Related papers: Inverse Occam's razor
With multiple outcomes in empirical research, a common strategy is to define a composite outcome as a weighted average of the original outcomes. However, the choices of weights are often subjective and can be controversial. We propose an…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
The beliefs of physicists can bias their results towards their expectations in a number of ways. We survey a variety of historical cases of expectation bias in observations, experiments, and calculations.
Linear regression is perhaps one of the most popular statistical concepts, which permeates almost every scientific field of study. Due to the technical simplicity and wide applicability of linear regression, attention is almost always…
Bayesian inference provides a uniquely rigorous approach to obtain principled justification for uncertainty in predictions, yet it is difficult to articulate suitably general prior belief in the machine learning context, where computational…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly complex, making it difficult for users to understand how the AI has derived its prediction. Using explainable AI (XAI)-methods, researchers aim to explain AI decisions to users. So far,…
A common method of making a theory more understandable, is by comparing it to another theory which has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory which attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation…
In contrast to software reverse engineering, there are hardly any tools available that support hardware reversing. Therefore, the reversing process is conducted by human analysts combining several complex semi-automated steps. However,…
While speed is an ubiquitous concept in physics, its inverse - known as slowness - sometimes proves more relevant. We discuss some case studies within classical physics where such a notion is fruitful, before exploring how it can be…
A natural way of quantifying the ``amount of information'' in decision problems yields a globally concave value for information. Another (in contrast, adversarial) way almost never does.
Communication is essential for the advancement of Science. Technology advances and the proliferation of personal devices have changed the ways in which people communicate in all aspects of life. Scientific communication has also been…
If spreadsheets are not erroneous then who, or what, is? Research has found that end-users are. If end-users are erroneous then why are they? Research has found that responsibility lies with human beings' fast and slow thinking modes and…
For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not…
There are two main opposing schools of statistical reasoning, Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Until recent days, the frequentist or classical approach has dominated the scientific research, but Bayesianism has reappeared with a strong…
Rapid advances in computing technology over the past few decades have spurred two extraordinary phenomena in science: large-scale and high-throughput data collection coupled with the creation and implementation of complex statistical…
Problems solved? Pulsar research must be considered - 35 years after the detection of pulsars - a mature science, where the basic questions have been raised and discussed. One would hope that many if not all generic and important problems…
Sometimes we obtain attractive results when associating facts to simple elements. The goal of this work is to introduce a possible alternative in the study of the dynamics of rational maps.
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…