Related papers: A Bayesian View on the Dr. Evil Scenario
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
Bayes' theorem incorporates distinct types of information through the likelihood and prior. Direct observations of state variables enter the likelihood and modify posterior probabilities through consistent updating. Information in terms of…
In the canonical examples underlying Shafer-Dempster theory, beliefs over the hypotheses of interest are derived from a probability model for a set of auxiliary hypotheses. Beliefs are derived via a compatibility relation connecting the…
According to our current conception of physics, any valid physical theory is supposed to describe the objective evolution of a unique external world. However, this condition is challenged by quantum theory, which suggests that physical…
An agent observes a clue, and an analyst observes an inference: a ranking of events on the basis of how corroborated they are by the clue. We prove that if the inference satisfies the axioms of Villegas (1964) except for the classic…
Belief dynamics are fundamental to human behavior and social coordination. Individuals rely on accurate beliefs to make decisions, and shared beliefs form the basis of successful cooperation. Traditional studies often examined beliefs in…
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…
Teddy Seidenfeld has been arguing for quite a long time that binary preference models are not powerful enough to deal with a number of crucial aspects of imprecision and indeterminacy in uncertain inference and decision making. It is at his…
Credences are mental states corresponding to degrees of confidence in propositions. Attribution of credences to Large Language Models (LLMs) is commonplace in the empirical literature on LLM evaluation. Yet the theoretical basis for LLM…
Is there a canonical way to think of agency beyond reward maximisation? In this paper, we show that any type of behaviour complying with physically sound assumptions about how macroscopic biological agents interact with the world…
Bayesian belief networks can be used to represent and to reason about complex systems with uncertain, incomplete and conflicting information. Belief networks are graphs encoding and quantifying probabilistic dependence and conditional…
This paper introduces Reflective Empiricism, an extension of empirical science that incorporates subjective perception and consciousness processes as equally valid sources of knowledge. It views reality as an interplay of subjective…
This chapter provides a overview of Bayesian inference, mostly emphasising that it is a universal method for summarising uncertainty and making estimates and predictions using probability statements conditional on observed data and an…
Bayesian inference allows expressing the uncertainty of posterior belief under a probabilistic model given prior information and the likelihood of the evidence. Predominantly, the likelihood function is only implicitly established by a…
The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to…
Yager[5] proposed a transformation for opposing(negating) the occurence of an event that is not certain using the idea that one can oppose the occurence of any uncertain event by allocating its probability among the other outcomes in the…
This work explores a social learning problem with agents having nonidentical noise variances and mismatched beliefs. We consider an $N$-agent binary hypothesis test in which each agent sequentially makes a decision based not only on a…
On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities ("aliens") would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have…
Bell's inequality is derived from three assumptions: measurement independence, outcome independence, and parameter independence. Among these, measurement independence, often taken for granted, holds that hidden variables are statistically…
In the eyes of a rationalist like Descartes or Spinoza, human reasoning is flawless, marching toward uncovering ultimate truth. A few centuries later, however, culminating in the work of Kahneman and Tversky, human reasoning was portrayed…