Informal fallacies as cognitive heuristics in public health reasoning

The public must make assessments of a range of health-related issues. However, these assessments require scientific knowledge which is often lacking or ineffectively utilized by the public. Lay people must use whatever cognitive resources are at their disposal to come to judgement on these issues. It will be contended that a group of arguments - so-called informal fallacies - are a valuable cognitive resource in this regard. These arguments serve as cognitive heuristics which facilitate reasoning when knowledge is limited or beyond the grasp of reasoners. The results of an investigation into the use of these arguments by the public are reported

The use of "no evidence" statements in public health

Public health communication makes extensive use of a linguistic formulation that will be called the "no evidence" statement. This is a written or spoken statement of the form "There is no evidence that P" where P stands for a proposition that typically describes a human health risk. Danger lurks in these expressions for the hearer or reader who is not logically perspicacious, as arguments that use them are only warranted under certain conditions. The extent to which members of the public are able to determine what those conditions are will be considered by examining data obtained from 879 subjects. The role of "no evidence" statements as cognitive heuristics in public health reasoning is considered

Double Whammy - How ICT Projects are Fooled by Randomness and Screwed by Political Intent

The cost-benefit analysis formulates the holy trinity of objectives of project management - cost, schedule, and benefits. As our previous research has shown, ICT projects deviate from their initial cost estimate by more than 10% in 8 out of 10 cases. Academic research has argued that Optimism Bias and Black Swan Blindness cause forecasts to fall short of actual costs. Firstly, optimism bias has been linked to effects of deception and delusion, which is caused by taking the inside-view and ignoring distributional information when making decisions. Secondly, we argued before that Black Swan Blindness makes decision-makers ignore outlying events even if decisions and judgements are based on the outside view. Using a sample of 1,471 ICT projects with a total value of USD 241 billion - we answer the question: Can we show the different effects of Normal Performance, Delusion, and Deception? We calculated the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of (actual-forecast)/forecast. Our results show that the CDF changes at two tipping points - the first one transforms an exponential function into a Gaussian bell curve. The second tipping point transforms the bell curve into a power law distribution with the power of 2. We argue that these results show that project performance up to the first tipping point is politically motivated and project performance above the second tipping point indicates that project managers and decision-makers are fooled by random outliers, because they are blind to thick tails. We then show that Black Swan ICT projects are a significant source of uncertainty to an organisation and that management needs to be aware of

Experiments in Distributive Justice and Their Limits

Mark Pennington argues political systems should be decentralized in order to facilitate experimental learning about distributive justice. Pointing out the problems with Pennington's Hayekian formulation, I reframe his argument as an extension of the Millian idea of 'experiments in living.' However, the experimental case for decentralization is limited in several ways. Even if decentralization improves our knowledge about justice, it impedes the actual implementation of all conceptions of justice other than libertarianism. I conclude by arguing for the compatibility of egalitarian redistribution with the epistemic virtues of markets pointed out by Hayek

Quantum Bit Commitment with a Composite Evidence

Entanglement-based attacks, which are subtle and powerful, are usually believed to render quantum bit commitment insecure. We point out that the no-go argument leading to this view implicitly assumes the evidence-of-commitment to be a monolithic quantum system. We argue that more general evidence structures, allowing for a composite, hybrid (classical-quantum) evidence, conduce to improved security. In particular, we present and prove the security of the following protocol: Bob sends Alice an anonymous state. She inscribes her commitment $b$ by measuring part of it in the + (for $b = 0$) or $\times$ (for $b=1$) basis. She then communicates to him the (classical) measurement outcome $R_x$ and the part-measured anonymous state interpolated into other, randomly prepared qubits as her evidence-of-commitment.Comment: 6 pages, minor changes, journal reference adde

Project: Screenplay Finding Andy

This paper is about my screenplay entitled Finding Andy which I use as my final project. The screenplay itself is a story about a teenage girl who wants to improve her family's poor communication. For my theory, I use John Gottman's “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Model” about family conflict. The theory helps me to shape my characters' behavior towards each others. Since my characters has better relationship even though the brother dies in the end, I tend to use the worst level of family conflict in the beginning of the story and it gradually changes into successful communication which leads to good relationship. The theory helps me to give example of family's poor communication to the audiences. I also do an observation on some families with poor communications and Rangkah Rejo neighborhood in Eastern Surabaya to build the setting's circumstances. From this creative work, I expect that it is made into films, like what screenplay is for, so that the audiences realize that this kind of family exists

Organizing Economic Experiments The Role of Firms

Many economists, including Austrian economists, have argued that the market process is essentially an experimental process. We briefly try to clarify this conceptualization, and then argue that we may understand the firm in much the same light. A basic view of the firm as an experimental entity is derived, drawing on property rights insights.The theory of the firm, Austrian economics, property rights

Inadvertent Disclosure, the Attorney-Client Privilege, and Legal Ethics: An Examination and Suggestion for Alaska

Lantmäteriets stödenhet Utveckling och IT (UIT) ska inför ett mer agilt arbetssätt. Den agila arbetsmetoden ifråga är Lean Thinking, den västerländska adaptionen av Toyota Production System. För att underlätta vid en övergång till det nya arbetssättet, kartläggs de inledande faserna i projektarbetet, då dessa saknar specifika anvisningar i den nuvarande projektstyrningsmodellen, Praktisk projektstyrning (PPS). Utifrån kartläggningen utfördes så en tvåstegsanalys, den första utifrån ett distribuerat kognitivt perspektiv och sedan utifrån de fem huvudprinciper från Lean Thinking. Resultatet från analysen resulterade sedan i ett antal förändringspunkter som UIT kan använda sig av vid bytet av arbetssätt. Dessa punkter inkluderar förslag att utnyttja digitala systems potential, skapa ett kontinuerligt flöde i arbetsprocessen genom att minska antalet pågående arbetsuppgifter på en kanbantavla samt att projektgruppen har en medvetenhet om de olika system som används förmåga att hålla information aktuell