Despite claims from prominent scientists that SARS‐CoV‐2 indubitably emerged naturally, the etiology of this novel coronavirus remains a pressing and open question: Without knowing the true nature of a disease, it is impossible for clinicians to appropriately shape their care, for policy‐makers to correctly gauge the nature and extent of the threat, and for the public to appropriately modify their behavior. Unless the intermediate host necessary for completing a natural zoonotic jump is identified, the dual‐use gain‐of‐function research practice of viral (...) serial passage should be considered a viable route by which the novel coronavirus arose. The practice of serial passage mimics a natural zoonotic jump, and offers explanations for SARS‐CoV‐2's distinctive spike‐protein region and its unexpectedly high affinity for angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE2), as well as the notable polybasic furin cleavage site within it. Additional molecular clues raise further questions, all of which warrant full investigation into the novel coronavirus's origins and a re‐examination of the risks and rewards of dual‐use gain‐of‐function research. (shrink)

When people are asked to estimate the probabilities of uncertain events, they often neglect the additivity principle, which requires that the probabilities assigned to an exhaustive set of outcomes should add up to 100%. Previous studies indicate that additivity neglect is dependent on response format, self-generated probability estimates being more coherent than estimates on rating scales. The present study made use of eye-tracking methodology, recording the movement, frequency and duration of fixations during the solution of ten additivity problems and two (...) control tasks. Participants produced more non-additive estimates in the Scale format than in the Self-generated format. Self-generated estimates also led to longer decision time and a higher number of repeated inspections, suggesting a deliberate comparison process. In contrast, the Scale format seemed to encourage a case-based approach where each outcome is evaluated in isolation. (shrink)

This article extends the Humean example of evolutionary stakeholder theory introduced in Kline and McDermott (2019). In that article, it was established that the Cost of Service Regulation (COSR) rules created by regulatory commissions, courts, and legislation was an example of evolutionary stakeholder theory. Ultimately, the Supreme Court decision in the Hope Natural Gas case established that it was not the method, but the result reach that was important. If the result reach balanced the interests of stakeholders then the outcome (...) was just and reasonable. Kline and McDermott (2019) also established that the COSR process was rather robust in terms of stakeholder participation. The purpose of this article is to extend the analysis to examine one of the most turbulent periods in COSR's history: the Post‐OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s–1980s. The effects of this period called into question the efficacy of the COSR process and led, as evolutionary stakeholder theory predicts, to a series of engagements by stakeholders to modify the rules of the process to achieve a better balance in the publics' interest. While adjudicatory in nature, the COSR process enabled cooperative solutions to redress the imbalances created by the OPEC oil shocks, improvements in information gathering, processing and decision‐making were all products of the evolutionary stakeholder process that regulators engaged in with stakeholders. (shrink)

Herbert A. Simon's reply (Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 3) to my criticism of his 1954 paper is not to the point. He fails to respond to some of my arguments and misconceives others. One of his misconceptions is that any mathematical deduction from empirical premises which are formulated mathematically will necessarily lead to empirically valid conclusions. This claim is particularly unwarrantable in Simon's case since his mathematical premise, the continuity of the reaction function, is empirically meaningless.

In his well?known paper from 1954, Herbert A. Simon sets out to demonstrate that it is possible, in principle, to make public predictions within the social sciences that will be confirmed by the events. However, Simon's proof by means of the Brouwer fixed?point theorem not only rests on an illegitimate use of continuous variables, it is also founded on the questionable assumption that facts ? even on the level of possibilities ? can be established by purely mathematical means. The ?proof? (...) also appears redundant since we already know from past experience that, for instance, the confirmation of a public election prediction is possible. (shrink)

In this paper we revise Reinforcement Learning and adaptiveness in Multi-Agent Systems from an Evolutionary Game Theoretic perspective. More precisely we show there is a triangular relation between the fields of Multi-Agent Systems, Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Game Theory. We illustrate how these new insights can contribute to a better understanding of learning in MAS and to new improved learning algorithms. All three fields are introduced in a self-contained manner. Each relation is discussed in detail with the necessary background information (...) to understand it, along with major references to relevant work. (shrink)

An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815. Edited by Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 374 pp., £40.00 cloth.

The traditional conception and validation of state identity, if not legitimacy, has in recent decades, so argues Jason Royce Lindsey, undergone profound alterations in response to novel transformat...