Defusing the explosive

Defusing Bertrand’s Paradox

The classical interpretation of probability together with the Principle of Indifference are formulated in terms of probability measure spaces in which the probability is given by the Haar measure. A notion called Labeling Invariance is defined in the category of Haar probability spaces, it is shown that Labeling Invariance is violated and Bertrand’s Paradox is interpreted as the very proof of v...

Defusing redox bombs?

Proteins catalyze crucial reactions via unstable, high-energy chemical intermediates. In the absence of physiological substrates, activated redox cofactors become ticking time bombs, capable of producing oxidative damage to the protein. In PNAS, Gray and Winkler (1) propose that chains of tryptophan (Trp) and tyrosine (Tyr) residues may serve as escape routes for potentially damaging, highly ox...

Defusing the childhood vocabulary explosion.

During the second year of life, the rate at which children acquire new words accelerates dramatically. This has led the field of language acquisition to posit specialized mechanisms that leverage the few words learned in the initial slow phase for faster vocabulary growth later. Simulations and mathematical analysis demonstrate that specialized cognitive changes are unnecessary. The acceleratio...

Defusing epistemic relativism

This paper explores the question of whether there is an interesting form of specifically epistemic relativism available, a position which can lend support to claims of a broadly relativistic nature but which is not committed to relativism about truth. It is argued that the most plausible rendering of such a view turns out not to be the radical thesis that it is often represented as being. 0. On...

Risk-defusing Behavior