Related papers: Knowing when to stop
Peer review is an integral component of contemporary science. While peer review focuses attention on promising and interesting science, it also encourages scientists to pursue some questions at the expense of others. Here, we use ideas from…
As computer systems become more and more complex, software and tools lag more and more behind. This is especially true for scientific software that often demands high performance, and thus needs to take advantage of parallelisms, memory…
Science can be seen as a sequential process where each new study augments evidence to the existing knowledge. To have the best prospects to make an impact in this process, a new study should be designed optimally taking into account the…
I suggest that a "scientific reticence" is inhibiting communication of a threat of potentially large sea level rise. Delay is dangerous because of system inertias that could create a situation with future sea level changes out of our…
Crisis management is a complex problem raised by the scientific community currently. Decision support systems are a suitable solution for such issues, they are indeed able to help emergency managers to prevent and to manage crisis in…
Cloud computing has permeated into the information technology industry in the last few years, and it is emerging nowadays in scientific environments. Science user communities are demanding a broad range of computing power to satisfy the…
One way to make decisions under uncertainty is to select an optimal option from a possible range of options, by maximizing the expected utilities derived from a probability model. However, under severe uncertainty, identifying precise…
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 AI systems demonstrate increasingly strong predictive performance, their adoption has grown in numerous domains. However, in high-stakes domains such as criminal justice and healthcare, full automation is often not desirable due to…
More and more processes governing our lives use in some part an automatic decision step, where -- based on a feature vector derived from an applicant -- an algorithm has the decision power over the final outcome. Here we present a simple…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generates complexity. The discussion is centered around the emergence of collective behavior in…
An intelligent agent may in general pursue multiple procedural goals simultaneously, which may lead to arise some conflicts (incompatibilities) among them. In this paper, we focus on the incompatibilities that emerge due to resources…
This paper I assume that in humans the creation of knowledge depends on a discrete time, or stage, sequential decision-making process subjected to a stochastic, information transmitting environment. For each time-stage, this environment…
The constraints on the models for the structure formation arising from various cosmological observations at different length scales are reviewed. The status of different models for structure formation is examined critically in the light of…
Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards…
Every human action begins with decision-making. Stress is a significant source of biases that can influence human decision-making. In order to understand the relationship between stress and decision-making, stress quantification is…
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
The past decade has witnessed a dramatically growing interest in collective intelligence - the phenomenon of groups having an ability to make more accurate decisions than isolated individuals. However, the vast majority of studies to date…
We use decision theory to confront uncertainty that is sufficiently broad to incorporate "models as approximations." We presume the existence of a featured collection of what we call "structured models" that have explicit substantive…