This note shows that disagreement, in the sense of differing priors, may increase the incentives to collect information when two agents work on a joint project. The reason is that each agent believes that new data will confirm his own beliefs and thus ‘convince’ the other agents to do what the focal agent thinks is right.

Policymakers and pundits have been sounding alarms about internet insecurity for years, so the arst appearance of anything in International Security (IS) on this topic is a welcomed development. In the fall 2013 issue, Lucas Kello takes the security studies community to task for ignoring cyber perils, while Erik Gartzke argues that cyberwar is of limited political utility.1 Kello writes that “[...

The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably ’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appea...

CONTEXT Witnessing domestic violence increases a child's chance of emotional or behavioral problems during childhood and entering abusive relationships in adulthood, even without co-occurring child maltreatment. OBJECTIVE Our goals were to estimate the prevalence of reported violent disagreements in the homes of US children and to assess prevalence differences by race/ethnicity, residence, an...

Critical issues of gender justice are frequently analyzed in the American legal academy without meaningful attention to the insights of newer feminist theories. To some degree this is understandable, as newer feminisms have added substantially to the overall complexity of feminist scholarship and have employed a less accessible argumentative style than older feminist theories. Selective “tuning...

This report presents a probabilistic analysis of a family of simple synchronous round-based consensus algorithms aimed at solving the 1-of-n selection problem. In this problem, a set of n nodes are to select one common value among a set of n proposed values. There are two possible outcomes of each node’s selection process: it can decide either to select a value, or to abort. Agreement implies t...

In previous lectures we saw examples in which active learning gives an exponential improvement in the number of labels required for learning. In this lecture we describe the Disagreement Coefficient —a measure of the complexity of an active learning problem proposed by Steve Hanneke in 2007. We will derive an algorithm for the realizable case and analyze it using the disagreement coefficient. I...