Thinking twice about sum scores

Thinking Twice about Second-Price Ad Auctions

A number of recent papers have addressed the algorithmic problem of allocating advertisement space for keywords in sponsored search auctions so as to maximize revenue, most of which assume that pricing is done via a first-price auction. This does not realistically model the Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction used in practice, in which bidders pay the next-highest bid for keywords that they ...

Thinking twice: cloning and in vitro fertilization.

Human cloning and in vitro fertilisation may seem very different procedures; certainly, they are regarded very differently by many people at the present time. IVF is seen as a mainstream procedure raising few ethical problems, while cloning, or ‘reproductive’ cloning, is widely regarded as beyond the moral pale. In this paper, I argue that the two procedures have more in common than might at fi...

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'