Common Intuition Research Articles

Reflective intuition and the Copi card problem

ABSTRACT In the 1970’s, a controversy arose about a probability problem posed by Irving Copi. One side argued that a common spontaneous intuition about the problem is correct; the other side argued that this intuition is mistaken. Here, I argue (1) that the naïve intuition yields the correct answer, but accidentally and for a wrong reason; (2) that a more reflective intuition yields a wrong answer, and hence, is also mistaken; and (3) that an even more reflective intuition yields the correct answer for a correct reason. This warrants what I call optimistic fallibilism concerning intuitions about probability: although intuition is certainly prone to error in this domain, intuition has the capacity for self-correction. A naïve intuition that is mistaken can be replaced by a distinct, reflective intuition; and a reflective intuition that is mistaken can be replaced by another reflective intuition – with the process ultimately yielding a sound intuition.

Similarity in functional brain connectivity at rest predicts interpersonal closeness in the social network of an entire village

People often have the intuition that they are similar to their friends, yet evidence for homophily (being friends with similar others) based on self-reported personality is inconsistent. Functional connectomes-patterns of spontaneous synchronization across the brain-are stable within individuals and predict how people tend to think and behave. Thus, they may capture interindividual variability in latent traits that are particularly similar among friends but that might elude self-report. Here, we examined interpersonal similarity in functional connectivity at rest-that is, in the absence of external stimuli-and tested if functional connectome similarity is associated with proximity in a real-world social network. The social network of a remote village was reconstructed; a subset of residents underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Similarity in functional connectomes was positively related to social network proximity, particularly in the default mode network. Controlling for similarities in demographic and personality data (the Big Five personality traits) yielded similar results. Thus, functional connectomes may capture latent interpersonal similarities between friends that are not fully captured by commonly used demographic or personality measures. The localization of these results suggests how friends may be particularly similar to one another. Additionally, geographic proximity moderated the relationship between neural similarity and social network proximity, suggesting that such associations are particularly strong among people who live particularly close to one another. These findings suggest that social connectivity is reflected in signatures of brain functional connectivity, consistent with the common intuition that friends share similarities that go beyond, for example, demographic similarities.

Is frequent sighing an indicator of dispositional negative emotionality? A multi-sample, multi-measure naturalistic-observation study

Sighing is a common nonverbal everyday behavior thought to signal the experiencing of negative emotions. Prior research from a small-scale study suggests that observed daily expressions of sighing is associated with subclinical depression (Robbins, Mehl, Holleran, & Kasle, 2011). This paper replicates and extends these findings, hypothesizing that individual differences in negative emotionality are associated with frequency of spontaneous sighing. Study 1 (N = 320) documents a strong lay assumption that frequent sighing signals dispositional negative emotionality. Study 2 estimates the actual association between daily sighing, assessed naturalistically using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), and negative emotionality in a large, diverse, pooled sample (N = 469). Bayesian tests across six measures (neuroticism, depression, anxiety, stress, fatigue, loneliness) strongly support the null model. Together, results suggest the common intuition that people who sigh frequently experience more negative emotionality is inaccurate. Assessing whether an individual sighs more (or less) than others cannot be used to infer that they experience more negative emotions.

(Sub)Optimal Asset Allocation to ETFs

We study the allocation of capital to U.S. equity exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Investors tend to invest more in ETFs with lower fees and higher liquidity, consistent with common intuition. We also find, however, that investors make substantial allocations to ETFs that are similar to existing ETFs while incurring the costs of higher fees and lower liquidity. We estimate the aggregate cost to ETF investors from investing in dominated funds to be $1.1 billion to $17.5 billion since 2000 depending on the bench-marking approach. We conclude that ETF investors may be better off, as a whole, by concentrating on a relatively small set of low-fee, high-liquidity funds.

