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Heuristics that almost always work

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#211

Post by timClicks »

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.

The risks are highest when learners are at a beginner to intermediate stage. They know the basics, and have gained some confidence, but don't know enough to get themselves out of trouble.

This is called Stage 1 in the Gordon Model of learning: unconscious incompetence.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#212

Post by Imnimo »

josephcsible wrote: post #204
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?

Then I guess measuring raw accuracy was not a good idea in the first place.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#213

Post by joosters »

pessimizer wrote: post #182
joosters wrote: post #97

A pedantic criticism of the title: ‘ Heuristics that almost always work ’ is a truism, or a tautology. If a heuristic worked 100% of the time, it would no longer be a heuristic, it would be a rule!

But if a heuristic worked 75% of the time, it wouldn't almost always work.

I wonder what the minimum % a heuristic could be said to have? When does a heuristic become just an educated guess?

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#214

Post by jim-jim-jim »

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.

Funny book recommendation: "The Dice Man" by Luke Rhinehart.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#215

Post by TameAntelope »

Oh man, next time I need an illustration of how the "villians/heroes" narrative can completely destroy any complexity in a human being, I now have a very well written example!

These people don't exist. Not a single one. Every time you're tempted to think someone fits one of these roles, remember how complex you are, and then think about how complex you likely appear to others. The rift you can see between your internal self and external self is there for everyone, in every situation.

Fun read, though!

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#216

Post by jekro9jdj »

PaulHoule wrote: post #7
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #4

>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.

Instead of a rock you just need an inflatable security guard. What's frightening about all this is that this article has gotten 15 upvotes despite 100% of the comments so far being about what a pointless article this is.

No post body was provided.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#217

Post by ahmed_ds »

You are webmd. You take in symptoms from people with mild discomfort. You give a wide range of causes and diseases based on the symptoms. You include both spectrum of extreme events. You are worthless as a medical advice provider.

---

You are a talking head in CNBC. You have seen only two global financial crisis in your life time. You talk about a global recession that is about to happen every week. You try your best to keep everyone in the edge of their sit. You never talk about the how market is booming. You are on doomsday patrol.

---

Why does modern contrarian black swan enthusiast always talk about catastrophic events that has incredibly low likelihood of happening? You know what are the other things that have low likelihood of happening, winnings from gambling and lottery. The sentiment is that being conscious about risk is smart unless you are talking about exploiting tail events for profits.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#218

Post by s1artibartfast »

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?

One way is to see if they are doing any new context specific work to make their assessment.

Did the doctor run any tests, perform any investigation, or just tell you the most likely cause for your symptoms. That is to say, did they preform any expert analysis on you specifically or simply tell you a statistic for people like you?

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#219

Post by bmc7505 »

"Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us."

―Peter Watts, Echopraxia (2015)

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#220

Post by honkdaddy »

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.

For some context, Scott Siskind (of SlateStarCodex fame) has been a favorite blogger of this site for years, though admittedly this isn't one of his stronger pieces. Some of Scott's observations are super profound and enlightening, some of them are a bit more obvious. I enjoy his prose, so I tend to at least skim nearly everything he posts.
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