7,331 research outputs found
Free will and luck
Get PDFThe problem of free will is a problem about control and luck. If causal determinism is true, then everything we do is ultimately a matter of luck, as it is if causal determinism is false. Either way we seem to lack free will of the kind needed for moral responsibility. In this thesis a case is built for a certain type of modest incompatibilist view on free will. It is argued that it makes no difference in terms of control whether determinism or indeterminism obtains. What matters is that we have a certain kind of ownership over what we do. Causal determinism rules this out, but indeterminism does not. This has the upshot that not only does free will turn out to be compatible with luck, exposure to a certain kind of luck is actually required, for unless we are exposed to this kind of luck our actions will not be truly ours. By providing luck with a positive role this thesis invites a re-evaluation of the reasons causal determinism destroys free will, and a re-evaluation of our attitudes towards luck. In short this thesis challenges the anti-luckism that lies behind the problem of free will
The problem of moral luck: An argument against its epistemic reduction
Get PDFWhom I call 'epistemic reductionists' in this article are critics of the notion of 'moral luck' that maintain that all supposed cases of moral luck are illusory; they are in fact cases of what I describe as a special form of epistemic luck, the only difference lying in what we get to know about someone, rather than in what (s)he deserves in terms of praise or blame. I argue that epistemic reductionists are mistaken. They implausibly separate judgements of character from judgements concerning acts, and they assume a conception of character that is untenable both from a common sense perspective and with a view to findings from social psychology. I use especially the example of Scobie, the protagonist of Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter, to show that moral luck is real-that there are cases of moral luck that cannot be reduced to epistemic luck. The reality of moral luck, in this example at least, lies in its impact on character and personal and moral identity. © 2009 Springer Science Media B.V
Balancing Conflict and Cost in the Selection of Negotiation Opponents
No full textWithin the context of agent-to-agent purchase negotiations, a problem that has received little attention is that of identifying negotiation opponents in situations where the consequences of conflict and the ability to access resources dynamically vary. Such dynamism poses a number of problems that make it difficult to automate the identification of appropriate opponents. To that end, this paper describes a motivation-based opponent selection mechanism used by a buyer-agent to evaluate and select between an already identified set of seller-agents. Sellers are evaluated in terms of the amount of conflict they are expected to bring to a negotiation and the expected amount of cost a negotiation with them will entail. The mechanism allows trade-offs to be made between conflict and cost minimisation, and experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach
Way more than luck
No full textWay More Than Luck is the vivid debut collection from the well-known young poet and critic Ben Wilkinson. The book opens with a series of poems that, with a remarkable clarity and sympathy, recall a battle with clinical depression: the “days when you weren’t anyone. Days gone undercover...”. The author interrogates this malady: “two-parts sadness, one-part anger”, grapples to understand that its sources are both personal and cultural. It soon emerges that competitive running, which possibly starts as therapy, a means of combat, becomes a way of life, not just for fitness but for the long-haul, for endurance. The poet finds a still, calm centre: “Running is the pure solitude of a wordless hour.”
The collection centres on a series of vivid character portraits, giving life to the legends of Liverpool Football Club. With characteristic self-deprecation Wilkinson calls this section ‘An Ordinary Game’ and kicks things off with the Bill Shankly quote: “What a great day for football. All we need is some green grass and a ball.” In various inventive forms that echo the characters they celebrate or decry, the author finds in football an apt field for human display. Bruce Grobbelaar shoots a ball straight at the ref’s face; old-school Billy Liddell still inspires hymns in the stands; Stevie Gerrard is the soul of “grit”; the “dancing shadow”of John Barnes endures racism: “dark slurs circle the stands”; Fernando Torres is a latter-day Icarus. These poems recapture both the childish wonder of the young fan and the die-hard faith of adult fans undefeated by cynicism or rain.
