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
When Customer Journeys Don’t Work: Arcs, Loops, & Terrain An Article by Stephen P. Anderson stephenanderson.medium.com Thinking [in terms of loops and arcs] allows us to let go of a specific journey or sequence, and imagine dozens of scenarios and possible sequences in which these skills can be learned. This doesn’t mean there aren’t more fundamental skills that other skills build upon, but we can let go the tyranny of how, precisely, a person will move through a system. We’re free to zoom in and obsess on these loops, which does two things for us: Approach the design of a system as the design of these as small but significant moments of learning. Consider the many ways these loops might be sequenced, with the exact order being less important. uxsystemsfeedbackgames