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Heuristics that almost always work

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#191

Post by thehappypm »

derbOac wrote: post #156
kbuchanan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"There are bold X, and old X, but no old, bold X." Replace X with any practitioners subject to sufficient risk as a result of their practice. I first heard it in the context of mushroom foraging.

Mountaineers is where I heard it.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#192

Post by segmondy »

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.

I would imagine that if you scale back enough tho, you won't be as sharp. Sure the odds increase the more you do it, but not just because you do it, but often because of other variables, such as the weather, not listening to your body, over confidence, etc.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#193

Post by jaggederest »

lapetitejort wrote: post #169
323 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Also known as complacency. Working in a woodshop, one of the things you are most vulnerable to is failing to respect the danger you're in. This is why many experienced woodworkers have been injured by e.g. a table saw - you stop being as careful after such long exposure.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#194

Post by _Nat_ »

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…

Legitimate futurists are objecting to some pop-culture nonsense with NFT's, cryptocurrency, etc., often describing such things as scams. I suspect that the author may've had that in mind there.

It may be sorta like the problem with science: there's real science and pop-culture science-flavored junk, and pop-culture audiences may perceive real scientists as dismissive because they're always so critical of the latest pop-culture fads.

So while futurists may love new-tech and scientists may love science, pop-culture may see things differently because they see futurists/scientists dismissing (what they perceive to be) new-tech/science.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#195

Post by robaato »

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…

Jared Diamond talks about dead trees: https://www.openculture.com/2015/08/jared-diamond-underscore...

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#196

Post by mrow84 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #61
kbuchanan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This assumes a lot about the underlying process, particularly independence. Whilst assuming independence might hold reasonably well for low numbers of samples, the assumption might be increasingly (and dangerously) misleading. The intuition expressed by GP captures that.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#197

Post by Traster »

I feel like a lot of this is just... bullshit. Yes, if a security guard literally decided to ignore every sound as the wind they would probably be useless - as long as their role is literally only fast response. Except they don't, and it isn't. Their role is just as often to politely escort someone out, or remind someone of their manners. So there's that but also, maybe over time the security guard doesn't ignore everything as wind, maybe the security guard...learns quite well what wind is like. If I hear a vague rumbling on a monday I know it's my neighbour bringing the bins out. Similarly, the security guard probably can go from 5 false positives a day to 0.01 false positives a day without increasing their false negatives at all.

It's like, it's a nice thought, but if you really apply attention to it, it doesn't hold up for long.

>Fast, fun to read, and a 99.9% success rate. Pretty good, especially compared to everyone who “does their own research” and sometimes gets it wrong.

I would wager the "do your own research" crowd hits much lower than 99.9% success rate, so what's the argument here? The person who accepts mainstream view - which is apparently what this article calls a skeptic - is no better than a rock. But that actually, the people who contradict the skeptic are no better than a rock thrown in a glass house.

In my experience though, the skeptic is far more likely to be a "skeptic" of the mainstream view and to advertise themselves as that (see: literallly thedailyskeptic.org) and in reality, they're taking the bad side of the bet, by this logic you're 99.9% right by dismissing contrarians and accepting the mainstream view. if you're constantly endorsing the contrarians, you're basically taking the 0.01%. And this isn't theoretical, the skeptics I listed earlier literally posted an article today telling us how global warming is fine, because the earth was warmer... 50 million years ago when no human life was viable. The problem with skeptics isn't their skepticism, it's where they choose to apply it.

There is value in there being contrarians, in order to hold people's feet to the fire, but that doesn't really apply if they're just bringing up dumb arguments and are no more complex than the people they're questioning.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#198

Post by 323 »

ska wrote: post #170
323 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The odds of a rocking accident are known and fixed?

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#199

Post by crent »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #183

The last sentence of the edit the author provides is the key insight of this piece. > the existence of experts using heuristics causes predictable over-updates towards those heuristics. That's the essence of this piece. If you expect that consultation with experts will leave you with a more accurate picture of things than before consultation, you should first be sure that their heuristics are not equivalent to readin…

Which is the rub, right? How can a non-expert reasonably come to a conclusion of whether or not an expert's prediction is baseless or is actually solid/insightful?

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#200

Post by [deleted] »

beaned wrote: post #179
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…

Reminds me of the fact that on overage, one out of every hundred places you know will be experiencing a once-in-a-hundred-years event. When you hear once-in-a-hundred-year event, it makes it sound quite rare. One might look around and say (for example, in relation to climate) "why are so many of these happening?" But it is unsurprising statistically. If you know just a thousand distinct geographic places, about 10 of…

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