Is It Rational to Reject Expert Consensus?

Surprise and Uncertainty Is It Rational to Be Rational?

Is It Rational to be Logical?

The topic of this panel is whether considerations of logicality or rationality should be paramount in modelling, or reasoning about, knowledge and belief. The first reaction one ought to have to such a question is to ask why there should be any conflict between these two types of consideration. Isn't one required to be logical in order to be rational? On closer examination, the issue is not as ...

When is it Rational to Review for Privilege?

Legal professionals are naturally reluctant to trust fully automated techniques for privilege review. There are certainly cases in which fully manual review is a rational choice, but there are also cases in which reliance on some degree of automation is rational. This paper proposes a model that can help practitioners to make rational choices, and to explain those choices once they have been ma...

Is it rational to treat pneumonia with exogenous surfactant?

Pneumonia is an important cause of respiratory failure, and is associated with increased alveolar permeability leading to pulmonary oedema, haemorrhage and atelectasis [1, 2]. The pathophysiological changes in pneumonia include hypoxaemia, decreased functional residual capacity (fRC), decreased total lung capacity (TLC), decreased lung compliance, and a diminished surfactant system [3-5]. As ea...

Language modelling’s generative model: is it rational?

This note considers issues of principle that arise in applying so-called language modelling to different language and information processing tasks. Language modelling is familiar and effective for some tasks, and has been proposed and appears promising for others (see, e.g. Croft and Lafferty 2003). However attention has been more often focused on technical manipulation than on the underlying j...