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Heuristics that almost always work

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#311

Post by borroka »

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.

The author is very popular among the tech/rationalist crowds (they are not the same crowd, to be clear), the topic is of interest for the same crowd, but the examples get a C-. It is challenging to write interesting and accurate pieces twice a week, and this is neither. That would be another heuristic.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#312

Post by tootie »

the_af wrote: post #72

One 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…

Think about policing. 99.9% of people are innocent so therefore we don't search and arrest people at random. And when we do people rightly flip out.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#313

Post by fleddr »

Unimportant, but the dad of one of my friends worked his entire career as fire brigade on a military base. During that career, there were only two fire incidents. In both cases it was not during his shift.

A lifetime of providing zero value. But that's not the way I see it, he got paid and this supported a family.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#314

Post by lemmsjid »

somethingAlex wrote: post #203

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…

I wanted to take the overall point but I did get bogged down in the examples. The overall tone of the essay is philosophical and allegorical. For an essay with that tone to really make its point it needs to be crystalline in its clarity and feel a real depth of reasoning, otherwise it will lose the reader. Instead it makes rather extreme points in the examples that don't have to do with what I imagine the author wants you to take from the essay. Specifically, the whole business about there being no point to the existence of the people involved. That invites nit-picking ("the security guard is still valuable because they're there! The doctor can still diagnose obvious ailments!"). Then there's the aside about the different Covid treatments, which basically feels like a dig to people who in real life probably took a serious look at the differing treatments before discarding them. These things distract from the much more interesting point that aggregating opinions from experts will not necessarily increase the certainty of the opinion. I think behind this essay is a way better revision where the author has taken a lot of the feedback from these responses and done another draft. In the meantime it doesn't achieve its desired effect as a piece of writing.

Another commenter left what I thought was a rather essential analogy which was whether or not people should run from the hint of a tiger. Running too little invites tiger attack. Running too much invites excessive anxiety. Both have health ramifications: too little fight or flight response and a creature is easy prey, too much fight or flight response and the creature is expending too much energy in the fight or flight state. If the bushes rustle in the right way next to a herd of antelope, the herd will run, and the size of the herd doesn't act as a linear multiplier on the chance that there is a tiger. To follow the analogy rather painfully, the OP article is critiquing the members of the herd who would say, "Don't run, idiot, there's no tiger", when there's an equal critique to be made against the members of the herd who run all the time and are in a constant state of anxiety.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#315

Post by vasco »

borroka wrote: post #275

I read them as sloppy caricatures that provide little value to the conversation. Let's take the security guard: "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." That is blatantly not true, the guard provide value since the wanna-be robbers don't know w…

Maybe we should replace you with a "THIS NEW IDEA ISN'T NUANCED ENOUGH TO REPRESENT THE WORLD" rock.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#316

Post by jozvolskyef »

Jupe wrote: post #291
jozvolskyef wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a tough call this one. If my calculations are correct, based on data from[1], male infant head CT scans cause one excess death per ~3k scans. There must have been something else than a remote possibility to warrant ordering it. [1]: https://www.ajronline.org/doi/full/10.2214/AJR.12.10294

I interpret the linked article different. Can you elaborate? For example (from the summary): =============================== "CONCLUSION. Radiation exposure from the use of CT in the evaluation and management of severe traumatic brain injury causes negligible increases in lifetime attributable risk of cancer and cancer-related mortality. Treating physicians should not allow the concern for future risk of radiation-in…

Excess Cancer Mortality per 100,000 individuals exposed to 100mSv is ~1000 in the 1 year-old male cohort. A single scan is ~3mSv, which makes the mortality ~30 per 100k, or 1 in ~3333, assuming the linear no-threshold model[1].

When someone comes to the ER with a traumatic brain injury, a CT scan is the standard practice because they are at a high risk of dying and presumably the scan is important for reducing the risk.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#317

Post by amflare »

borroka wrote: post #275

I read them as sloppy caricatures that provide little value to the conversation. Let's take the security guard: "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." That is blatantly not true, the guard provide value since the wanna-be robbers don't know w…

I agree with you. The value of the heuristic is in the 99.9% and the value of the person is in the 0.01%. That's why doctors are so valuable. It's for those times when someone comes back and says, "It didn't work." If we waste the doctor's time on the 99.9%, then they lose their primary function of being the expert during the unexpected. For an individual, they may seem interchangeable with a rock, but for a society, they are not. This is because while the probability of cancer per unit of human doesn't change (enough to matter for this illustration), the more people there are, the probability of cancer per unit of time does increase. 0.01% of a lot is still something.

Crucially, however, the security guard and doctor are roles that have value in their responsive nature. Then you have the part of the article where you are talking about roles that have value in their predictive nature. And for those, yeah, the author has a point.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#318

Post by RivieraKid »

Another one is the "science can explain everything" heuristic, which is true in 99.99+% of cases.

But there's one important case where this is not true and many people are trying and failing to use the scientific approach, unable to realize that "solving" the problem requires a very fundamental change of thinking.

Try to guess what I'm talking about (it should be easy I think).

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#319

Post by itsdrewmiller »

somethingAlex wrote: post #203

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…

No evidence is provided that any experts are doing this - not sure where you got "oftentimes" from.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#320

Post by willcipriano »

Retric wrote: post #310
tshaddox wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really just an empirical question in ethology, but if I had to guess I'd say that prey animal in fact don't do a lot of needless running. On the contrary, I'd suspect their sense do a pretty darn good job at quickly determining the risk of predation.

I regularly see prey animals doing a lot of running from me when I am not a threat to them. Even remote observation of fairly large prey animals like goats in their natural environment show them seemingly randomly get spooked.

Don't be so hard on yourself.
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