Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Scientific facts

The planning fallacy is a tendency for people and organizations to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, even when they have experience of similar tasks over-running. The term was first proposed in a 1979 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky . Since then the effect has been found for predictions of a wide variety of tasks, including tax form completion, school work, furniture assembly, computer programming and origami . In 2003, Lovallo and Kahneman proposed an expanded definition as the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions. According to this definition, the planning fallacy results in not only time overruns, but also cost overruns and benefit shortfalls . The bias only affects predictions about one's own tasks; when uninvolved observers predict task completion times, they show a pessimistic bias, overestimating the time taken Planning fallacy - Wikipedi

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was the name of a 1956 undertaking now considered the seminal event for artificial intelligence as a field. Organised by John McCarthy (then at Dartmouth College ) and formally proposed by McCarthy, Marvin Minsky , Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon , the proposal is credited with introducing the term 'artificial intelligence'. The project lasted a month, and it was essentially an extended brainstorming session. The introduction states: “ We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire . The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) is people's tendency to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation, rather than thinking about external situational. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior—where situational factors are more easily recognized and can thus be taken into consideration. The flip side of this error is the actor–observer bias, in which people tend to overemphasize the role of a situation in their behaviors and underemphasize the role of their own personalities. As a simple example, consider a situation where Alice, a driver, is about to pass through an intersection. Her light turns green, and she begins to accelerate when another car drives through the red light and crosses in front of her. The fundamental attribution error may lead her to think that the driver of the other car was an unskilled or rec

In Physics or engineering education , a Fermi problem, Fermi question, or Fermi estimate is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis , approximation , and the importance of clearly identifying one's assumptions. Named after physicist Enrico Fermi , such problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities that seem impossible to compute given limited available information. Fermi problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sir Francis Bacon , 1st Viscount St. Alban,  Kt. , QC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution . Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism . His works established and popularized inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method , or simply the scientific method . His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621; as he died without heirs, both peerages became

In economics and finance , arbitrage ( / ˈ ɑr b ɨ t r ɑː ʒ / ) is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets : striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices . When used by academics, an arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs. For instance, an arbitrage is present when there is the opportunity to instantaneously buy low and sell high. In principle and in academic use, an arbitrage is risk-free; in common use, as in statistical arbitrage , it may refer to expected profit, though losses may occur, and in practice, there are always risks in arbitrage, some minor (such as fluctuation of prices decreasing profit margins), some major (such as devaluation of a currency o