The final section, ‘An Absurd Pastime’, contains more occasional poems, about the writing life, both the graft of the craft and the petty indignities of performance as in ‘You Must Be Joking’ where a comedian must, by the brutal trial and error of stand-up, discover the means to laughter. Here, there are also poems about dreams, fraught with strange vertigo. There are also a number of tenderly hesitant love poems. There is an enjoyably vicious satire of the anodyne non-promises of a conservative party speech. Most notably, many poems in this collection are in artfully invisible poetic forms. Their rhymes and repetitions are wonderfully woven to suit content and expression. Way More Than Luck is a beautifully serious debut by a more-than-promising young author, Ben Wilkinson
Equality of opportunity and luck: Denitions and testable conditions, with an application to income in France
Get PDFWe oer a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses dierent conceptions expressed in the public and philosophical debates. In addition to circumstances whose eect on outcome should be compensated and eort which represents a legitimate source of inequality, we introduce a third factor, luck, that captures the random factors whose impact on outcome should be even-handed for equality of opportunity to be satised. Then, we analyse how the various denitions of equality of opportunity can be empirically identied, given data limitations and provide testable conditions. Denitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic dominance tools. Lastly, we develop an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for income acquisition in France over the period 1979-2000 which reveals that the degree of inequality of opportunity tends to decrease and that the degree of risk of income distributions, conditional on social origin, appears very similar across all groups of social origins.Equality of opportunity, Luck, Stochastic dominance, Income distribution.
How to Avoid Compensating CEO for Luck: The Case of Microeconomic Fluctuations
Get PDFIncentive effects of performance-based compensation schemes for management may be weakened or biased by macroeconomic influences on remuneration. These influences can be seen as reflecting luck from the CEO’s perspective. In this chapter we present a model for how to avoid compensating CEO for luck by filtering out the macroeconomic influences. In the empirical section we analyze the impact of macroeconomic, industry and firm-specific factors on the compensations (salary, bonus, options, and pensions) of CEOs in 127 Swedish corporations during the period 2001-2007. We find macroeconomic influences on Swedish CEOs’ compensation to be substantial. Distinguishing between favorable and unfavorable macroeconomic developments, we find compensation to be more responsive to favorable than to unfavorable developments in macroeconomic variables.Executive compensation; Salary; Bonus; Option; Pension; Macroeconomic uncertainty; Macroeconomic factors; Performance; Luck
Separating Skill from Luck in REIT Mutual Funds
Get PDFThis study uses a bootstrap methodology to explicitly distinguish between skill and luck for 80 Real Estate Investment Trust Mutual Funds in the period January 1995 to May 2008. The methodology successfully captures non-normality in the idiosyncratic risk of the funds. Using unconditional, beta conditional and alpha-beta conditional estimation models, the results indicate that all but one fund demonstrates poor skill. Tests of robustness show that this finding is largely invariant to REIT market conditions and maturity.
Unifying Agent Systems
Get PDFWhilst there has been an explosion of interest in multi-agent systems, there are still many problems that may have a potentially deleterious impact on the progress of the area. These prob- lems have arisen primarily through the lack of a common structure and language for understanding multi-agent systems, and with which to organise and pursue research in this area. In response to this, previous work has been concerned with developing a computational formal framework for agency and autonomy which, we argue, provides an environment in which to develop, evaluate, and compare systems and theories of multi-agent systems. In this paper we go some way towards justifying these claims by reviewing the framework and showing what we can achieve within it by developing models of agent dimensions, categorising key inter-agent relationships and by ap- plying it to evaluate existing multi-agent systems in a coherent computational model. We outline the benefits of specifying each of the systems within the framework and consider how it allows us to unify different systems and approaches in general
Movement & complexity. Effect of pattern complexity and expertise on movement kinematics during perception and reproduction of auditory rhythms
No full textIt is an open question whether the sensory motor synchronization stems from general musical ability (independent of music training) or the interaction of domain-specific cognitive and motor predictive processes.
The role of body movement in music-related activities has received increasing attention in recent years (e.g., Eerola, Luck & Toiviainen, 2006; Luck & Toiviainen, 2006; Palmer & DallaBella, 2004; Wanderley, Vines, Middleton, McKay & Hatch, 2005).
Here, we examine the role of body movement in the perception and reproduction of rhythmic patterns, focusing in particular on the influence of rhythmic complexity and expertise on movement kinematics. In addition, participants’ performance was evaluated qualitatively by the first author, and against the baseline of their spontaneous tempo.
We identified systematic relationships between rhythmic complexity and the spatiotemporal characteristics of body movement during both perception and reproduction
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