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Heuristics that almost always work

astralcodexten.substack.com

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#61

Post by HWR_14 »

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.

> the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes the risk.

Kind of. However, you already know that the first N outings didn't have a disaster. So those should be discarded from your analysis.

Doing it N times more has a lot of risk, doing it the N+1th time has barely any.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#62

Post by ravi-delia »

efitz wrote: post #52

A big straw man. In real life some people are more or less diligent about their jobs, and more or less contrarian, and have different expertise, strengths and weaknesses. Each of the vignettes portrays the counter position as stupid (literally using a rock as a metaphor). The reality is much different. In each of the cases there’s an argument to be made that the proposition was flawed- the security guard never finds…

I think you're correct in thinking the situation is complicated, and wrong in thinking the author disagrees! Each situation is subtly different, and some seem more wrong than others. Regardless, a security guard recommending cameras is different from a rock precisely because they suggested that!

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#63

Post by dools »

stevage wrote: post #29

I think my main takeaway is how profitable it would be to be one of these naysayers. Good career move.

I think history has shown it is far more profitable to amplify fringe theories and capitalise on everyone’s fears that we are being deliberately mislead by corrupt authorities claiming false expertise.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#64

Post by llaolleh »

aksss wrote: post #46
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

If he finished with that line with a photoshopped rock it would've been great.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#65

Post by robbedpeter »

PaulHoule wrote: post #6

You'd do a lot better with one strong example rather than seven weak examples. For instance, if you are interested in Bayes Theorem like a lot of rationalists say they are, you could talk about the medical test which is 99.99% accurate but for which 90% of the positives are false positives.

Drug testing is a good example for most people to understand why Bayesian thinking is relevant.

https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/4250_Bayes_Theorem.html

Imagine that a driver gets hit by accident. He's tested as part of company policy, and tests positive. He gets fired, even though the test only really tells us there's a 33.2% chance he was actually using the drug.

Real world drug tests are a lot worse than 1% false positive and false negative rate.

Every time someone gets fired for a positive test, or loses custody of their kid, or so on, it reinforces whatever statistics are being collected as if the test were a ground truth. They're hardly ever questioned, and there's usually no recourse without an expensive legal fight.

The false positive rate for drug dogs is higher than 40%, for contrast. When a dog "alerts" its worse than a flip of a coin. All that matters is if an officer feels like fucking up your day.

Testing used in situations that are legally significant in people's lives should be required to reach a statistically valid threshold of accuracy, like 99.999% of the times this process is performed, it matches reality. A high sensitivity and high specificity aren't enough, but they're framed as highly accurate and reliable by often well intentioned people who simply aren't thinking in a Bayesian way.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#66

Post by PaulHoule »

efitz wrote: post #52

A big straw man. In real life some people are more or less diligent about their jobs, and more or less contrarian, and have different expertise, strengths and weaknesses. Each of the vignettes portrays the counter position as stupid (literally using a rock as a metaphor). The reality is much different. In each of the cases there’s an argument to be made that the proposition was flawed- the security guard never finds…

What I really don't get is how this article is getting so many upvotes but the comments are unanimous about how vacuous it is... Unless Aella asked her "fans" to vote it up or something. (I for one manufacture my flying monkeys with a statistical model but it's been a really long time..)

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#67

Post by bpodgursky »

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…

Isn't this from Jared Diamond? I read this in The World until Yesterday I thought, from his time in New Guinea.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#68

Post by scoofy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #45
scoofy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol, sure, starting Universa after basically inventing tail-risk trading strategies is definitely "becoming irrelevant."

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#69

Post by rakejake »

Funnily enough, you could replace this article with a rock that said, "When people are confronted with a very skewed probability distribution, after a while they become complacent and default to the most probable outcome".

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#70

Post by AlexCoventry »

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.

A long article is a sign of effort expended, which rationalists value as a sign that a lot of thought has gone into the ideas the article puts forward. (They have a rock in their heads saying "DON'T BOTHER YOURSELF WITH BRIEF EXPOSITIONS.")
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