Structural effects of amine polymers on stability and energy efficiency of adsorbents in post-combustion CO2 capture

Linear/branched polyethyleneimines (PEI) and their modified structures have been widely used to prepare CO2 adsorbents due to their low material cost and high amine content. However, few studies have been carried out to comprehensively understand the effects of polymer structures on the properties of adsorbents, especially other than CO2 capacity. In this study, we rigorously investigated the effects of polymer structures on the CO2 adsorption capacity, kinetics, adsorbent stability, and regeneration heat of adsorbents using four amine polymers with different molecular weights, amine distributions, and ppm-level metal impurities. Linear tetraethylenepentamine (TEPA) exhibited the highest CO2 adsorption capacity due to its low tertiary amine content. However, unlike common intuition, the high CO2 capacity of TEPA did not lead to high energy efficiency of the CO2 capture process because of excessively strong CO2 adsorption and substantial H2O co-adsorption under typical flue gas adsorption conditions. Furthermore, the use of TEPA led to the slowest CO2 adsorption kinetics and the fastest thermochemical degradation, limiting its practical applicability. In contrast, epoxide-functionalized branched PEI exhibited the lowest CO2 capacity, but enabled the most energy-efficient CO2 capture due to its moderate CO2 adsorption strength and suppressed H2O co-adsorption. It also exhibited the fastest adsorption kinetics and the highest stability. Conventional branched PEIs showed intermediate behaviors. The present results indicated that the CO2 adsorption capacity of adsorbents, which was the major focus of previous studies, should not be overemphasized for CO2 adsorbent development and other important engineering aspects (e.g., adsorption kinetics, thermochemical stability, and regeneration heat) need to be considered collectively.

Data segmentation based on the local intrinsic dimension

One of the founding paradigms of machine learning is that a small number of variables is often sufficient to describe high-dimensional data. The minimum number of variables required is called the intrinsic dimension (ID) of the data. Contrary to common intuition, there are cases where the ID varies within the same data set. This fact has been highlighted in technical discussions, but seldom exploited to analyze large data sets and obtain insight into their structure. Here we develop a robust approach to discriminate regions with different local IDs and segment the points accordingly. Our approach is computationally efficient and can be proficiently used even on large data sets. We find that many real-world data sets contain regions with widely heterogeneous dimensions. These regions host points differing in core properties: folded versus unfolded configurations in a protein molecular dynamics trajectory, active versus non-active regions in brain imaging data, and firms with different financial risk in company balance sheets. A simple topological feature, the local ID, is thus sufficient to achieve an unsupervised segmentation of high-dimensional data, complementary to the one given by clustering algorithms.

The Tip of the Iceberg

In this article, we investigate a fundamental question regarding software security: Is the security of SW releases increasing over time? We approach this question with a detailed analysis of the large body of open-source software packaged in the popular Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Contrary to common intuition, we find no clear evidence that the vulnerability rate of widely used software decreases over time: Even in popular and “stable” releases, the fixing of bugs does not seem to reduce the rate of newly identified vulnerabilities. The intuitive conclusion is worrisome: Commonly employed development and validation procedures do not seem to scale with the increase of features and complexity—they are only chopping pieces off the top of an iceberg of vulnerabilities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first investigation into the problem that studies a complete distribution of software, spanning multiple versions. Although we can not give a definitive answer, we show that several popular beliefs also cannot be confirmed given our dataset. We publish our Debian Vulnerability Analysis Framework (DVAF) , an automated dataset creation and analysis process, to enable reproduction and further analysis of our results. Overall, we hope our contributions provide important insights into the vulnerability discovery process and help in identifying effective techniques for vulnerability analysis and prevention.

Photoprotecting Uracil by Coupling with Lossy Nanocavities.

We analyze how the photorelaxation dynamics of a molecule can be controlled by modifying its electromagnetic environment using a nanocavity mode. In particular, we consider the photorelaxation of the RNA nucleobase uracil, which is the natural mechanism to prevent photodamage. In our theoretical work, we identify the operative conditions in which strong coupling with the cavity mode can open an efficient photoprotective channel, resulting in a relaxation dynamics twice as fast as the natural one. We rely on a state-of-the-art chemically detailed molecular model and a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian propagation approach to perform full-quantum simulations of the system dissipative dynamics. By focusing on the photon decay, our analysis unveils the active role played by cavity-induced dissipative processes in modifying chemical reaction rates, in the context of molecular polaritonics. Remarkably, we find that the photorelaxation efficiency is maximized when an optimal trade-off between light–matter coupling strength and photon decay rate is satisfied. This result is in contrast with the common intuition that increasing the quality factor of nanocavities and plasmonic devices improves their performance. Finally, we use a detailed model of a metal nanoparticle to show that the speedup of the uracil relaxation could be observed via coupling with a nanosphere pseudomode, without requiring the implementation of complex nanophotonic structures.

