Intuitive Appeal Research Articles

Against anti‐fanaticism

AbstractShould you be willing to forego any sure good for a tiny probability of a vastly greater good? Fanatics say you should, anti‐fanatics say you should not. Anti‐fanaticism has great intuitive appeal. But, I argue, these intuitions are untenable, because satisfying them in their full generality is incompatible with three very plausible principles: acyclicity, a minimal dominance principle, and the principle that any outcome can be made better or worse. This argument against anti‐fanaticism can be turned into a positive argument for a weak version of fanaticism, but only from significantly more contentious premises. In combination, these facts suggest that those who find fanaticism counterintuitive should favor not anti‐fanaticism, but an intermediate position that permits agents to have incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti‐fanatical.

Dependency-Aware Code Naturalness

Code naturalness, which captures repetitiveness and predictability in programming languages, has proven valuable for various code-related tasks in software engineering. However, precisely measuring code naturalness remains a fundamental challenge. Existing methods measure code naturalness over individual lines of code while ignoring the deep semantic relations among different lines, e.g., program dependency, which may negatively affect the precision of the measure. Despite the intuitive appeal of extending the code naturalness measure to the code dependency domain (as there are some work that have initiated the utilization of code dependency for diverse code-related tasks), this assumption remains unexplored and warrants direct investigation. In this study, we aim to perform the first empirical study to investigate whether incorporating code dependency, instead of analyzing individual lines, can enhance the precision of measuring code naturalness. To achieve that, we first propose a new method named DAN for measuring code naturalness by incorporating the rich dependency information in the code. Specifically, DAN extracts multiple sequences of code lines by traversing the program dependency graph, where different code lines are connected by dependencies in each sequence, and then the code naturalness will be measured by taking each sequence as a whole. In this way, the dependency information can be well captured. Finally, we have conducted an extensive study to evaluate the influence of code dependency for measuring code naturalness with DAN, and compared it with the state-of-the-art methods under three emerging application scenarios of code naturalness. The results demonstrate that DAN can not only better distinguish natural and unnatural code, but also substantially boost two important downstream applications of code naturalness, i.e., distinguishing buggy and non-buggy code lines and data cleansing for training better code models, reflecting the significance of code dependency in measuring code naturalness.

Optimal knots for smoothing splines and adaptive smoothing splines in generalized linear models: Design approach

Smoothing splines play a crucial role as a prevalent tool for estimating unknown functions in non parametric regression. In fitting functions with varying roughness, adaptive smoothing splines provide the flexibility to adjust the smoothing parameter adaptively with the changes over the predictor variable within specific intervals, facilitating accommodation for changing roughness. Despite its intuitive appeal and high flexibility, the implementation of this estimator poses challenges, especially in the absence of specified knot numbers, knot locations, and certain simplifying assumptions on the smoothing parameter. D-optimal designs are considered to specify the knot locations in this models. The prior information from data as the prior curvature knowledge can be useful for this optimization problem. For this purpose, the smoothing parameter in this optimization problem can be considered as a function based on the prior curvature. We apply this method to responses from the exponential family of distributions. The mathematical expression of the estimator of the curve in a generalized linear mixed model enables us to derive an information matrix. The derived information matrix and hence the optimum design will depend on the values of the model’s unknown parameters. In such situations, numerical techniques should be considered for evaluating and optimizing this criterion.

What is the role of affective forecasting in knowing what we value?

ABSTRACT Generally, we confidently ascribe valuing states to ourselves. We make statements such as “I value democracy” or “I value my best friend” - our sense of who we are depends on doing so. Yet what justifies that confidence? If you were asked “Do you value philosophy, or are you just doing it for the money?”, how might you go about generating such knowledge? I will operate with the notion that valuing involves, at a minimum, a set of distinctive emotional dispositions toward the valued object. Given this view of valuing, a plausible explanation stemming from Tooming and Miyazono is the following: to know whether we value, we need to predict our potential or future emotional reactions. That is, they suggest that affective forecasting is necessary to generate knowledge of valuing states. I argue that, despite its intuitive appeal, affective forecasting is not necessary. I then consider a more modest claim, namely that affective forecasting is still explanatorily powerful when it comes to self-knowledge of valuing states, as it explains the difficulty of generating such knowledge. I reject this further claim, arguing that there is a stronger available explanation: the use of theories about valuing.

