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Heuristics that almost always work

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Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#521

Post by ska »

blunte wrote: post #434
ska wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like the difference between You could win 100mm in the lottery (true statement!) Lottery tickets are a good investment (almost always, false statement). Planning on "well it could happen, technically" isn't a good approach.

But when looking at a possible positive outcome, such as the lottery case, it can "make sense" to buy one ticket. Your chance of winning goes from No Chance to A Chance, which is an infinite improvement.

That's not how this works as a rational investment choice.

It's true that you can never win a lottery you don't enter, but the expected value of that ticket is vastly lower than what you paid for it. That means, as an investment, your $10 will be expected to do better in literally anything with a positive return.

If you are buying > $10 worth of dreaming (for you), fine - but that's consumption.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#522

Post by kstenerud »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #520
kstenerud wrote: post #467

> 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. Not true. His value is in being there . He's not there to stop robbers, but rather to stop squatters or mischief makers who are looking for something to do (in which case there will be a lot more than ju…

> > Her heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, but she provides literally no value. There is no point to her existence. She could be profitably replaced with a rock saying “IT’S NOTHING, TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND WAIT FOR IT TO GO AWAY”. > Also not true. If there's a real problem, it won't go away and the patient will return, either with no improvement, or a worsening of symptoms. You could still replace the first visit wi…

> You could still replace the first visit with a rock or automated response.

Not really, because the doctor would have to receive a first visit before a second visit, and would evaluate how to deal with each one. This is an oversimplification and it doesn't work.

> He didn't provide any more value than a rock without a salary though.

He hired people. Rocks cannot hire people. So he absolutely did provide more value than a rock. In fact, a college degree is a pretty decent heuristic all around. It'll miss a lot of good candidates, but overall the candidates who pass his filter will be mostly sound (as was mentioned in the example).

The overarching problem is that these are oversimplified examples with oversimplified explanations to support his oversimplified conclusion. Real life doesn't work that way. Real life is why we need heuristics in the first place.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#523

Post by PebblesRox »

dragontamer wrote: post #519
fastball wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...ok? Again, not the point being made by the article so not sure what point you're trying to make.

The article ignores useful treatments like Dexamethasone and monoclonal antibodies. The correct skeptic was pro dexamethasone anti Hydroxychloroquine. Seeing things from only an anti-htdroxychloroquine perspective is 100% misleading. There were working drugs that saved many lives during the stupid Hydroxychloroquine hype. ------ What timeframe are we talking about here? What else was known and tested? There is a poli…

The article gives fluvoxamine as an example of a useful treatment that the heuristic-following skeptic would have been wrong to criticize:

"(shame about the time she condemned fluvoxamine equally viciously, though)"

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#524

Post by dragontamer »

PebblesRox wrote: post #523
dragontamer wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article ignores useful treatments like Dexamethasone and monoclonal antibodies. The correct skeptic was pro dexamethasone anti Hydroxychloroquine. Seeing things from only an anti-htdroxychloroquine perspective is 100% misleading. There were working drugs that saved many lives during the stupid Hydroxychloroquine hype. ------ What timeframe are we talking about here? What else was known and tested? There is a poli…

The article gives fluvoxamine as an example of a useful treatment that the heuristic-following skeptic would have been wrong to criticize: "(shame about the time she condemned fluvoxamine equally viciously, though)"

But we weren't "heuristic following skeptics" with regard to the pandemic.

The RECOVERY trial basically tried everything that had a chance of working. Hydroxychloroquine was part of the tests and did very poorly.

------

After the RECOVERY trial in June 2020, it was no longer about "what worked", the question was "what works better?". By the time Ivermectin became a discussion point in 2021, it wasn't good enough to just "work", you had to prove that it was at least as good as Dexamethasone + Monoclonal antibodies.

Its not about being a "heuristic following skeptic". Its about knowledge of treatments that do work and the tests they underwent to prove their efficacy.

The correct answer for Ivermectin was "Hey, we have this test with Dexamethasone + Monoclonal antibodies that showed efficacy over 3000 people. Where is the evidence for Ivermectin?"

Oh, you don't have evidence yet? How about we wait until you have evidence before you claim that IVM is more useful than the current Dexamethasone + Monoclonal antibodies cocktail?

