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
But what do you want to say? An Article by Ralph Ammer ralphammer.com Pablo Picasso famously said: “The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?” A sensible approach to something that can’t be explained is to express it. Rather than giving you explanations or “saying something”, most artists are concerned with what I like to call “room for interpretation”. They create platforms that trigger thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ideas. Instead of trying to explain the inexplicable artists express their view of it. They don’t want to tell you what to think, they invite you to respond. Making sense artemotion