One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when treatment and outcome are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been adjusted for. We introduce a novel approach for estimating causal effects that exploits observational conditional independencies to suggest “weak” pa...

Abstract In this paper, I highlight three objections to vice-based accounts of moral evil: (1) the worry that evil are explanatorily inadequate; (2) even extreme vice is not sufficient for evil; and (3) all vices inversions virtue (and so will struggle explain “mirror thesis”). argue it possible respond these by developing a account draws on insights from vice) epistemology. way, seek defend st...

In order to sketch, why steganography is such an important topic, and has received far too little attention from the hacker community in the past, let me quickly challenge our view of cryptosystems as commonly built in the context of military or commercial applications: Cryptosystems are designed to protect our sensitive data from evil arbitrators. Wrong. Well, maybe not. But then again, what i...

A classic argument for skepticism about the external world runs as follows. First: we cannot know that the evil-demon hypothesis is false, where the evil-demon hypothesis says that all of our sensory experiences have been produced by an evil demon. Second: if we cannot know that the evil-demon hypothesis is false, we cannot know we have hands. Conclusion: We cannot know we have hands. Generaliz...

In two previous essays (Perron, 2006 and Arsenault & Perron 2008), I have conceptualized the partaking in a game as a cognitive frame, as an ongoing process. To explain the gamer's immersion and progression through a game, I have resorted to the figure of the cycle, of the spiral instead of talking about Huizinga's " magic circle ". In this model, three interconnected spirals are represented: t...

BACKGROUND Ethiopia has high prevalences of udder health problems including clinical and subclinical mastitis across production systems in different livestock species. Previous studies on udder health problems have largely focused on identification of mastitis causing microbial pathogens and associated risk factors. However, relatively little is known about the knowledge and beliefs of livestoc...

The causal Markov condition (CMC) plays an important role in much recent work on the problem of causal inference from statistical data. It is commonly thought that the CMC is a more problematic assumption for genuinely indeterministic systems than for deterministic ones. In this essay, I critically examine this proposition. I show how the usual motivation for the CMC—that it is true of any acyc...

This paper argues that the current way in which the undergraduate introductory econometrics course is taught is neither inline with current empirical practice nor very intuitive. It proposes a shift in focus of the course on causal inference using the Roy-Rubin Causal Model (RRCM). A second theme of the paper is the suggestion to use random regressors from the start to improve the ability of st...