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
Site performance is potentially the most important metric A Fragment by Kealan Parr css-tricks.com Site performance is potentially the most important metric. The better the performance, the better chance that users stay on a page, read content, make purchases, or just about whatever they need to do. A 2017 study by Akamai says as much when it found that even a 100ms delay in page load can decrease conversions by 7% and lose 1% of their sales for every 100ms it takes for their site to load which, at the time of the study, was equivalent to $1.6 billion if the site slowed down by just one second. performanceuxmetrics