Resilience: Accounting for the Noncomputable

Plans to solve complex environmental problems should always consider the role of surprise. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to emphasize known computable aspects of a problem while neglecting aspects that are unknown and failing to ask questions about them. The tendency to ignore the noncomputable can be countered by considering a wide range of perspectives, encouraging transparency with regard to conflicting viewpoints, stimulating a diversity of models, and managing for the emergence of new syntheses that reorganize fragmentary knowledg

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals: What’s wrong with existing analytical models?

This study critically evaluates analytical models presently used to estimate the cost of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from sources including the UN Millennium Project, the UN Development Programme, the World Bank and the Zedillo Commission. Effective strategic choices for achieving the MDGs must be based on sound assessments of the costs and benefits of alternative policies. However, the existing approaches are unreliable. They derive from implausible and restrictive assumptions, depend on poor quality data, and are undermined by the presence of large uncertainties concerning the future. An alternative and less technocratic approach to planning is required.poverty, development, Millennium Development Goals

Challenges in Complex Systems Science

FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having: many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities; interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics; combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context, science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT agenda

AGM 25 years: twenty-five years of research in belief change

The 1985 paper by Carlos Alchourrón (1931–1996), Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson (AGM), “On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions” was the starting-point of a large and rapidly growing literature that employs formal models in the investigation of changes in belief states and databases. In this review, the first twenty five years of this development are summarized. The topics covered include equivalent characterizations of AGM operations, extended representations of the belief states, change operators not included in the original framework, iterated change, applications of the model, its connections with other formal frameworks, computatibility of AGM operations, and criticism of the model.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Stochastic Belief Change Framework with an Observation Stream and Defaults as Expired Observations

Abstract. A framework for an agent to change its probabilistic beliefs after a stream of noisy observations is received is proposed. Observations which are no longer relevant, become default assumptions until overridden by newer, more prevalent observations. A distinction is made between background and foreground beliefs. Agent actions and environment events are distinguishable and form part of the agent model. It is left up to the agent designer to provide an environment model; a submodel of the agent model. An example of an environment model is provided in the paper, and an example scenario is based on it. Given the particular form of the agent model, several 'patterns of cognition' can be identified. An argument is made for four particular patterns

Belief extrapolation (or how to reason about observations and unpredicted change)

PDF : Draft versionInternational audienceWe give a logical framework for reasoning with observations at different time points. We call belief extrapolation the process of completing initial belief sets stemming from observations by assuming minimal change. We give a general semantics and we propose several extrapolation operators. We study some key properties verified by these operators and we address computational issues. We study in detail the position of belief extrapolation with respect to revision and update: in particular, belief extrapolation is shown to be a specific form of time-stamped belief revision. Several related lines of work are positioned with respect to belief extrapolation

An experimental test of some economic theories of optimism

Economic theories of optimism provide different rationales for the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, and a recent empirical literature has tested some of them, with mixed results. We contribute to this literature with a novel experimental test of two mechanisms, according to which optimism is respectively predicted when (1) the potential material losses due to the bias are relatively small or (2) the cognitive costs of the bias are small enough. In our design, these two accounts predict inflated expectations regarding some future payoff. Contrary to that, the average subject tends to (slightly) underestimate that financial prospect. Although a minority of the subjects overestimate systematically, the size of their errors is rather reduced, and they hardly differ in their personal characteristics from the rest of the subjects. In fact, optimism in our experiment is correlated with the sample observed, in that it is more likely when a subject observes relatively few good signals. This is again at odds with (1) and (2). These mechanisms, we conclude, do not appear to fully capture under which circumstances people fail into a positivity bias. Yet (1) seems to be empirically less relevant, in that we observe a similarly limited level of bias irrespectively of its monetary cos

Engaging with the Present by Exploring the Future: Critical Potential of Science Fiction in Education

In The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (2008) argues that: [] sf has come to be seen as an essential mode of imaging the horizons of possibility (p. 1). Noting this, I will therefore discuss how SF can be used as a pedagogical tool by educators to help secondary students explore fictional futures, with an emphasis on developing critical thinking skills by comparing science fictional futures and the present. This thesis includes an original in-school study where I use Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, critical theory, genre-based analysis, and inquiry-based learning to encourage students to critically consider contemporary issues. Having analyzed student discussions, introductory questionnaires, exit interviews and written assessments through deductive thematic analysis, discourse analysis and within-method triangulation, I will discuss the practical use of SF to meet critical thinking and critical literacy expectations outlined in The Ontario Curriculum for English (2008)

Motivated beliefs, self-serving recall and data omission: economic implications and experimental evidence

Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Departamento de Análisis Económico, Teoría Económica e Historia Económica. Fecha de Lectura: 26-05-2021Tesis financiada por el Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, a través de los proyectos de investigación ECO2014-52372-P y ECO2017-82449-P