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Heuristics that almost always work

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#121

Post by verisimi »

This is an interesting article. In fact I really do think all any of us do is heuristics - where "A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with minimal mental effort."

I think this is how all of us are when we are doing something.

I also think this is existence is a free will experience.

That might seem incompatible, but I think our free will is engaged in selecting what heuristics we can choose. Alternatively, you can say we are programmable creatures, but we get to choose what programming we run.

I would also say, that the heuristics/programming we mostly run is that which has been provided to us by default - a consequence of our education and situation.

Not many of us take the time to review our programming - or to engage with the more 'meta' elements of our experience. I daresay, that the principles we run are not really coherent. Eg, we are reasonable, we do the right thing, we also take shortcuts to get what we want, or save time, etc. These are examples of principles that cannot all be true!

If you were to ask me, the best thing we can do in this life is to consider our values. Are these truth and reason, personal gain, saving time, etc. What means most to us? And the review the heuristics/programming we run according to those values. At least we have a foundation for our programs that we selected ourselves, rather than running the programs that were provided to us by default!

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#122

Post by moralestapia »

pessimizer wrote: post #108
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.

If you'll die if a roll of three dice comes up sixes, you're not really in a lot of danger. If you do it every day, you have about 15 months to live.

>you have about 15 months to live

Or a few minutes ... or 20 years.

That's the thing w/ statistically independent trials.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#123

Post by AlexCoventry »

tablespoon wrote: post #58

> The Futurist > He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says. He's got the name backwards on this one. What he's describing is more of an anti-futurist. IMHO, futurists and the ones that make implausibly grand predict…

Bruce Sterling did an OK job. Heavy Weather reads like prophecy, these days.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#124

Post by prakhar897 »

1. I think the author forgot the term "Anomaly Detection" and is trying to reinvent it. Also, Anomaly or "Sensing something is wrong" is one of the most basic human instinct.

2. >By this time they were 100% cultists, so they all consulted the rock and said “No, the volcano is not erupting”. The sulfur started to smell different, and the Queen asked “Are you sure?”

Even the queen deciphered that something is wrong without any volcano knowledge. The author itself is providing an example of human instinct without acknowledging it,

3. The author assumes all guards as the same when in fact they all are different individuals. Sure most of them might be lousy at their jobs but there will be some who understand how rare the "robbery event" is and so will still look when there's sound.

4. The examples suffer from cold start problem. What if robbery happens the first month of a new guard. Will he still be asleep? If not, then Utility (hiring a guard in all cases) > Utility (not hiring a guard).

5. As another commentor mentioned that the value of having a security guard visible so that 99% of the robbers who might conceivably want to rob decides to go someplace else instead.

6. Contrarionism is seen as a virtue by certain people hence "I don't like this generation's music" and "Popular thing bad" phenomenon. Also, they make sure to be as loud as possible whenever their contradiction is right. This helps humanity in mentally modelling rare events.

All in all, the author is underestimating the capabilities of humans and humanity.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#125

Post by mediaman »

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…

And for the robber, crime is a lot more common than he seems to think it is. Metal theft, for example, is extremely frequent: it is rare that an industrial facility would have so little theft that such a proposed heuristic would be reasonable.

If crime were that low, then the guard's position doesn't exist anyway.

So then we're just left with an empty thought exercise with no relation to reality, as an argument for how we should think about reality.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#126

Post by ravi-delia »

woodruffw wrote: post #92

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…

Where are you seeing the author suggest most people in the described jobs could actually be replaced by rocks?

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#127

Post by yupper32 »

scoofy wrote: post #86
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.

I mean, this is a weird example, but i feel like it's like Scott Auckerman says in Comedy Bang Bang, when he introduces the show. He'll do the welcome, and explain the show, and inevitably some guess will retort that this is silly, since everyone knows what the show is about, but he constantly responds with: "every episode is somebody's first episode." These ideas that should be obvious to anyone who's studied advanc…

But it's not interesting, it's not introducing anyone to advanced statistics or formal logic, it's not showing any real world uses that can be applied by anyone coming of age.

It's just generalized parables by someone not in any of the fields or positions mentioned, some weak conclusions, and a "Heuristics That Almost Always Works" book title.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#128

Post by woodruffw »

ravi-delia wrote: post #126
woodruffw wrote: post #92

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…

Where are you seeing the author suggest most people in the described jobs could actually be replaced by rocks?

> Where are you seeing the author suggest most people in the described jobs could actually be replaced by rocks?

I really think it's harder to get more literal than this:

> He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#129

Post by mgas »

I feel like this article does a much better job of reviewing Don't Look Up than the article that passed through here last week. As an allegorical reading, it calls out the major plot points of the film and hits on the ulterior motivations of both those using heuristics to naysay experts, and the experts who inevitably fall out of grace because of them.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#130

Post by kqr »

PaulHoule wrote: post #113
kqr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a much narrower view of the Kelly criterion than the general concept. The general idea is about choosing an action that maximises the expected logarithm of the result. In practise this means, among other things, not choosing an action that gets you close to "ruin", however you choose to measure the result. Another way to phrase it is that the Kelly criterion leads to actions that avoid large losses.

Actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion "The Kelly bet size is found by maximizing the expected value of the logarithm of wealth, which is equivalent to maximizing the expected geometric growth rate" In real life people often choose to make bets smaller than the Kelley bet. Part of that is that even if you have a good model there are still "unknown unknowns" that will make your model wrong some of the…

I've long found that Wikipedia article woefully lacking in generality.

1) The Kelly criterion is a general decision rule not limited to bet sizing. Bet sizing is just a special case where you're choosing between actions that correspond to different bet sizes. The Kelly criterion works very well also for other actions, like whether to pursue project A or B, whether to get insurance or not, and indeed whether to sleep under a tree or on a rock.

2) The Kelly criterion is not limited to what people would ordinarily think of as "wealth". It applies just as well to anything you can measure with some sort of utility where compounding makes sense.

The best overview I've found so far is The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion[1], which unfortunately is a thick collection of peer-reviewed science, so it's very detailed and heavy on the maths, too.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/KELLY-CAPITAL-GROWTH-INVESTMENT-CRITE...

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