We examine whether there is systematic evidence that the US intelligence services pandered to their political masters when constructing intelligence estimates during the Cold War. We construct a model which shows how career concerns on the part of intelligence analysts could lead them to distort reports towards their president’s prior beliefs. We then take the model’s prediction that errors in ...

The construction of rational agents is one of the goals that has been pursued in Artiicial Intelligence (AI). In most of the architectures that have been proposed for this kind of agents, its behaviour is guided by its set of beliefs. In our work, rational agents are those systems that are permanently engaged in the process of rational inquiry; thus, their beliefs keep evolving in time, as a co...

We construct a novel agent-based model of prediction markets in which putative human qualities like learning, reasoning, and profit-seeking are absent. We show that the prices which emerge from a market populated by a class of distinctly inhuman agents, Zero-Intelligence agents with diffuse beliefs, replicate the findings of empirical market studies. We use this result to argue against the prev...

Research has shown that language teachers’ beliefs are often difficult to change through education.  Experiential learning may help, but more research is needed to understand how experiential approaches shape perceptions. This study compares two approaches, conversation partners (CONV) and structured language learning experiences (SLLE), integrated into a course in language acquisition. Partici...

One attractive route to developing a theory of limited rationality is through the notion of rational control of reasoning. Rational control is sometimes viewed in terms of rational allocation of limited computational resources in drawing conclusions, with ideal rationality just the infinite-resource case of resourcebounded inference. But some important sorts of limitations on rationality due to...