SESSION L

In the AI era, questions often matter more than answers, adaptability trumps rigidity, and interconnections outweigh siloed expertise.

This book tutorial presents a stimulating blend of critical thinking and creative analogy to reframe complex scientific, technological, and statistical concepts. Merging established viewpoints with bold, unconventional insights, it offers participants a deeper and more intuitive understanding of modern challenges. Drawing from fields such as biostatistics, medicine, socioeconomics, and education, the tutorial demonstrates how abstract reasoning can illuminate real-world decisions.

Rather than focusing directly on AI tools, this course equips participants to thrive in an AI-driven world by cultivating the human strengths of reasoning and analogy. Through paradoxes and surprising case studies, we explore how deep thinking can generate promising research ideas and reveal hidden insights in decision-making, healthcare, and scientific discovery.

This tutorial is intended for strategic thinkers as well as practical statisticians and scientists who value critical thinking and analogical insight.

Topics to be Covered

• Digital Twins in Clinical Trials and Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges
  Explore digital twin technology through the lens of historical control trials, missing data methods, and predictive modeling. Address statistical intransitivity (e.g., A > B, B > C, yet C > A) using digital twin insights.
• Drug Repositioning: Revelation from the “Fair Game”
  Discover how two ineffective drugs can be turned into an effective treatment without altering biology or chemistry—purely through strategic randomization, inspired by game-theoretic fairness.
• Insights from Game Theory and Stochastic Decision Processes
  Apply non-intuitive findings from paradoxes to clinical trials, development strategy, and pharmaceutical partnerships.
• Identifying Bias through Critical Thinking
  Examine paradoxes such as the Friendship Paradox, the short-term “positive impact” of COVID-19, Parkinson’s Law, the Cobra Effect, and the Dice-Reward Experiments to uncover hidden biases and funding traps.
• Recursive Functions as Self-Referencing Analogies
  Discuss how recursion relates to self-awareness, why “proof by contradiction” may be self-defeating, how confirmatory discrimination reveals inherent bias, and how mathematical and statistical self-similarity connects fractals and Brownian motion. Explore the paradox of evolution: how weakness can promote survival and collective strength, and how devolutions and evolutions occur at the same time at two hierarchical levels (human and cancer cells within the body).
• What Constitutes Scientific Evidence? – The Similarity Principle
  Debate whether science is discovered or invented, whether data are objective or observer-dependent, and whether causality is a mathematical construct or practical necessity. Employ the mayfly analogy to challenge conventional views on climate change and scientific inference.

Figure: Polarization – Intensified by the Reluctance to Acknowledge Other Perspectives

• Analogy-Driven Humanized AI and Future Outlook
  Discuss “organ sensitivity” and the layered nature of reality, the iWordNet framework for semantic understanding, and analogies linking AI with quantum physics. Examine education’s evolution toward human-machine symbiosis.

Instructors’ Biography: