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
Sonorisms I the authenticity of the gesture as if the air had taken on substance representation and re-presentation a first order of presence this painterly game of pick-up sticks Irwin's "fetish finish" questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them the art is what has happened to the viewer an art of things not looked at a dialogue of immanence the information that takes place between things your house is the last before the infinite his "project of general peripatetic availability" that shiver of perception perceiving itself a desert of pure feeling Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees PhonaestheticsArchitectural dark matter wordseuphony