Improbable Events Research Articles

Myopic Economic Agents

This paper presents a model of myopic tastes, both in the context of intertemporal decision making and choice under uncertainty. Infinite dimensional consumption plans arise naturally in both contexts, either involving a denumerable number of periods or a countable number of states of the world. The essential feature of our model is that myopic behavior is formalized by defining topologies, on the space of consumption plans, which discount the future or improbable events.

Nuclear safety in doubt a year after accident

Suddenly they appear, four imposing cooling towers on an island in the Susquehanna River, 10 miles from Harrisburg, Pa. Once a symbol of safe, clean, dependable electric energy, the towers—justifiably or not—have come to symbolize the public's fear of an awesome technology gone amok. The turning point came seconds after 4 AM on March 28,1979, when a series of improbable events occurred that sent Three Mile Island Unit 2 out of control. Equipment failure and confusing instrumentation, compounded by human error, led to a loss of water coolant and a partial uncovering of the reactor core. It was the worst civilian nuclear accident the country has known. One year later, the crippled, contaminated reactor operates at zero power, and cleanup operations are hampered by a frightened populace on the verge of civil disobedience. It was an accident that couldn't happen, the nuclear industry said. A core meltdown averted as much by luck as by the ...

Heartbreak House: Shaw's Ship of Fools

IT IS EASIER to accept Shaw's judgment that Heartbreak House is his greatest play than to make critical sense of it, for the play can present obstacles even to the sympathetic critic. Throughout, the plot line is interrupted, expectations for further actions are undercut, and wildly improbable events occur. These irregularities are most glaring in the burglar's intrusion (Act II), the often contradictory responses of the characters, and the unpredictable denouement. Since such devices abound in farce and "absurdist" drama, critics have noted resem blances between Heartbreak House and, say, nineteenth century Dublin farce, as wel1 as plays of Beckett and Pinter. In contrast to these works, however, Heartbreak House is didactical1y ordered: Shaw bodies forth a simple statement on the future of England in two metaphors -the ship of state and the ship of fools. Uncovering the dramatic relation between these venerable tropes and the further relation of the tropes to the surface action lays bare the play's principle of coherence.

The one and the many: Early stochastic reasoning in philosophy

Summary From its beginnings religious philosophy confronted the challenge to reconcile Divine or natural determinism with man's moral freedom. In ancient Jewish thought, this gave rise to statistical ideas. In some Rabbinic texts, necessity is seen as inhering in collectives rather than in individuals. This is a statistical conception. Some miracles too were understood as highly improbable events, and remarkable phenomena were distinguished from usual ones. Medieval thinkers amplified and developed these ideas. Providential as well as natural determinism were explained as operating in large numbers of individual acts of free will, an idea later taken up by Kant.

Dissociation of algorithmic and heuristic processes in language comprehension: Evidence from aphasia

Three groups of aphasic patients, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's, and a nonaphasic patients control group were tested for comprehension of object-relative center-embedded sentences. The sentences were of three types: sentences in which semantic constraints between words allowed the subjects to assign a correct semantic reading of the sentence without decoding the syntax, sentences in which semantic constraints were relaxed and for which a correct reading was only possible with knowledge of syntactic relationships among words, and sentences which described highly improbable events. The subjects' task was to choose which of two pictures captured the meaning expressed in the sentence. Broca's and Conduction aphasics performed near perfectly on sentences where they could use semantic information. Their performance dropped to chance when they had to use syntactic information. These results support a neuropsychological dissociation of heuristic and algorithmic processes based primarily, though not exclusively, on semantic and syntactic information, respectively.

Myth and Neurosis in Ibsen’s Mature Plays

Myth and realism are quite incompatible, we suppose. Their curious marriage in Ibsen's plays, in which mythic patterns are enacted by the Norwegian burghers and their matrons, poses problems which call the nature of modern myth criticism into question. The case is not unique, of course. Eliot praised Joyce's use of myth in Ulysses, and described its function as that of a template, imposing form on the chaos of modern life Л But Ibsen, writing earlier, depicts not a chaotic world which needs shaping, but a highly structured world in the process of unravelling. Orley Holtan's important study of mythic patterns in Ibsen's plays2 employs a method borrowed from Jung, Frye, Cassirer, and other proponents of the archetype, who classify myth semantically, according to content. 3 Holtan therefore looks for archetypal myth structures in Ibsen's work Frye's quest pattern and Campbell's monomyth, for example and for myth content, such as the inclusion of supernatural beings and improbable events. This method prompts him to conclude that only the early and the late plays of Ibsen are mythic in nature. He classifies the social dramas of the middle period in terms borrowed from Frye, as myth displaced in favor of realism: They operate in a human world in which the supernatural is absent and causes and effects are, in large part, realistically determined.4 By aligning myth with the sacred and realism with the secular, Holtan fails to avail himself of those critical tools which would allow him to overcome the dichotomy of myth and the real, and to analyze simultaneously the compelling structural principle which governs Ibsen's last twelve plays. Contemporary structuralism, particularly the myth criticism of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, offers a way of looking for repetitions, similarities, differences, and other relationships

Dostoevsky, Kazantzakis' Unacknowledged Mentor

HE MAIN streams that run through Kazantzakis are those that 1 still flow strongly in the minds of many artists and thinkers of the twentieth century, and even yet determine many currents; however, the very origin of these streams of thought was in the nineteenth century. Both Nietzsche and Bergson are children of that age, as was Dostoevsky, the third very essential nutrient in Kazantzakis. Thus, Kazantzakis' artistic skill and intellectual prowess primarily rest on his ability to understand and to apply the thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Apparently, without a serious study and knowledge of Dostoevsky, and of Russian literature in general,1 Kazantzakis would have been dominated by the thought of his Western teachers, Nietzsche and Bergson, whom he had systematically studied, and he would probably have evolved as a novelist of Western culture. Tom Doulis thinks that Kazantzakis, in contrast to many contemporary Greek writers, rejects the Western tradition of writing realistic novels by combining and including in his novels many unrealistic, improbable, and impossible elements and events. A deep religious fervor many times mixed with a scurrilous anticlericalism is one major characteristic that marks Kazantzakis' novels as definitely not contemporary, realistic, or even Western European. Such tendencies are not endorsed by the rational writers of the West, who define reality as within the realm of the possible and probable.2 Regardless of Kazantzakis' intellectual

A test of goodness of fit

The authors propose a new test of goodness of fit for the simple null hypothesis that the actual distribution is equal to a given, everywhere continuous distribution function. Under theNeyman-Pearson setup they obtain a test which (a) is meaningful without reference to any specific set of alternatives, and (b) is based on the fact we tend to dis-believe tall scores for improbable events. They also show that their test is connected with a pseudo distance between two distribution functions defined in terms of theKullback-Leiber mean information index. Finally, they compare their test with the standard procedures, viz. chi-square test,Kolmogorov’s test and two modifications of the latter, applying all of them to data published byDurbin.

Wishes concerning improbable future events: reactions to the future.

Wishes concerning improbable future events: reactions to the future.