Papers presented cover: new approaches to evolutionary epistemology, new applications, critical evaluations, and the nature of the mind. Paper edition (unseen), $25.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Prediction markets are increasingly being considered as methods for gathering, summarizing and aggregating diffuse information by governments and businesses alike. Critics worry that these markets are susceptible to price manipulation by agents who wish to distort decision making. We study the effect of manipulators on an experimental market, and find that manipulators are unable to distort price accuracy. Subjects without manipulation incentives compensate for the bias in offers from manipulators by setting a different threshold at which they are willing to (...) accept trades. (shrink)

Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background (Relatability) and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar’s actions are (Attainability). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading true stories about the good deeds of a (...) recent fellow alum, compared to a famous moral exemplar from decades past. Study 2A developed a battery of short moral exemplar stories that more systematically varied Relatability and Attainability, along with a set of non-moral exemplar stories for comparison. Studies 2B and 2C examined the path from the story type to relatively low stakes altruism (donating to charity and intentions to volunteer) through perceived attainability and relatability, as well as elevation and pleasantness. Together, our studies suggest that it is primarily the relatability of the moral exemplars, not the attainability of their actions, that inspires more prosocial motivation, at least regarding acts that help others at a relatively low cost to oneself. (shrink)

Since utilities and probabilities jointly determine choices, event-dependent utilities complicate the elicitation of subjective event probabilities. However, for the usual purpose of obtaining the information embodied in agent beliefs, it is sufficient to elicit objective probabilities, i.e., probabilities obtained by updating a known common prior with that agent’s further information. Bayesians who play a Nash equilibrium of a certain insurance game before they obtain relevant information will afterward act regarding lottery ticket payments as if they had event-independent risk-neutral utility and (...) a known common prior. Proper scoring rules paid in lottery tickets can then elicit objective probabilities. (shrink)

Norwood Russell Hanson was one of the most important philosophers of science of the post-war period. Hanson brought Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy to bear on the concepts of science, and his treatments of observation, discovery, and the theory-ladenness of scientific facts remain central to the philosophy of science. Additionally, Hanson was one of philosophy’s great personalities, and his sense of humor and charm come through fully in the pages of Perception and Discovery. Perception and Discovery, originally published (...) in 1969, is Hanson’s posthumous textbook in philosophy of science. The book focuses on the indispensable role philosophy plays in scientific thinking. Perception and Discovery features Hanson’s most complete and mature account of theory-laden observation, a discussion of conceptual and logical boundaries, and a detailed treatment of the epistemological features of scientific research and scientific reasoning. This book is of interest to scholars of philosophy of science, particularly those concerned with Hanson’s thought and the development of the discipline in the middle of the 20th century. However, even fifty years after Hanson’s early death, Perception and Discovery still has a great deal to offer all readers interested in science. (shrink)

We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding of the neurobiology of (...) moral judgment in adulthood and to some extent in childhood and adolescence. Combined with rigorous evidence from psychology and careful philosophical analysis, neuroscientific evidence can even help shed light on the extent of moral knowledge and on ways to promote healthy moral development. (shrink)

This study explores the clusters of work–family balance among Japanese middle-aged and older adults and clarifies the characteristics of the derived clusters. Data on working adults were drawn from a pool of participants in the National Institute for Longevity Sciences—Longitudinal Study of Aging. The WFB scale consists of subscales assessing work–family conflict and work–family facilitation. First, a cluster analysis was performed using the WFB scale, and four clusters were extracted. Second, we examined associations between the four clusters and related variables (...) such as demographic characteristics, work, family, and lifestyle factors, social support, and mental health. Our findings showed that the clusters included high-WFC/high-WFF, high-WFC/low-WFF, low-WFC/high-WFF, and low-WFC/low-WFF. Differences were found in related variables among the clusters. Specifically, those in the Low-WFC/High-WFF cluster had a good lifestyle, received the highest levels of social support, and had the fewest mental health issues. Our findings have implications for maintaining sufficient WFB and promoting positive mental health among workers. (shrink)

In a simple model of conflict, two agents fight over a fixed prize, and how hard they fight depends on what they believe about their abilities. To this model I add “preagents,” representing parents, leaders, or natural selection, who choose each agent’s confidence in his ability. Depending on the reason for such confidence, I find five different patterns in how confidence varies with ability. Agents who estimate their ability with error have under-confidence when ability is high and over-confidence when ability (...) is low, while strategic commitment incentives induce the opposite pattern. Agents who misjudge their value for the prize, relative to their cost of effort, induce an overor under-confidence that is independent of ability, while cooperating pre-agents choose extreme under-confidence. Agents who use confidence to signal ability have a relatively uniform over-confidence. (shrink)

In their article, McKelvey and Page note that In previous experimental work, ... [researchers] investigated how individuals use public information to augment their original private information, and whether in doing so, a rational expectations equilibrium is attained. ... [But either] the inference processes are complicated because of the enormous number of potential interactions among the individuals, and the optimal inference processes are not analyzed. ... [or] the inference process is analyzed but the working assumption is not altogether satisfactory.

Humans clearly have trouble thinking about death. This trouble is often used to explain behavior like delay in writing wills or buying life insurance, or interest in odd medical and religious beliefs. But the problem is far worse than most people imagine. Fear of death makes us spend fifteen percent of our income on medicine, from which we get little or no health benefit, while we neglect things like exercise, which offer large health benefits.

Technologists think about specific future technologies, which they may foresee in some detail. Unfortunately, such technologists then mostly use amateur intuitions about the social world to predict the broader social implications of these technologies. This makes it hard for technologists to identify the technologies which will have the largest social impact.

