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.
In the past, GDP and resources use have always been tightly correlated. But this is just drawing a line through some data — it’s not based on any deep theory. And in fact, these correlations can change very quickly. Just as one example, here’s energy use versus GDP since 1949.
If you were sitting in 1970, you could look at this curve and claim, very confidently, that economic growth requires concomitant increases in energy use. And you’d be wrong. Because the trend is your friend til the bend at the end.
Maintenance is a low-status affair: you can confess to being unable to change a tyre in a way that you would never confess to being unable to name a play by Shakespeare.
…We understand the expertise of janitors, plumbers and mechanics, and we suffer mightily in their absence, yet somehow we take them for granted. We take for granted, too, the most basic maintenance of all — preparing food, washing clothes, changing dirty nappies. Nobody would boast at a dinner party or on a first date about doing any of this, yet it is essential.
…This is about more than breaking bridges and breaking bike chains. There is a missed opportunity here to find something rather wonderful in maintenance.