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
The details of construction The housing developments in the Moscow suburbs were built mostly in the decades after the Second World War. Laid out as enormous chessboards, the suburbs stretch to the horizon across flat land sparsely planted with birch and aspen. The architectural design of the suburban buildings was good, but the state had not been able to command good-quality work. The signs of poorly motivated workers appeared in the details of construction. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman Designing detail