An old-timer physician of New York, who was forever questioning the methods and purpose of his colleagues, concluded a Grand Rounds in his department with the observation, “No patient is in real danger until all his doctors agree on his diagnosis.” Those of us at the session dutifully applauded and laughed, left the meeting, but never forgot his perceptive warning. We all crave certainty, yet s...

Probability can be used to measure degree of belief in two ways: objectively and subjectively. The objective measure is a measure of the rational degree of belief in a proposition given a set of evidential propositions. The subjective measure is the measure of a particular subject’s dispositions to decide between options. In both measures, certainty is a degree of belief 1. I will show, however...

In this paper, a robust adaptive fuzzy control algorithm based on the generalized fuzzy hyperbolic model (GFHM) for nonlinear system with uncertainties is proposed. The proposed control is a smooth control with no chattering phenomena, which consists of two control terms. One is the certainty equivalent control and the other is the compensated control, which is obtained by bounded estimation in...

Humans and other animals constantly evaluate their decisions in order to learn and behave adaptively. Experimentally, such evaluation processes are accessed using metacognitive reports made after decisions, typically using verbally formulated confidence scales. When subjects report high confidence, it reflects a high certainty of being correct, but a low confidence might signify either low cert...

This paper studies the time-series behavior of consumption in a model that incorporates birth, death, and a precautionary motive for saving. Consumption of an individual agent is a random walk. However, aggregate consumption is a random walk if and only if the s u m of the death rate and population growth rate is zero. Failure of the random walk hypothesis should not be attributed to finite hor...