The origin of spin wave pulse-induced domain wall inertia

The fundamental problem of domain wall (DW) inertia—the property that gives to inertial behaviors remains unclear in the physics of magnetic solitons. To understand its nature as well as to achieve accurate DW positioning and efficient manipulation of domain wall motion (DWM), spin wave (SW) pulse-induced DW transient effect is studied both numerically and theoretically in a magnetic nanostrip. It is shown for the first time that there occurs inevitable deceleration/automotion after SW pulse, which indicates nonzero DW inertia. The induced DWM is revealed to relate to two factors: energy storing within DW and out-of-plane tilting of DW. To explain the DWM dynamics, a one-dimensional collective model is developed to account for the excitation of spin wave pulse. The model successfully bridges DW energy, DW tilting and DW displacement and provides descriptions in accordance with numerical findings. It is made clear that the DW automotion hence DW inertia originate from the process of DW relaxation toward equilibrium. The DW inertia is expressed in terms of effective mass and turns out to be a time-dependent function with damping constant α as the governing parameter, which opposes the nature of intrinsic mass. For case containing multiple DWs, the total effective mass is shown to concern the reached velocity and stored energy of DWs instead of the number of DWs, which is against common intuition.

From Intuitions to Anarchism?

Abstract When libertarian political philosophy attracted wide public notice in the 1970s, a common view was that the distinctive individual rights advocated in libertarian theory required grounding in a theory of ethics. Recently, this view has come under challenge. It has been argued that resort to such grounding in ethical theory is unneeded. An appeal to common sense intuitions suffices to justify libertarianism. First, a brief account of libertarianism will be presented. Then, some examples of the older, pro-grounding position will be discussed. Then, the principal defense of the newer view, Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority, will be examined. This discussion constitutes the substance of the present paper. The principal contention of the present article will be that the argument to libertarianism from intuitions does not succeed. In conclusion, it will be suggested that a return to the earlier, grounding view is indicated for philosophers who wish to defend libertarianism.

Smoke Evacuation Filters After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Smoke Evacuation Filters After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Understanding More About Human and Machine Attention in Deep Neural Networks

Human visual system can selectively attend to parts of a scene for quick perception, a biological mechanism known as <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Human attention</i> . Inspired by this, recent deep learning models encode attention mechanisms to focus on the most task-relevant parts of the input signal for further processing, which is called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Machine/Neural/Artificial attention</i> . Understanding the relation between human and machine attention is important for interpreting and designing neural networks. Many works claim that the attention mechanism offers an extra dimension of interpretability by explaining where the neural networks look. However, recent studies demonstrate that artificial attention maps do not always coincide with common intuition. In view of these conflicting evidence, here we make a systematic study on using artificial attention and human attention in neural network design. With three example computer vision tasks (i.e., salient object segmentation, video action recognition, and fine-grained image classification), diverse representative backbones (i.e., AlexNet, VGGNet, ResNet) and famous architectures (i.e., Two-stream, FCN), corresponding real human gaze data, and systematically conducted large-scale quantitative studies, we quantify the consistency between artificial attention and human visual attention and offer novel insights into existing artificial attention mechanisms by giving preliminary answers to several key questions related to human and artificial attention mechanisms. Overall results demonstrate that human attention can benchmark the meaningful ‘ground-truth’ in attention-driven tasks, where the more the artificial attention is close to human attention, the better the performance; for higher-level vision tasks, it is case-by-case. It would be advisable for attention-driven tasks to explicitly force a better alignment between artificial and human attention to boost the performance; such alignment would also improve the network explainability for higher-level computer vision tasks.