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#525

Post by travisjungroth »

jancsika wrote: post #420
travisjungroth wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Get three opinions from professionals giving the default answer and you have three default answers. Because it’s non-competitive it doesn’t even require coordination. Get three home appraisals in 2007 and they’re all coming in at the offer. They don’t have to know each other, they’re just aligned with the same individual incentives.

> Get three opinions from professionals giving the default answer and you have three default answers. What's the likelihood they've all standardized on the exact same default heuristic? But even if they did, at least in some of the examples giving the same default answer would be literally impossible when 2nd opinions are taken into account. The security guard example is instructive. Scatter a truckload of security g…

> What's the likelihood they've all standardized on the exact same default heuristic?

In some cases really high. Professionals are often under the same constraints, have no reason to be diverge, and even are incentivized to converge in opinions. These are not independent probabilistic events.

To my earlier example, _many_ appraisers adopted the heuristic of “appraisal = offer + irrelevant_random_noise”.

You security guard example doesn’t really apply to professional opinions. They’re usually done independently. By hiring multiple security guards, you’re forcing them (or at least encouraging them) to spread out. Sure, you’d get a similar effect if you hired ten doctors to spend 20 minutes with you all at the same time. They couldn’t all listen to your heart and tell you to take an aspirin. But if you visit them one at a time they can. So it’s more like ten security guards all watching one camera feed from different rooms.

Examples of this problem aren’t made up. Citigroup accidentally sent $900 million dollars to creditors. An issue I believe is still in litigation about a year later and has been a huge loss. It was approved by three people.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#526

Post by [deleted] »

PaulHoule wrote: post #303
gilgad13 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true, in the context of alpine climbing where I first heard this statement, the bold alpinists who die young are very much not beginner-intermediates. I've interpreted this differently than just the "Bathtub Curve"[1] applied to dangerous pursuits. Rather, there is a certain amount of objective risk in alpine environments, and the more time you put yourself in that environment, especially in locations y…

My wife teaches people to ride horses for a living so we talk about the safety of that. You hear a lot about people who get seriously injured riding who are often professionals or people who ride competitively at a high level. They are doing dangerous things and doing a lot of them. We don't think it is that dangerous for people who ride at the level we do, out of maybe 15 years we've had one broken bone. The other d…

[deleted]

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#527

Post by crent »

SilasX wrote: post #258
crent wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I came up with the Goldilocks (meta?-)heuristic[1] for that: Only trust someone to say X is too high if they can also tell you when X would be too low. A corollary of which would be e.g. "Don't trust a skeptic that says 'X won't Change The World' unless they can tell you which developments would Change The World." [1] Or Scylla-Charybdis Heuristic if you prefer: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-ch…

I like this idea. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#528

Post by d1sxeyes »

sin7 wrote: post #406
pessimizer wrote: post #108

Earlier 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.

RandomSwede's comment is accurate, but maybe the below can help add some 'flesh' to their response.

Basically, the problem is that you can't just multiply it all together.

(1/6) ^ 3 is correct, and the probability of rolling 3 sixes is indeed 1/216 today, but if you repeat independent events, you don't just add up the probability.

Imagine instead of dice it's coins, and it's only two. Your odds of getting HH today are 1/4, but the odds of getting HH by day four are not now 4/4. We know that it's possible, although unlikely, you could flip coins for the rest of your life and NEVER get two heads. So we know that you can't ever have odds of 4/4 (or 1), only odds that approach 1. So that means that we can't say 216 days from now will be 216/216.

Instead, you need to work out the probability of the event NOT happening, and then repeatedly NOT happening independently (so we can multiply together to get the probability.

For our four coins, the probability of NOT getting HH is 3/4. On Day 2, the probability of NOT getting HH on both occasions will be (3/4)×(3/4), (9/16, 56.25%). By day 3, it will be (3/4) × (3/4) × (3/4), or 27/64. On day 4, it'll be 81/256, or 31.6%. Now we can subtract from 1, to work out that by day 4, the odds of us having hit HH are almost 70%.

As RandomSwede explains, there's a 50% chance that you will have rolled three sixes by day 149. By day 496, you're down to 10%.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#529

Post by throwaway6532 »

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.

This is why I don't drive or talk to people anymore.

Re: Heuristics that almost always work

#530

Post by noetic_techy »

Does anyone else who is following the FLCCC/Ivermectin/Peter McCullough story find it ironic that they would use this as an example of something we can believe the "experts" on?

Japan, India, and a growing list of countries apparently never got that memo...

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