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Heuristics that almost always work

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#91

Post by operator-name »

There's some very interesting discussion here and in the comments. Many have pointed out the similarity of ideas to Taleb's Black Swan, and extremisation, which was also brought up in Superforcasting by Gardner and Tetlock.

Instead of such a discussion, I'd like highlight a book that provides the "oposite" perspective: Gerd Gigerenzer's Rationality for Mortals. Gigerenzer presents the an anti hyper-rationalist perspective for heuristics, arguing that they're not only human, but necessary and inevitable for time and compute bounded beings.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#92

Post by woodruffw »

The reasoning in this post is completely backwards: just because a job could be completely replaced with a rock without affecting the majority of cases doesn't mean that the actual practitioners of that job are either completely useless or are themselves on autopilot.

Siskind assumes the latter and reasons towards the former, which isn't aligned at all with what actually happens in the world: we do predict hurricanes and exploding volcanoes, and there's no particular evidence that the average doctor is ignoring their patients. We're all subject to biases and fatigue, but neither of those supports the claim that we're all phoning it in all the time.

Edit: I will also note that "when nothing happens at all, a person can be replaced with a note on a rock" is not an interesting statement to make. Dressing it up with eloquent prose (and he is indeed eloquent!) does not change this, and does not a poignant observation make.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#93

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

Great anecdote.

The tricks in this article might work in the short term. However, over the length of a career, it's difficult to outrun a negative reputation forever. Especially in the age of the internet, people will eventually catch on to what you're doing.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#95

Post by operator-name »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #81

This article uses a trope that is frustratingly common in rationalist articles: It sets up over simplified straw-man versions of real world scenarios and then knocks them out of the park. In the real world, a doctor who ignores the complaints of every patients will quickly find themselves the subject of malpractice lawsuits. Not by every wronged patient, but it only takes one or two angry patients with lawyers in the…

I don't think there's the need to take the examples in the article hyper literally. You can call them strawmen if you'd like but simplification for the sake of presenting a point (which you seem to have ignored) is necessary.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#96

Post by deltaonefour »

Sounds like he's describing software architects. I feel software architects follow a slightly more complicated heuristic. They can't do the same thing every time when they draw the line connecting all the boxes. It has to be a little different every time with different boxes and a different set of lines.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#98

Post by reactspa »

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…

Also: in the version of the story I remember reading somewhere, all night they kept hearing trees fall. And that had a significant effect in affecting their impression of the probability.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#99

Post by csee »

This sounds like learned helplessness. I have seen it in difficult R&D jobs where the hitrate from experimenting is very small, and people subconsciously give up. That's why hiring extremely motivated and intrinsically curious people for these roles is important.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#100

Post by aaronblohowiak »

HPsquared wrote: post #82
HWR_14 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The "slippery slope" principle applies here though: N+1 enables N+2, which enables N+3 and so on.

but the risk is independent. so once you do the N+1 time safely, you are back to N and your next time is _also_ just an N+1.
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