Speed and Reliability of Touch vs Mouse Inputs in Visual Foraging

Abstract Traditional visual attention research predominantly employs a visual search paradigm focused on identifying a single target within a scene. This approach, however, may not fully encapsulate the complexities of natural environmental interactions, which often involve multiple decisions and actions. Addressing this gap, recent advancements have introduced touch-screen-based foraging tasks, where participants are required to identify and cancel multiple targets through tactile interaction. Despite its intuitive appeal, the widespread adoption of this methodology has been limited. This article explores the computer mouse as a viable alternative for target cancellation in such foraging tasks. We conducted an experiment comparing search performance between touch and mouse inputs in a visual foraging task, requiring participants to locate and interact with a known target multiple times under various search types. Our findings indicate that while mouse responses are marginally slower, the variance in response times is consistent across both input modalities. Contrary to expectations, we observed no significant disadvantages when employing the mouse as opposed to touch screens. The results suggest that the computer mouse is a competent and underutilized tool in visual attention research, offering a comparable and effective alternative to touch-based devices for complex search tasks.

From beaks to brains-Challenges in translating woodpecker biology into traumatic brain injury innovation.

The biomechanics of woodpeckers have captivated researchers for decades. These birds' unique ability to withstand repeated impacts, seemingly without apparent harm, has piqued the interests of scientists and clinicians across multiple disciplines. Historical and recent studies have dissected the anatomical and physiological underpinnings of woodpeckers' protective mechanisms and sparked interest in the development of woodpecker-inspired safety equipment. Despite the intuitive appeal of translating woodpecker adaptations into strategies for human traumatic brain injury (TBI) prevention, significant challenges hinder such innovation. Critical examinations reveal a lack of direct applicability of these findings to human TBI prevention, attributed to fundamental biological and mechanical dissimilarities between humans and woodpeckers. Additionally, some commercial endeavors attempting to capitalize on our fascination with woodpeckers are rooted in unsubstantiated claims about these birds. This paper explores the narrative surrounding woodpecker biomimicry, including its origins and history, and highlights the challenges of translating findings from unconventional animal models of TBI into effective human medical interventions.

How to be indifferent

AbstractAccording to the principle of indifference, when a set of possibilities is evidentially symmetric for you – when your evidence no more supports any one of the possibilities over any other – you're required to distribute your credences uniformly among them. Despite its intuitive appeal, the principle of indifference is often thought to be unsustainable due to the problem of multiple partitions: Depending on how a set of possibilities is divided, it seems that sometimes, applying indifference reasoning can require you to assign incompatible credences to equivalent possibilities. This paper defends the principle of indifference from the problem of multiple partitions by offering two guides for how to respond. The first is for permissivists about rationality, and is modeled on permissivists' arguments for the claim that a body of evidence sometimes does not uniquely determine a fully rational credence function. The second is for impermissivists about rationality, and is modeled on impermissivists' arguments for the claim that a body of evidence does always uniquely determine a fully rational credence function. What appears to be a decisive objection against the principle of indifference is in fact an instance of a general challenge taking different forms familiar to both permissivists and impermissivists.

The State of Nationalism (SoN): Nationalism and International Conflict

Does nationalism increase the probability of international conflict? An affirmative answer has intuitive appeal: Nationalists promote force to protect their land and people from foreign threats. Research on nationalism in international conflict implicates elites, masses, and political interactions between these actors when asserting its status as a powerful force that raises the risk for interstate wars. Yet both micro- and macro-level evidence cautions against drawing broad conclusions about how nationalism affects conflict. Nationalism sometimes prompts aggression. In other contexts, nationalism produces restraint. Systematic knowledge about how nationalism relates to international conflict therefore requires answers to questions about which nationalisms promote conflict and whose nationalism matters. This article first reviews theory and evidence about nationalism’s conflict-causing potential. We discuss the microfoundations that link nationalism to foreign policy attitudes before describing research that implicates nationalism as a cause of militarized conflict. Next, we argue that understanding the complex relationships between nationalism and conflict requires theorizing the causal processes that connect various stakeholders’ nationalism to foreign policy outcomes. Moreover, research on identity content suggests that nationalism is compatible with a variety of foreign policy preferences. Throughout, we centre research that features nationalism as a principal independent variable or causal mechanism precipitating conflict. Any review about nationalism must contend with the delicate matter of conceptualization — the field contains nearly as many definitions for nationalism as articles about nationalism and war. The research we discuss variously describes nationalism as an identity, ideology, or belief, for example. For our purposes, nationalism captures a set of sentiments related to a national group and its superiority. This broad perspective centers the phenomenon implicated in international conflict research.

What Can Community Benefits Agreements Learn from Allied Policies? Lessons from a Systematic Literature Review

Community benefits agreements (CBAs) have risen in popularity and usage in the twenty-first century. Despite their intuitive appeal, usage has remained relatively infrequent due to legal and practical difficulties. Globally, various policies share key goals and characteristics with CBAs, including place-based development, community engagement, and applicability to large projects. This paper uses an Extending Review to answer the question, what do allied policies teach us in terms of innovations and best practices that could improve CBA practice in the United States? This paper advances rights-based strategies, tools, and frameworks for consideration, while discussing the potential and challenges of each.

