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
Evergreen notes A Definition by Andy Matuschak notes.andymatuschak.org Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes. Evergreen notes should be atomic Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented Evergreen notes should be densely linked Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden notetakinglearning