Synonym of unexpected hanging paradox

(economics) The proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.

(programming) The situation where a programmer sees less powerful programming languages than those he/she knows as lacking in important features, but more powerful ones as having bizarre or unnecessary features.

(probability theory) The counterintuitive observation that a random group of people needs to have only 23 members before there is a 50% chance of two of them having the same birthday.

(probability) A problem within the classical interpretation of probability theory, illustrating how the principle of indifference may not produce definite, well-defined results for probabilities if it is applied uncritically when the domain of possibilities is infinite.

(computing, robotics) The observation that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning (which is high-level in humans) requires very little computation, but sensorimotor skills (comparatively low-level in humans) require enormous computational resources.

An apparent paradox within the subjectivistic interpretation of probability theory, in which two people wager over whose necktie is cheapest, with the owner of the more expensive tie giving it to the other. Taking the wager seems to be to the advantage of both people.

(economics) The phenomenon that uncertainty about future prices can theoretically push rational consumers to temporarily trade away their preferred consumption goods (or currency) for non-preferred goods (or currency), as part of a plan to trade back to the preferred consumption goods after prices become clearer.

The observation that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomically large number of possible conformations, and therefore sequentially sampling all the possible conformations is not practical, yet most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond timescale.

The situation in which a phenomenon being observed for study is unwittingly influenced by the presence of the observer.