Spatial and temporal variability in the structure of the multiple-herbivore community of horsenettle, and evidence for evolutionary responses in host-plant resistance

The geographic mosaic model of plant–herbivore coevolution asserts that interactions between a plant species and an herbivore species vary in intensity among populations across the plant’s geographic range. Despite this model’s intuitive appeal, data to investigate its implications for the type of complex, multiple-herbivore communities that occur in nature are scant. This paper reports on the results of 2 years of field surveys of damage by five leaf herbivores and one stem herbivore in four Solanum carolinense (horsenettle) populations, combined with results of a common-garden study quantifying the mean resistance levels of the plants from each field against each of the six herbivores. The relative amounts of damage caused by each species (representing the “herbivore-community structure”) differed significantly among the four fields. The plants were much more heavily damaged in the 2nd year than in the first, but the herbivore-community structure remained stable within each field between years. Overall, the amount of damage by species of herbivores in a field tended to be positively correlated with the plants’ levels of resistance that were measured in the common garden (r = 0.40, P = 0.05). Specifically, for five of the six herbivores, greater damage in the field was associated with greater plant resistance. This result suggests that horsenettle’s evolution of resistance against specific herbivores can occur rather quickly within fields, creating a local-scale mosaic of populations specifically adapted to the particular structure of the herbivore community that they are facing, but that herbivore-community structure is not strongly determined by plant resistance.

Rebalance Your Investment Portfolio Periodically: Mantra or Myth?

Rebalance Your Investment Portfolio Periodically: Mantra or Myth?

The Quintilian School in the history of Social Choice: an early tentative step from plurality rule to pairwise comparisons

We present two texts from Roman Empire times that add two early appearances to the stream of the history of Social Choice Theory. One is from the School of Rhetoric of Quintilian (35–96), a contemporary of Pliny the Younger, who developed an early criticism of Plurality rule and, in search of a better method, sketched a choice by pairwise comparisons. The other is from Aulus Gellius (160–180), who used the term “aporia” applied to a voting problem while commenting on a voting by Plurality that yielded counterintuitive or seemingly illogical results. These early analyses and critiques of Plurality rule reveal the flaws of a system that, despite its intuitive or spontaneous appeal, has evident failures that have triggered theoretical reflection from remote times. The two texts also show how paradoxical and problematic situations serve as powerful incentives for reflection and advancement of knowledge and can trigger attempts to address and refine voting and election methods to find more robust and fair alternatives.

A Multi-Disciplinary Cybernetic Approach to Pedagogic Excellence

This paper presents a theory of good pedagogy that i) unifies several current theories, ii) is cybernetic, that is, content independent, and iii) operationally defined. The paper builds off a recent theoretical unification of pedagogy using the four pedagogic pillars of executive function, goal-setting, attribution theory, and self-efficacy. A novelty of the theory is avoidance of jargon, such as higher cognitive, which, while having intuitive appeal, has meaning which is ambiguous. The theory also avoids secondary terms such as creative or analytic and instead focuses on root psychological processes such as executive function and multiple modalities. The theory is applied in a multi-disciplinary setting addressing both machine and human mastery of tasks. This multi-disciplinarity is synergistic allowing simultaneous considerations of emotional (human) and efficiency (machine) issues. The theory is easily applied to new situations without the need for special training. It is hoped that instructors will begin to use this approach in their instructional design.

SpreadLine: Visualizing Egocentric Dynamic Influence.

Egocentric networks, often visualized as node-link diagrams, portray the complex relationship (link) dynamics between an entity (node) and others. However, common analytics tasks are multifaceted, encompassing interactions among four key aspects: strength, function, structure, and content. Current node-link visualization designs may fall short, focusing narrowly on certain aspects and neglecting the holistic, dynamic nature of egocentric networks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpreadLine, a novel visualization framework designed to enable the visual exploration of egocentric networks from these four aspects at the microscopic level. Leveraging the intuitive appeal of storyline visualizations, SpreadLine adopts a storyline-based design to represent entities and their evolving relationships. We further encode essential topological information in the layout and condense the contextual information in a metro map metaphor, allowing for a more engaging and effective way to explore temporal and attribute-based information. To guide our work, with a thorough review of pertinent literature, we have distilled a task taxonomy that addresses the analytical needs specific to egocentric network exploration. Acknowledging the diverse analytical requirements of users, SpreadLine offers customizable encodings to enable users to tailor the framework for their tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy and general applicability of SpreadLine through three diverse real-world case studies (disease surveillance, social media trends, and academic career evolution) and a usability study.

