Heuristics that almost always work • Hacker News Board

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#201

Post by will4274 » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:49 PM UTC

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.

> You'd do a lot better with one strong example rather than seven weak examples

Tend to disagree. It's easy to dismiss one example as "well, medicine is special because XYZ." Multiple examples are the core aspect of showing a general pattern.

He could probably have stopped at 3, 4, or 5 though, not 7.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#202

Post by 323 » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:50 PM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #193

lapetitejort wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A related thing is normalization of deviance. You start removing safety because you see nothing bad happened before, until you are at a point where almost no safety rules are respected anymore. You can see this a lot in construction videos.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#203

Post by somethingAlex » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:50 PM UTC

I'm surprised how many people are just nitpicking the examples like they are supposed to be rigorous analogies.

The point that I walked away with is that oftentimes experts use these same heuristics even when people assume they are not. People think that experts don't have to use them because they have better tools and skills at their disposal. However, for reasons involving human factors, they oftentimes do use them. Finally, these opinions then get thrown into the body of evidence as if they are ground truth values.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#204

Post by josephcsible » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:51 PM UTC

Imnimo wrote: post #188

The flip side of this, is that if the rock is 99.9% right, and the high-minded rationalist is only 99% right, what does that say about the value of his rationality?

What if the rock's errors are all false negatives, the high-minded rationalist's errors are all false positives, and false negatives are 100 times worse than false positives?

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#205

Post by ducttapecrown » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:52 PM UTC

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…

Your idea that there's a format to the names is a great heuristic that works most of the time :-)

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#206

Post by spongechameleon » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

I find it so comforting to believe in Heuristics That Almost Always Work even when I know I ought to employ more scrutiny. It's too easy to jump on board.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#207

Post by koboll » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

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…

This seems like the weakest example. I immediately thought of that Paul Krugman quote from the 1990s where he pooh-poohed the internet, something that's stuck with him forever and made him a laughingstock where futurism is concerned.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#208

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

montebicyclelo wrote: post #137

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 parent comment talks about scaling back the amount of rock climbing they do in order to reduce risk.. And now you are saying that they should go one more time, because a single climb is low risk?

Yes. I am saying their analysis of risk is incorrect, and therefore if that's the only reason they aren't climbing then they should climb more often.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#209

Post by drzoltar » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.

Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, Dad.

Homer: Thank you, dear.

Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.

Homer: Oh, how does it work?

Lisa: It doesn’t work.

Homer: Uh-huh.

Lisa: It’s just a stupid rock.

Homer: Uh-huh.

Lisa: But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?

Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

[0]: https://youtu.be/xSVqLHghLpw

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#210

Post by bigodbiel » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

crent wrote: post #199

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?

consult another expert and hope his heurestics are different from the latter, ad infinitum (or you yourself end up creating a meta-heurestic of their heurestics)!