Related papers: Viewing Simpson's Paradox
Following F. William Lawvere, we show that many self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness theorems and fixed point theorems fall out of the same simple scheme. We demonstrate these similarities by showing how this simple scheme encompasses…
The common cause principle for two random variables $A$ and $B$ is examined in the case of causal insufficiency, when their common cause $C$ is known to exist, but only the joint probability of $A$ and $B$ is observed. As a result, $C$…
Phenomena with a constrained sample space appear frequently in practice. This is the case e.g. with strictly positive data and with compositional data, like percentages and the like. If the natural measure of difference is not the absolute…
The law of likelihood underlies a general framework, known as the likelihood paradigm, for representing and interpreting statistical evidence. As stated, the law applies only to simple hypotheses, and there have been reservations about…
In many applications of the probabilistic method, one looks to study phenomena that occur ``with high probability''. More recently however, in an attempt to understand some of the most fundamental problems in combinatorics, researchers have…
Two paradoxical aspects of the prevailing kinetic equations are presented. One is related to the usual understanding of distribution function and the other to the usual understanding of the phase space. With help of simple counterexamples…
This short note revisit information metric, underlining that it is a pseudo metric on manifolds of observables (random variables), rather than as usual on probability laws. Geodesics are characterized in terms of their boundaries and…
The remaining travel time of a plane shortens with every minute that passes from its departure, and a flame diminishes a candle with every second it burns. Such everyday occurrences bias us to think that processes which have already begun…
The framework used to prove the multiplicative law deformation of the algebra of Feynman-Bender diagrams is a \textit{twisted shifted dual law} (in fact, twice). We give here a clear interpretation of its two parameters. The crossing…
Some known relativistic paradoxes are reconsidered for closed spaces, using a simple geometric model. For two twins in a closed space, a real paradox seems to emerge when the traveling twin is moving uniformly along a geodesic and returns…
This paper investigates how global decision problems over arithmetically represented domains acquire reflective structure through class-quantification. Arithmetization forces diagonal fixed points whose verification requires reflection…
Philosophers now seem to agree that frequentism is an untenable strategy to explain the meaning of probabilities. Nevertheless, I want to revive frequentism, and I will do so by grounding probabilities on typicality in the same way as the…
Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic…
In reverse mathematics, is is possible to have a curious situation where we know that an implication does not reverse, but appear to have no information on on how to weaken the assumption while preserving the conclusion. A main cause of…
We show in this note that Gibbs paradox arises not due to application of thermodynamic principles, whether classical or statistical or even quantum mechanical, but due to incorrect application of mathematics to the process of mixing of…
This study has the purpose of addressing four questions that lie at the base of the probability theory and statistics, and includes two main steps. As first, we conduct the textual analysis of the most significant works written by eminent…
Russell's paradox is the most easily understandable way to illustrate the inconsistency of na\"ive set theory. This note proposes a direct encoding of Russell's paradox with type-in-type universe, sigma types, and either extensional…
If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…
For half a century, authors have weakened the rule of necessitation in various more or less ad hoc ways in order to make inconsistent systems consistent. More recently, necessitation was weakened in a systematic way, not for the purpose of…
This is a survey on the use of low-degree polynomials to predict and explain the apparent statistical-computational tradeoffs in a variety of average-case computational problems. In a nutshell, this framework measures the complexity of a…