Related papers: Everything's Fine

We consider the problem of detecting an epidemic in a population where individual diagnoses are extremely noisy. The motivation for this problem is the plethora of examples (influenza strains in humans, or computer viruses in smartphones,…

We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…

Decisions in a group often result in imitation and aggregation, which are enhanced in panic, dangerous, stressful or negative situations. Current explanations of this enhancement are restricted to particular contexts, such as anti-predatory…

Synthesis of bulletproof strategies in imperfect information scenarios is a notoriously hard problem. In this paper, we suggest that it is sometimes a viable alternative to aim at "reasonably good" strategies instead. This makes sense not…

A frequentist definition of sensitivity of a search for new phenomena is discussed, that has several useful properties. It is based on completely standard concepts, is generally applicable, and has a very clear interpretation. It is…

Aging refers to the property of two-time correlation functions to decay very slowly on (at least) two time scales. This phenomenon has gained recent attention due to experimental observations of the history dependent relaxation behavior in…

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…

We investigate the role of greed on the lifetime of a random-walking forager on an initially resource-rich lattice. Whenever the forager lands on a food-containing site, all the food there is eaten and the forager can hop $\mathcal{S}$ more…

When people receive new information, sometimes they revise their beliefs too much, and sometimes too little. In this paper, we show that a key driver of whether people overinfer or underinfer is the strength of the information. Based on a…

An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…

Problems with artificial neural networks originate from their deterministic nature and inevitable prior learnings, resulting in inadequate adaptability against unpredictable, abrupt environmental change. Here we show that a stochastically…

Biological information processing is often carried out by complex networks of interconnected dynamical units. A basic question about such networks is that of reliability: if the same signal is presented many times with the network in…

Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy…

Empirical evidence shows that wealthy households have substantially higher saving rates and markedly lower marginal propensity to consume (MPC) than other groups. Existing theory cannot account for this pattern unless under restrictive…

One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…

It is often suggested that extraterrestial life sufficiently advanced to be capable of interstellar travel or communication must be rare, since otherwise we would have seen evidence of it by now. This in turn is sometimes taken as indirect…

Scientists do not merely choose to accept fully formed theories, they also have to decide which models to work on before they are fully developed and tested. Since decisive empirical evidence in favour of a model will not yet have been…

We study repeated games where players use an exponential learning scheme in order to adapt to an ever-changing environment. If the game's payoffs are subject to random perturbations, this scheme leads to a new stochastic version of the…

Consider a uniformly mixing population which grows as a super-critical linear birth and death process. At some time an infectious disease (of SIR or SEIR type) is introduced by one individual being infected from outside. It is shown that…

Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…