Intelligent escalation and the principle of relativity

Escalation is the fact that in a game (for instance in an auction), the agents play forever. The $0,1$-game is an extremely simple infinite game with intelligent agents in which escalation arises. It shows at the light of research on cognitive psychology the difference between intelligence (algorithmic mind) and rationality (algorithmic and reflective mind) in decision processes. It also shows that depending on the point of view (inside or outside) the rationality of the agent may change which is proposed to be called the principle of relativity.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1306.228

The risk of divergence

We present infinite extensive strategy profiles with perfect information and we show that replacing finite by infinite changes the notions and the reasoning tools. The presentation uses a formalism recently developed by logicians and computer science theoreticians, called coinduction. This builds a bridge between economic game theory and the most recent advance in theoretical computer science and logic. The key result is that rational agents may have strategy leading to divergence .Comment: 3rd International Workshop on Strategic Reasoning, Dec 2015, Oxford, United Kingdom. 201

BEGIN THE ADVENTURE : How to Break the Light Barrier by A.D. 2079 (3rd ed.)

This edition, the third, has undergone a subtle name change, going from A.D. 2070 in the title to A.D. 2079 as the timeline is fine-tuned. Because of the almost universal failure to recognize the distinction between physical (reality-based, dynamical) and visual (appearance-based, kinematical) variables, a tremendous volume of mythology arose over the past 100 years centered around Einstein\u27s reality view of the distortions of special relativity. To get a sense of it, we point the reader to Paul J. Nahin\u27s heroic book, Time Machines, 2nd ed.,- to these Tech Notes in particular: TN#6. A High-Speed Rocket Is a One-Way Time Machine to the Future ; TN#7. Superluminal Speeds, Backward Time Travel, and Warp Drive, or Faster-Than-Light into the Past ; TN#8. Backward Time Travel According to Gödel and Tipler. But those magical effects go away when we consider that the variables of special relativity are kinematical, not physical. If they have not yet gone away in the minds of everyone, a reason may be that there is a great need felt by many fine folk for such effects to be real. There are today sizeable popular and scientific communities with vested interests in keeping those magical hopes alive. But at some point in time humanity must come of age, question the existence of Santa Claus and come to realize that what we see is not necessarily what we get… . That the stick partly stuck in water may not be bent or broken after all even though it distinctly and definitely appears to be. Distinguished cognitive researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini might characterize the period just ending as a century-long mistake of reason – a kind of mass cognitive illusion. MP-P, Inevitable Illusions/ How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds, John Wiley, ISBN 0-471- 58126-7, 1994, p.18: These are errors we commit without knowing that we do so, in good faith, and errors that we often defend with vehemence, thus making our power of reasoning subservient to our illusions. Page 141: Cognitive illusions, unknown to science until some 20 years ago, are active in all of us ... Page 139: cognitive illusions are general, because they are found in all human beings. MP-P did not direct his message at Einstein; that is my doing. Yet the descriptions MP-P gives seem to fit the present context

Escalation: Explorative studies of high-risk situations from the theoretical perspectives of complexity and joint cognitive systems

The main aim of the research is to explore different aspects of organisational resilience in escalating situations, with an investigation of both theoretical and practical implications. From the platform of an explorative approach, this study makes use of naturalistic research in the domain of health care and experimental simulation studies, in order to establish a broad theoretical framework vis-à-vis the processes of escalation. Rather than treating notions of crisis as processes taking place outside the organisation, the thesis outlines a view of escalation as an inherent part of organisational reproduction and structure, rooted in historical relations of power and professional identities. The thesis goes on to look at pragmatic implications in areas such as the establishment of efficient coordination structures in escalating situations, and team performance assessment

Advocating Scientism, 1963-2013

By the nineteenth century, scientism began to emerge as a worldview that sought to explain all phenomena through the scientific method to the exclusion of all other ways of knowing. These sentiments intensified with Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection. At the turn of the twentieth century, scientific discoveries increased exponentially, giving rise to a strong confidence that science could indeed describe everything. By 1960, certain scientists grew so confident in science’s descriptive ability that they started to advocate scientism. From 1963 to 2013, they advocated an antireligious, positivistic worldview through their popular works and warned of concurrent global conundrums such as the existence of nuclear weapons, global warming, and overpopulation. They envisioned a human future in space as a possible means to avoid earthly problems

Multi-Objective Optimization in Negotiation Support

The paper reviews the methodology of multi-objective modeling and optimization used in decision support based on computerized analytical models (as opposed to logical models used in expert systems) that represent expert knowledge in a given field. The essential aspects of this methodology relate to its flexibility: modeling and optimization methods are treated not as goals in themselves but as tools that help a sovereign user (an analyst or a decision maker) to interact with the model, to generate and analyze various decision options, to learn about possible outcomes of these decisions. Although the application of such methods in negotiation and mediation support is scarce yet, their flexibility increases essentially the chances of such applications. Various aspects of negotiation and mediation methods related to multi-objective optimization and game theory are also reviewed

On the Problem of Vague Terms: A Glossary of Clearly Stated Assumptions & Careful, Patient, Descriptions

Coase 1930 endures through the decades as one of the most-cited papers in economics due to the fact that it highlights a fundamental and equally enduring problem: "Economic theory has suffered in the past from a failure to state clearly its assumptions. Economists in building up a theory have often omitted to examine the foundations on which it was erected. This examination is, however, essential not only to prevent the misunderstanding and needless controversy which arise from a lack of knowledge of the assumptions on which a theory is based, but also because of the extreme importance for economics of good judgement in choosing between rival sets of assumptions." In 1944 Von Neumann and Morgenstern offered the simply, yet invariably rejected solution: "In… economics the most fruitful work may be that of careful, patient description; indeed this may be by far the largest domain for the present and some time to come….Economic problems [have been and are often] not formulated clearly and are often stated in such vague terms as to make mathematical treatment a priori appear hopeless because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are. There is no point in using exact methods where there is no clarity in the concepts and issues to which they are to be applied. Consequently the initial task is to clarify the knowledge of the matter by further careful descriptive work." This paper offers a stone along the path to the solution to this problem by offering a glossary in this spirit, a glossary germain to some of the most fundamental, open problems in economics. As the fate of the human race may lay in the balance to finding solutions to these problems, this glossary may be a steop in the right direction.economic terms; methodology; scientific method; coase 1930; Von Neumann & Morgenstern 1944; definitions; careful, patient descriptions