I agree with this, with the caveat that you don't want to fall into the opposite trap of believing the people who just use the contrarian heuristic.
Heuristics that almost always work
161–170 of 541 posts
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#162This 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.
aka exactly what straw man means
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#163Funnily 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".
This is the best summary of the article. How is this #1 on HN right now.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#164Great article, really enjoyed it. I second the Talib connection. But anyways... Does anyone else struggle with Substack's typeface, specifically it's width and spacing between characters? I'm a bit of a typeface nerd, and I genuinely like or enjoy most of our common fonts. Substack is the only site that I find the typeface to significantly affect the reading experience.
I tend to agree with you about the typeface they use, Spectral. I think it's a combination of factors: loose tracking designed to permit slightly over-emphasized differences in weight (which were a design goal for the font) and somewhat selective replacement of inktraps from the inspiration face (Elzévir) with angular serifs, which creates a bit of a visual discordance. I don't find it unreadable, personally, but it does call attention to itself.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#165Repackaged straw men, in the form of several narratives that describe the exact same thing.
I stopped reading the examples after the second one and scrolled straight to the end, to confirm my suspicion that there was actually no useful information in the article at all.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#166One interesting twist on the doctor example: we know she is almost always right that it's nothing, that it will all go away and that just two aspirins are ok. The article correctly points out that she will miss one or two cases where it was a terrible disease instead, and that her prescription of aspirin and to go away and rest will be misguided. However... doctors must do more than just cure you. They must also "do…
This article is a little misleading because it conflates a few things.
The low base rate prediction problem is a problem not just because of lazy application, it's because the numbers make it impossible to do anything else in some situations. With a low enough base rate, you have to have a preternaturally good indicator to make anything but a negative prediction.
Then you have to resort to utility theory and decide if false positives are worth the cost.
Incidentally, the hiring example is poor because it's just not the same situation at all. The fact he's equating it to the other scenarios maybe says as much about the real problem as the scenario does itself.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A guard who adopts the heuristic "there are no robbers" can be replaced with a rock, but has adopted a heuristic that almost always works.
Guards that do not adopt that heuristic cannot be replaced by that rock.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#168>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.
A coworker and I were once stuck in an office building for an hour or two. We were working as consultants at a client's building and ended up working rather late. Not particularly late by software programmer standards, but clearly exceptionally late by the culture of the client company. At some point in the evening all the exit doors, including the front door, became armed, and this was conspicuously noted as when we…
That security guard was performing the important function of allowing the management to legally tick the "we have a security guard" box on the insurance form.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#169Earlier 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.
This is called the Turkey fallacy: the turkey was feed by humans for 1000 days, and after each feed event he updated his belief that humans care for him until it's now almost a statistical certainty.
Is this the reverse of the Gambler's Fallacy? Instead of "The numbers haven't hit in a while, therefore they're going to hit soon." it's "The numbers haven't hit yet, therefore they're never gonna hit."
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#170Earlier 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.
This is called the Turkey fallacy: the turkey was feed by humans for 1000 days, and after each feed event he updated his belief that humans care for him until it's now almost a statistical certainty.
That only applies if you are updating priors. In this case the odds are fixed, the GP is correct.