Alien Plot to Invade the Earth: First Undermine Faith in ...

“Given a time gap of forty thousand hours, the strategic value of any traditional tactics of war or terror is insignificant, and they can recover from them. To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.” The science consul said, “The plan focuses on emphasizing the negative environmental effects of scientific development and showing signs of supernatural power to the population of Earth. In ...

 Algorithm that Presents Opposing Viewpoints

Social networks allow people to connect with each other and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, users tend to connect with like-minded people and read agreeable information, a behavior that leads to group polarization. Motivated by this scenario, we study how to take advantage of partial homophily to suggest agreeable content to users authored by people with opposite views on sensitive issues. We introduce a paradigm to present a data portrait of users, in which their cha...

 Overconfidence Breeds Error

In one classic demonstration, clinical psychologists were asked to give confidence judgments on a personality profile. They were given a case report in four parts, based on an actual clinical case, and asked after each part to answer a series of questions about the patient’s personality, such as his behavioral patterns, interests, and typical reactions to life events. They were also asked to rate their confidence in their responses. With each section, background information about the case i...