dominance reduce the costs of genetic trade-offs and can enable selection to maintain genetic variation for fitness. Beneficial dominance reversals are characterized by the beneficial allele for a given context (e.g.…
Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure…
We study the performance of different methods for processing information, incorporating narrative selection within an evolutionary model. All agents update their beliefs according to Bayes' Rule, but some strategically choose the narrative…
Self-adaptation is used in all main paradigms of evolutionary computation to increase efficiency. We claim that the basis of self-adaptation is the use of neutrality. In the absence of external control neutrality allows a variation of the…
In this second article, we show a simple use of the Ignorance as defined in "Jaynes & Shannon's Constrained Ignorance and Surprise". By giving an example about the journey of a person, we believe to show some simple, obvious but…
We introduce and study a learning theory which is roughly automatic, that is, it does not require but a minimum of initial programming, and is based on the potential computational phenomenon of self-reference, (i.e. the potential ability of…
Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…
The notion of information pervades informal descriptions of biological systems, but formal treatments face the problem of defining a quantitative measure of information rooted in a concept of fitness, which is itself an elusive notion.…
We study what changes to an agent's decision problem increase her value for information. We prove that information becomes more valuable if and only if the agent's reduced-form payoff in her belief becomes more convex. When the…
Empirical evidence shows that human behaviour often deviates from game-theoretical rationality. For instance, humans may hold unrealistic expectations about future outcomes. As the evolutionary roots of such biases remain unclear, we…
We live within an increasingly technological, information-laden environment for the first time in human evolution.This subjects us, and will continue to subject us in an accelerating fashion, to an unremitting exposure to meaningful…