Precision and Perceptual Clarity

ABSTRACT When we see objects blurrily, in the periphery, or in dim light, we often experience their features unclearly. This paper argues that perceptual clarity is a dimension along which experiences vary, distinct from their distal contents. Drawing on models in perception science, the paper accounts for clarity by using the probabilistic notion of precision. The account’s first part is ecumenical: it says that experiences carry information about the precision of the representations from which each distal content of experience was selected and that this precision information accounts for perceptual clarity. The account’s second part entails that experiences carry the relevant precision information in the manner in which their distal contents are represented. The precision account of clarity is shown to conform to common intuitions about experiences’ contents and accuracy conditions. And it is used to illustrate how experiences could assign probability distributions over distal possibilities, even while experiences’ contents are non-probabilistic.

Validity of mean-field theory in a dissipative critical system: Liouvillian gap, PT -symmetric antigap, and permutational symmetry in the XYZ model

We study the all-to-all connected $\mathit{XYZ}$ (anisotropic-Heisenberg) spin model with local and collective dissipations, comparing the results of mean-field (MF) theory with the solution of the Lindblad master equation. Exploiting the weak $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry of the model (referred to as Liouvillian $\mathbb{PT}$ symmetry), we efficiently calculate the Liouvillian gap, introducing the idea of an antigap, and we demonstrate the presence of a paramagnetic-to-ferromagnetic phase transition. Leveraging the permutational symmetry of the model [N. Shammah et al., Phys Rev. A 98, 063815 (2018)], we characterize criticality, finding exactly (up to numerical precision) the steady state for $N$ up to $N=95$ spins. We demonstrate that the MF theory correctly predicts the results in the thermodynamic limit in all regimes of parameters, and quantitatively describes the finite-size behavior in the small anisotropy regime. However, for an intermediate number of spins and for large anisotropy, we find a significant discrepancy between the results of the MF theory and those of the full quantum simulation. We also study other more experimentally accessible witnesses of the transition, which can be used for finite-size studies, namely, the bimodality coefficient and the angular-averaged susceptibility. In contrast to the bimodality coefficient, the angular-averaged susceptibility fails to capture the onset of the transition, in striking difference with respect to lower-dimensional studies. We also analyze the competition between local dissipative processes (which disentangle the spin system) and collective dissipative ones (generating entanglement). The nature of the phase transition is almost unaffected by the presence of these terms. Our results mark a stark difference with the common intuition that an all-to-all connected system should fall onto the mean-field solution also for intermediate number of spins.

Discourse topics and digressive markers

The article aims to clarify some of the theoretical orientations underlying the linguistic studies on topics of discourse and digressive markers. The notion of discourse topic (DT) introduced by van Dijk in the 1970s has no place in the models developed since the 1980s by Hobbs, Mann and Thompson, Asher and Lascarides and others. These models do without DT, for the reason that the rhetorical relations they advocate were sufficient to explain common sense intuitions on (dis)continuity and (in)coherence of discourse, although, at the same time, van Kuppevelt advocates model based solely on DT relations. With the development of systematic annotations of corpora, studies on discourse markers have increased, including markers of topic shifts. The last part of the paper deals with d'ailleurs and par ailleurs French adverbials, which are commonly used as a marker of digression. The analysis of these two DMs show that they are polyfunctional and involve both rhetorical relationships (addition, justification) that make the link with the previous utterances, and framing relationships indexing the incoming discourse (announcing of a topic shift, or a return to a previous DT).

Topologically induced prescrambling and dynamical detection of topological phase transitions at infinite temperature

We report a numerical observation where the infinite-temperature out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) directly probe quantum phase transitions at zero temperature, in contrast to common intuition where low energy quantum effects are washed away by strong thermal fluctuations at high temperature. By comparing numerical simulations with exact analytic results, we determine that this phenomenon has a topological origin and is highly generic, as long as the underlying system can be mapped to a 1D Majorana chain. Using the Majorana basis, we show that the infinite-temperature OTOCs probe zero-temperature quantum phases via detecting the presence of Majorana zero modes at the ends of the chain that is associated with 1D $Z_2$ topological order. Hence, we show that strong zero modes also affect OTOCs and scrambling dynamics. Our results demonstrate an intriguing interplay between information scrambling and topological order, which leads to a new phenomenon in the scrambling of generic nonintegrable models: topological order induced prescrambling, paralleling the notion of prethermalization of two-time correlators, that defines a time-scale for the restricted scrambling of topologically-protected quantum information.

