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Heuristics that almost always work

astralcodexten.substack.com

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#41

Post by soheil »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #4

>The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He’s excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it except for the value of having a security guard visible so that 99% of the robbers who might conceivably want to rob a Pillow Mart decide to go rob Quilting Heaven down the road instead.

It's not 99% of the robbers, you're exaggerating. Maybe at best you fool 5% of them, after all if they were that dumb to be fooled so easily they would have been caught by now. But now you have diminishing returns. Just like you, they know a security guard isn't effective, ... and down the game theory rabbit hole we go.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#42

Post by sjg007 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #7
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #4

>The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He’s excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it except for the value of having a security guard visible so that 99% of the robbers who might conceivably want to rob a Pillow Mart decide to go rob Quilting Heaven down the road instead.

Instead of a rock you just need an inflatable security guard. What's frightening about all this is that this article has gotten 15 upvotes despite 100% of the comments so far being about what a pointless article this is.

Or security cameras.. or a drone..

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#43

Post by TulliusCicero »

yupper32 wrote: post #39

I don't understand how articles like this get upvoted. Who is getting value from this? This reads like some generic LinkedIn CEO post that sounds deep on the surface but actually means nothing.

It seems to make its point pretty clearly to me: "just naysay" is a strategy that is extremely effective/accurate in many domains, but provides no actual value compared to people attempting more honest evaluations or predictions.

I just realized it's possible I'm being whooshed by your comment.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#44

Post by kqr »

kbuchanan wrote: post #35
inglor_cz wrote: post #30

This story reminded me of a story written by a Czech biologist who studied animals in Papua-New Guinea and went to a hunt with a group of local tribesmen. The dusk was approaching, they were still in the forest and he proposed that they could sleep under a tree. The hunters were adamant in their refusal: no, this is dangerous, a tree might fall on you in your sleep and kill you . He relented, but silently considered…

It's a great example. This is the very reason I have scaled back the amount of time I rock climb as I've gotten older -- not because any individual outing is dangerous, but there's an element of Russian roulette wherein the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes the risk.

Also known as the Kelly criterion. If one possible outcome of an action is associated with a great enough loss, it doesn't make sense to perform the action no matter how unlikely the loss.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#45

Post by PaulHoule »

scoofy wrote: post #40
rthomas6 wrote: post #16

This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been writing books about. He calls them black swan events, because if you took a sample of 1000 swans, chances are you'd conclude that all swans are white, but it just isn't so. People tend to round down the probability of very rare events to zero, even when the upside of them is small and the downside is catastrophically bad. Examples: the 2008 housing crisis, Fukushima, and ou…

These are NOT black swan events. These are probably all White Swan events (possibly grey swan events, but i'd have to review stuff that i don't want to right now). E.g. High certainty, just low predictability. From the book, when you know the statistics of a rare event, and then the even occurs, it's absolutely not a black swan event. For an event to be a Black Swan event, you literally need to have no possibly for t…

When I was doing a postdoc in Germany I would go eat mushrooms in Amsterdam and have the same trip about "exceptional events" over and over again.

Than Taleb wrote that book and I wished I'd written something about "exceptional events".

Then Taleb just coasted, drifted and became irrelevant.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#46

Post by aksss »

jppope wrote: post #2

One of the amazing subtleties in this article... if you're a fast reader you'll stop paying attention to the stories as they go through... kind of amazing that this article is layered like that.

This article could be replaced by a rock with the words "Heuristics are valuable but will bite you in the ass" chiseled on it. /s

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#47

Post by ppsreejith »

rthomas6 wrote: post #16

This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been writing books about. He calls them black swan events, because if you took a sample of 1000 swans, chances are you'd conclude that all swans are white, but it just isn't so. People tend to round down the probability of very rare events to zero, even when the upside of them is small and the downside is catastrophically bad. Examples: the 2008 housing crisis, Fukushima, and ou…

IIRC, a black swan event highlights the problem of induction when there is _no_ prior event that you can use to learn from. Eg: humans thought all swans were white until the first black swan was encountered. So not just exceedingly rare but outside what you know AND extremely rare. Eg: Neither the housing crisis, Fukushima, supply chain crisis, nor the pandemic are black swans (they were seen before and was predicted/theorised) but the internet is.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#48

Post by kqr »

jiggawatts wrote: post #38

My favourite one is seeing IT admins plan for “this almost always won’t fail.” Substitute “this” for SAN array, core switch, or entire data centre. I’ve had someone argue with me at length that simultaneous multi disk failures in a RAID5 never happen. Two weeks later it did and the main SAN disk array went up in smoke.

It is useful to remember that "almost never" is a synonym for "sometimes".

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#49

Post by yccs27 »

ghostly_s wrote: post #33

What is the impetus for this writing style that repeats different versions of the same analogy 10 times when one would have sufficed? Surely Substack doesn't have a word count minimum.

I actually found the ramp-up from security guard to sceptic pretty clever. Demonstrate the principle on an easy, constructed case; verify on a real-world example; then present the applications you care about and have somewhat more controversial content. Although I agree that the number of repetitions is higher than optimal here.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#50

Post by kuratkull »

moralestapia wrote: post #26

One could add: The Barking Dog Barks at everything all the time, people learn to ignore it. Then, when there's real danger, no one cares, providing literally no value and becoming only an annoyance. It's kind of like a dual for the security guard one.

I think the best known illustration for this concept is actually called "The boy who cried wolf"
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