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
Don't think big An Article by Ralph Ammer ralphammer.com One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your creative project is to pick a topic which is too big. Big topics often lead to small results, small topics foster great results. And here is why: Your project is limited by the time and energy you have. These are the boundaries of your project. If you pick a huge topic then there is not much room for your creative efforts. On the other hand, if you pick a small topic you have time and energy to make a great creative contribution. creativity