The problem with articles like this is that they take one good clear simple point, "the existence of experts using heuristics causes predictable over-updates towards those heuristics", and pad it out with so many examples and allegories that, understandably, what the reader wants to talk about is the validity and accuracy of the examples. These, of course, aren't the point of the piece, but the point of the piece is so slight that it hardly bears discussing. Of course everyone looks to the actual content.
Heuristics that almost always work
441–450 of 541 posts
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What am I missing? 6 x 6 X 6 = 216 or about 7 months.
Dice (typically) do not have a memory, so whatever happened yesterday will not influence what happens today. If you roll it daily, your chance of surviving at least N days is (215/216)^N, for the specific case of "rolling three 6 on three 6-sided dice" that puts you at ~50% at 149 days and at ~10% at 496 days.
At sufficient scale, even incredibly unlikely things become quite probable.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh man, that's terrible. I can certainly understand how someone without a checklist that is verified by two people can do that, especially if you have a backpack on to mask the fact that the parachute is missing. Many times if I wear a tight jacket in the car, I forget to put my seat belt on, because I unconsciously mistake the pressure of the jacket for the seatbelt's, even though putting on a seat belt is usually t…
I generally take off my jacket before driving for that very reason.
Luckily newer cars won't stop beeping if you forget your seatbelt, so the problem is mitigated. Not so for parachutes, apparently.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#444Earlier 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.
All this reminds me of “if you are immortal and cannot be harmed, what are the odds of getting ‘stuck’?” I’d venture 100%.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you think a 1/216 chance of sudden death isn't a lot of danger, I don't want to go rock climbing with you!
Don’t look at the actuarial tables. The odds are worse than that over a year’s time after ~35
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#446This 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…
For those curious, (4999/5000)^3650 is approx .5. Meaning your chance of dying under a tree is about 50/50 after 10 years.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#447I 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…
You have a very weird idea of what security guards do. They don't sit in front of the entrance all night, scaring off would-be robbers. They are inside the building, in their booth, probably looking over some monitors. They do not provide a deterrent, they just call the cops if something does happen. Robbers have no clue if they are there or not. The heuristic works fine.
Where I come from, companies don't waste real estate with monitor rooms for security guards. Instead the monitoring is outsourced, and the security guard has a fixed position and a set number of patrols they need to do.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#448This 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 took the same approach with motorcycling. I decided to do it for 3 years while at university because it had a transformative impact on my lifestyle. But I also decided the odds were way too bad to keep doing it my whole life. So I stopped and haven't done it since then.
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#449This 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…
But the odds aren’t additive. If you sleep under a tree 4999 times and nothing happens, that doesn’t mean the 5000 time you sleep under one you’ll get crushed. Each and every time you have a 1 in 5000 chance.
I don't believe the odd that you get crushed once if you play it multiple times are not as good as the odd of not getting crushed when playing only one time.
So you have 0.02% chance of getting crushed each time.
(1 - 0.0002)^10950 = 0.1119 1 - 0.1119 = 0.8881
So the probability of getting crushed at least one night over 30 years is ~89%
I think, my stats are from school over 10 years ago.
This is because, for example, if you flip a coin, each time you still only have 50% chance of getting tails. But the chances that you flip it 10 times in a row and never get heads are a lot less than 50%.
That's said. Another tricky bit is, what was measured when we said 1/5000 chance? This is where data can get confusing. Was that the odd of a tree falling at any given night? Or was that the odd of someone being crushed by a tree in their sleep at night? Or was it the odd of someone being crushed by a tree ever? Or the odd of a particular tree falling at night?
That's often where any prediction already begins to break down. For example, sorry to use the vaccines as an example, but when we say 90% efficacy, it means, out of x number of people who got a vaccine during the trial, 90% of those didn't get covid during some period, while in the placebo group it would be some other % who got it.
Reasoning about this already is tricky. You don't know the priors. What was the odd your participants were exposed to COVID? What if you'd measured over a longer period of time? What if that was just a lucky bunch?
Re: Heuristics that almost always work
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I finished the piece noticing times that "heuristics that almost work" were a genuine temptation for me to adopt and having more empathy for people who end up adopting them. If you really don't feel like you could ever be tempted to become lazy in the way that the piece illustrates then I admire your integrity but there are actually many of us who are tempted to reduce the rigor with which we investigate things when…
The mere fact that you think of using these kinds of heuristics as "lazy" and "acting without integrity" is itself an example of why this article creates a moralistic dichotomy that's both completely untrue and entirely unnecessary. Don't fall for it. Laziness is a lot rarer than you may believe, even in yourself. People don't just "do bad things" very often for the sake of doing bad things, there are almost always r…
Not seeking a reason beyond the obvious IS what the concept of Laziness means, so its not rare at all. When you don't care if there is a reason for not doing something, you call it Laziness.