One explanation for drug bans is that regulators know more than consumers about product quality. But why not just communicate the information in their ban, perhaps via a “would have banned” label?Because product labeling is cheap-talk, any small market failure tempts regulators to lie about quality, inducing consumers who suspect such lies to not believe everything they are told. In fact, when regulators expect market failures to result in under-consumption of a drug, and so would not ban it for informed (...) consumers, regulators ex ante prefer to commit to not banning this drug for uninformed consumers. (shrink)

Humans have slowly built more productive societies by slowly acquiring various kinds of capital, and by carefully matching them to each other. Because disruptions can disturb this careful matching, and discourage social coordination, large disruptions can cause a “social collapse,” i.e., a reduction in productivity out of proportion to the disruption. For many types of disasters, severity seems to follow a power law distribution. For some of types, such as wars and earthquakes, most of the expected harm is predicted to (...) occur in extreme events, which kill most people on Earth. So if we are willing to worry about any war or earthquake, we should worry especially about extreme versions. If individuals varied little in their resistance to such disruptions, events a little stronger than extreme ones would eliminate humanity, and our only hope would be to prevent such events. If individuals vary a lot in their resistance, however, then it may pay to increase the variance in such resistance, such as by creating special sanctuaries from which the few remaining humans could rebuild society. (shrink)

The longstanding debates aver how to enforce codes of ethics reflect a serious flaw in understanding the nature of ?accountability.?; Fuzziness aver that basic notion has allowed the quantity of codes to expand, without any improvement in their quality or in media behavior. The essay maintains that we repeat the same arguments today that moralistic journalists did in the 1920s, because we lack intellectual precision aver such issues as internal vis a vis external controls, ethics vis a vis First Amendment (...) freedoms, and different forms and degrees of accountability to government, to fellow professionals, and to the general public. Self?imposed media codes?with enforcement provisions?and thorough analysis of social ethics are recommended. (shrink)

There is a widespread feeling that health is special; the rules that are usually used in other policy areas are not applied in health policy. Health economists, for example, tend to be reluctant to offer economists' usual prescription of competition and consumer choice, even though they have largely failed to justify this reluctance by showing that health economics involves special features such as public goods, externalities, adverse selection, poor consumer information, or unusually severe consequences.

Both natural and engineered systems are fundamentally dynamical in nature: their defining properties are causal, and their functional capacities are causally grounded. Among dynamical systems, an interesting and important sub-class are those that are autonomous, anticipative and adaptive (AAA). Living systems, intelligent systems, sophisticated robots and social systems belong to this class, and the use of these terms has recently spread rapidly through the scientific literature. Central to understanding these dynamical systems is their complicated organisation and their consequent capacities for (...) re- and self- organisation. But there is at present no general analysis of these capacities or of the requisite organisation involved. We define what distinguishes AAA systems from other kinds of systems by characterising their central properties in a dynamically interpreted information theory. (shrink)

This article examines the implications of the transition to online or blended learning for first generation scholars (FGS) brought about by Covid-19. We present the findings of a mixed methods project that draws data from both in-depth qualitative interviews and a large quantitative survey of students at Durham University. We offer a comparative analysis of how FGS contrast to the general student body in relation to a range of key challenges that Covid-19 and the consequent ‘online pivot’ posed to university (...) life including technological, social and resource based issues. Our findings demonstrate that FGS were particularly affected by this shift to online or blended learning. The final substantive section discusses a range of potential mitigation strategies adopted by the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, with the assumption that some, at least, of these, and our data, will be of wider relevance in the sector. (shrink)

Reproduction of the original: Science and Medieval Thought by Thomas Clifford Allbutt.

We investigate the relationship between weak square principles and simultaneous reflection of stationary sets.

I. In some celebrated passages, the Physics conveys to us that.

This paper outlines an original interactivist-constructivist approach to modelling intelligence and learning as a dynamical embodied form of adaptiveness and explores some applications of I-C to understanding the way cognitive learning is realized in the brain. Two key ideas for conceptualizing intelligence within this framework are developed. These are: intelligence is centrally concerned with the capacity for coherent, context-sensitive, self-directed management of interaction; and the primary model for cognitive learning is anticipative skill construction. Self-directedness is a capacity for integrative process (...) modulation which allows a system to "steer" itself through its world by anticipatively matching its own viability requirements to interaction with its environment. Because the adaptive interaction processes required of intelligent systems are too complex for effective action to be prespecified learning is an important component of intelligence. A model of self-directed anticipative learning is formulated based on interactive skill construction, and argued to constitute a central constructivist process involved in cognitive development. SDAL illuminates the capacity of intelligent learners to start with the vague, poorly defined problems typically posed in realistic learning situations and progressively refine them, transforming them into problems with sufficient structure to guide the construction of a solution. Finally, some of the implications of I-C for modelling of the neuronal basis of intelligence and learning are explored; in particular, Quartz and Sejnowski's recent neural constructivism paradigm, enriched by Montague and Sejnowski's dopaminergic model of anticipative-predictive neural learning, is assessed as a promising, but incomplete, contribution to this approach. The paper concludes with a fourfold reflection on the divergence in cognitive modelling philosophy between the I-C and the traditional computational information processing approaches. (shrink)

Until recently, technology has happened to allow for cheap wiretaps. New digital telephone technologies, however, may soon make wiretaps more difficult, and new encryption technologies may soon make them almost impossible. This may be good news to privacy buffs, but it worries U.S. police agencies -- since 1968 the law has explicitly allowed police wiretaps. And it worries U.S. spy agencies -- since 1978 the law has explicitly allowed them to wiretap foreigners.