The Ex-Middle Problem for Law-and-Economics

Abstract Law-and-economics has an ex-middle problem. First, there is the problem of preserving law’s deterrent power, and its ability to influence later behavior, even when it is sensible to renegotiate incentives later on. The issue is hardly limited to contract renegotiation, and the ubiquity of this kind of ex-middle thinking is examined here. Second, there is the idea that the more our thinking is driven by an ex-ante perspective, the more it distances itself from common ethical intuitions that tend to involve ex-post observations, or simply results. Solving ex-middle problems by tinkering with incentives leads to increased objections from ethically oriented audiences, who find efficiency claims unattractive when they burden individuals in the interest of future unidentifiable beneficiaries. This conflict makes it hard for law-and-economics to have its deserved influence on lawmaking. When law renegotiates with positive incentives, it reduces its ex-ante impact; when it relies on negative incentives, either ex-post or ex-middle, accompanied by a readjustment of the optimal ex-ante rule, it runs the risk of offending ethical sentiments, and then it rarely takes hold. One aim here is to draw attention to ex-middle recalibrations, and the second aim is to suggest that a law-and-economics approach is most successful when it devises efficient rules that are not at odds with ethical sentiments.

Measures of Similarity

AbstractThis article analyses the relationship between the concept of single aspect similarity and proposed measures of similarity. More precisely, it compares eleven measures of similarity in terms of how well they satisfy a list of desiderata, chosen to capture common intuitions concerning the properties of similarity and the relations between similarity and dissimilarity. Three types of measures are discussed: similarity as commonality, similarity as a function of dissimilarity, and similarity as a joint function of commonality and difference. Relative to the desiderata, it is found that a measure of the second type fares the best. However, rather than recommend this measure alone as a measure of similarity, it is suggested that there are at least three separate concepts of single aspect similarity, corresponding to the three types of measures. In light of this proposal, three of the eleven measures (and variants of these) are deemed acceptable.

Una propuesta de evaluación de la receptividad al bullshit que contemple la incidencia del contexto pragmático sobre la cognición

El artículo analiza el experimento de A. Pennycook et al., a fin de ampliar el alcance de sus hipótesis y las estrategias para contrastarlas, de modo que contemplen no solo factores cognitivos, sino también aspectos pragmáticos y contextuales implicados en la receptividad al bullshit. Se utiliza el experimento como ejemplo de las asunciones normativas implícitas en las investigaciones descriptivas de psicología y filosofía experimental, ya que, al contrastar hipótesis sobre las intuiciones filosóficas de sentido común, los investigadores parten de supuestos axiológicos sobre la corrección de las respuestas y la fiabilidad de los procesos cognitivos implicados.

Understanding black hole evaporation using explicitly computed Penrose diagrams

Explicitly computed Penrose diagrams are plotted for a classical model of black hole formation and evaporation, in which black holes form by the accretion of infalling spherical shells of matter and subsequently evaporate by emitting spherical shells of Hawking radiation. This model is based on known semiclassical effects, but is not a full solution of semiclassical gravity. The method allows arbitrary interior metrics of the form $ds^2=-f(r)\,dt^2+f(r)^{-1}\,dr^2+r^2\,d\Omega^2$, including singular and nonsingular models. Matter dynamics are visualized by explicitly plotting proper density in the diagrams, as well as by tracking the location of trapped surfaces and energy condition violations. The most illustrative model accurately approximates the standard time evolution for black hole thermal evaporation; its time dependence and causal structure are analyzed by inspection of the diagram. The resulting insights contradict some common intuitions and assumptions, and we point out some examples in the literature with assumptions that do not hold up in this more detailed model. Based on the new diagrams, we argue for an improved understanding of the Hawking radiation process, propose an alternate definition of "black hole" in the presence of evaporation, and suggest some implications regarding information preservation and unitarity.