Abstract
This paper offers an initial investigation into how the number of choices available to individual agents may influence choice at the group level by formalizing and simulating a social version of the No Alternatives Argument (NAA). The Social NAA assumption predicts that strength of belief in the most strongly held hypothesis in a group of agents will increase when the number of available hypotheses decreases. Social network simulations using connected Bayesian networks show that this assumption can be violated, but infrequently. Implications of the Social NAA assumption and when it holds in social networks are discussed, and future work is outlined.
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Notes
- 1.
Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to attention.
- 2.
Who is permitted to vote in a primary election depends on the state. Open primaries, for instance, allow for any registered voter to vote in any party, regardless of party affiliation. Closed primaries, on the other hand, only allow for registered members of that particular party to vote. The type of primary is not necessary to specify for this example, although it does effect the voters’ calculation of which is the most feasible choice – a voter may, for example, employ a strategy of ‘crossing over’ to vote in the primary for the party he or she is not affiliated with to try to choose the opponent they would prefer to face in the general election.
- 3.
Although the owner of this belief state, whether it is that of the scientific community as a whole or the individual scientists, is not clarified by DHS. This point will addressed in the new model developed in later sections.
- 4.
This iteration of the formal proof borrows from [13].
- 5.
In the original paper, the proposition T is “the hypothesis is empirically adequate”. DHS set up their proof to make inferences about the empirical adequacy of the found hypothesis rather than its truth to avoid the possibility of constructing infinite arguments with superfluous additions, which they claim threatens the validity of the NAA. This is not a point of contention for the new model developed in later sections because the concern is decision-making rather than inference.
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Edlin, L. (2019). Simulating the No Alternatives Argument in a Social Setting. In: Sikos, J., Pacuit, E. (eds) At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11667. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_1
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