Mobile business apps and employee productivity

PurposeHoping to increase the productivity of their employees, firms provide and expect their employees to use approved mobile apps. However, despite an intuitive appeal, the relationship between information technology usage and productivity is still seen as paradoxical. This study examines the relationship between employees' experience and engagement with business mobile apps provided by employers and its effects on employee work productivity.Design/methodology/approachData from respondents who use employer-provided business apps were used to test the hypotheses. Measurement-corrected latent scores extracted from the PLS measurement evaluation were used in regression-centric assessment using PROCESS.FindingsResults indicate that employee-users’ experience-based attributions of the business app, i.e. customization, performance quality and compatibility, have positive effects on productivity mediated by participation intensity. Further, work type (retail vs non-retail) and the depth of the employee user’s experience moderate experience-based attributions' indirect effects on productivity.Originality/valueUnlike previous studies delving into this topic, this study focuses solely on the mediation and moderation effects for hypothesis testing. Specifically, this study investigates effects conditional on work type (retail vs non-retail), which the authors believe has significant implications for retailing. These findings have interesting implications for both future research and managers.

Some Remarks on the Logic of Probabilistic Relevance

In this paper we deepen some aspects of the statistical approach to relevance by providing logics for the syntactical treatment of probabilistic relevance relations. Specifically, we define conservative expansions of Classical Logic endowed with a ternary connective ⇝ - indeed, a constrained material implication - whose intuitive reading is “x materially implies y and it is relevant to y under the evidence z”. In turn, this ensures the definability of a formula in three-variables R(x, z, y) which is the representative of relevance in the object language. We outline the algebraic semantics of such logics, and we apply the acquired machinery to investigate some termdefined weakly connexive implications with some intuitive appeal. As a consequence, a further motivation of (weakly) connexive principles in terms of relevance and background assumptions obtains.

A Multi-Disciplinary Cybernetic Approach to Pedagogic Excellence

This paper presents a theory of good pedagogy that i) unifies several current theories, ii) is cybernetic, that is, content independent, and iii) operationally defined. The paper builds off a recent theoretical unification of pedagogy using the four pedagogic pillars of <em>executive function, goal-setting, attribution theory, </em>and <em>self-efficacy</em>. A novelty of the theory is avoidance of jargon, such as <em>higher cognitive, </em>which, while having intuitive appeal, has meaning which is ambiguous. The theory also avoids secondary terms such as <em>creative </em>or <em>analytic </em>and instead focuses on root psychological processes such as executive function and multiple modalities. The theory is applied in a multi-disciplinary setting addressing both machine and human mastery of tasks. This multi-disciplinarity is synergistic allowing simultaneous considerations of emotional (human) and efficiency (machine) issues. The theory is easily applied to new situations without the need for special training. It is hoped that instructors will begin to use this approach in their instructional design.

A Note on the Preferences of Sports Fans: Partisanship Versus Uncertainty of Outcome

Since its inception, a core principle of sports economics has been the claim that fans desire balanced competition—the so-called Uncertainty of Outcome Hypothesis (UOH). While this idea has intuitive appeal, it runs counter to the equally obvious importance of partisanship in shaping fan interest in sporting contests. The absence of a well-accepted theoretical basis for the UOH, coupled with a lack of compelling empirical evidence in support of it, suggests important gaps in the literature. This paper takes a step toward addressing the former need by offering a contest utility function, based on standard Cobb-Douglas preferences, which embodies both partisanship and a demand for competitive balance. The model is used to derive a willingness-to-pay function for game tickets and an expression for aggregate attendance. Findings from the empirical literature are discussed in light of the analysis.

Abbott Dimension, Mathematics Inspired by Flatland

What is the “right way” to define dimension? Mathematicians working in the early and middle 20th-century formalized three intuitive definitions of dimension that all turned out to be equivalent on separable metric spaces. But were these definitions the “right” ones? What would it mean to have the “right” definition of dimension? In this paper we attempt to inspire thought about these questions by introducing Abbott dimension, a geometrically intuitive definition of dimension based on Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland. We show that while Abbott dimension has intuitive appeal, it does not always agree with the classical definitions of dimension on separable metric spaces.

A reply to Gillham on the impairment principle.

The impairment argument claims that abortion is immoral, because it results in a greater impairment to a fetus than other actions that are clearly immoral, such as inflicting fetal alcohol syndrome. Alex Gillham argues that the argument requires clarification of the meaning of greater impairment. He proposes two definitions, and points out the difficulties with each. In response, I argue that while the impairment argument's definition of greater impairment is narrow in scope, it is sufficient for its intended purpose. Broadening its scope to more controversial comparisons of impairment is likely to undermine the intuitive appeal of the impairment principle that the argument is based upon.