CARELESSNESS, INDIFFERENCE AND RECKLESSNESS1

Monuments to Academic Carelessness

In 1942, Katherine Frost Bruner published an article titled ‘‘Of psychological writing: Being some valedictory remarks on style.’’ It was published in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, the journal for which she served as editorial assistant between 1937 and 1941. Her collection of advice to writing scholars has been widely quoted, including by several editions of The Publication Manual...

Ignorance and Indifference*

The epistemic state of complete ignorance is not a probability distribution. In it, we assign the same, unique, ignorance degree of belief to any contingent outcome and each of its contingent, disjunctive parts. That this is the appropriate way to represent complete ignorance is established by two instruments, each individually strong enough to identify this state. They are the principle of ind...

Envelopes and Indifference

Stable Marriage and Indifference

It is well known that every instance of the classical stable marriage problem admits at least one stable matching, and that such a matching can be found in O(n’) time by application of the Gale/Shapley algorithm. In the classical version of the problem, each person must rank the members of the opposite sex in strict order of preference. In practical applications, a person may not wish (or be ab...

Carelessness and Goal Orientation in a Science Microworld

In this paper, we study the relationship between goal orientation within a science inquiry learning environment for middle school students and carelessness, i.e., not demonstrating an inquiry skill despite knowing it. Carelessness is measured based on a machine-learned model. We find, surprisingly, that carelessness is higher for students with strong mastery or learning goals, compared to stude...