Heuristics That Almost Always Work An Article by Scott Alexander astralcodexten.substack.com Sometimes there’s a Heuristic That Almost Always Works, like “this technology won’t change everything” or “there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow”. And sometimes the rare exceptions are so important to spot that we charge experts with the task. But the heuristics are so hard to beat that the experts themselves might be tempted to secretly rely on them, while publicly pretending to use more subtle forms of expertise. …Maybe this is because the experts are stupid and lazy. Or maybe it’s social pressure: failure because you didn’t follow a well-known heuristic that even a rock can get right is more humiliating than failure because you didn’t predict a subtle phenomenon that nobody else predicted either. Or maybe it’s because false positives are more common (albeit less important) than false negatives, and so over any “reasonable” timescale the people who never give false positives look more accurate and get selected for. expertiseheuristicsprediction
Beauty and compression An Article by Scott Alexander astralcodexten.substack.com The Buddha discusses states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation: Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion. ...If you could really concentrate on a metronome, it would be more blissful than a symphony. The jhāna is also a strong contender as a theory of beauty: beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed. The Abode of the Unsymmetrical beautysilencesensesattention
Negative Creativity An Article by Scott Alexander slatestarcodex.com Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard. Misinterpretation as inspirationSit Down And Think About It For Five Minutes ideascreativitymetaphor
Primer A Film by Shane Carruth www.imdb.com A normal wooden pencilSomething moreAt the top of the pageParanoiaHe had but to speak+1 More timetechnologyexperiments
A normal wooden pencil Aaron: You know that story about how NASA spent millions of dollars developing this pen that writes in Zero G? And how Russia solved the problem? Abe: Yeah, they used a pencil. problemscreativityconstraintscosmos
At the top of the page Here's what's going to happen. I'm gonna read this, and you're gonna listen, and you're gonna stay on the line. And you're not gonna interrupt, and you're not gonna speak for any reason. Some of this you know. I'm gonna start at the top of the page.
He had but to speak He had but to speak aloud the words that came into his head, and those around him would fall in line. wordscommunicationpersuasion
Like normal people Abe: What's wrong with our hands? Aaron: What do you mean? Abe: Why can't we write like normal people? Aaron: I don't know...I can see the letters. I know what they should look like, I just can't get my hand to make them. writing