[HN Gopher] Heuristics that almost always work
___________________________________________________________________
Heuristics that almost always work
Author : mudro_zboris
Score : 297 points
Date : 2022-02-08 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (astralcodexten.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (astralcodexten.substack.com)
| adamc wrote:
| The argument in the first example is just wrong. 1) His value
| might be that it looks like there is a security guard on duty,
| and that a) encourages customers, b) discourages robbers. A rock
| cannot do that. 2) He could do that, but he probably won't,
| because it's boring to just sit there. Once in a while, he will
| walk around, looking, paying at least a little attention. It
| makes robbery riskier.
| jppope wrote:
| One of the amazing subtleties in this article... if you're a fast
| reader you'll stop paying attention to the stories as they go
| through... kind of amazing that this article is layered like
| that.
| [deleted]
| aksss wrote:
| This article could be replaced by a rock with the words
| "Heuristics are valuable but will bite you in the ass" chiseled
| on it. /s
| llaolleh wrote:
| If he finished with that line with a photoshopped rock it
| would've been great.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I developed a rock inside my head, and the rock said "THESE
| PEOPLE WILL ALL FALL AFOUL OF RIGID DICTATES WRITTEN ON A
| ROCK."
| bentcorner wrote:
| Second-to-last story should have been about a person that did
| not fall afoul of the rock. Then in the last segment ask the
| reader if they developed their own rock.
| csee wrote:
| This sounds like learned helplessness. I have seen it in
| difficult R&D jobs where the hitrate from experimenting is very
| small, and people subconsciously give up. That's why hiring
| extremely motivated and intrinsically curious people for these
| roles is important.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| My favourite one is seeing IT admins plan for "this almost always
| won't fail."
|
| Substitute "this" for SAN array, core switch, or entire data
| centre.
|
| I've had someone argue with me at length that simultaneous multi
| disk failures in a RAID5 never happen.
|
| Two weeks later it did and the main SAN disk array went up in
| smoke.
| kqr wrote:
| It is useful to remember that "almost never" is a synonym for
| "sometimes".
| wombatpm wrote:
| "Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so
| patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But
| magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up
| nine times out of ten."
|
| Terry Pratchett
| yupper32 wrote:
| I don't understand how articles like this get upvoted. Who is
| getting value from this?
|
| This reads like some generic LinkedIn CEO post that sounds deep
| on the surface but actually means nothing.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It seems to make its point pretty clearly to me: "just naysay"
| is a strategy that is extremely effective/accurate in many
| domains, but provides no actual value compared to people
| attempting more honest evaluations or predictions.
|
| I just realized it's possible I'm being whooshed by your
| comment.
| slothtrop wrote:
| I don't think he's being meta, just obtuse.
| scoofy wrote:
| I mean, this is a weird example, but i feel like it's like
| Scott Auckerman says in Comedy Bang Bang, when he introduces
| the show. He'll do the welcome, and explain the show, and
| inevitably some guess will retort that this is silly, since
| everyone knows what the show is about, but he constantly
| responds with: "every episode is somebody's first episode."
|
| These ideas that should be obvious to anyone who's studied
| advanced statistics, or formal logic, or read some books about
| extreme events, all likely already know, but the fact is, not
| everyone... better yet _most people_ have not every studied
| these things.
|
| These ideas are inherently interesting, and every year, there
| are new people coming of age that are introduced to these
| interesting ideas via an article like this, and then it'll get
| upvotes. The world is like a fire hose of young people. Add in
| a popular author who will likely get attention anyway, and here
| we are at the top of the feed.
| yupper32 wrote:
| But it's _not_ interesting, it 's _not_ introducing anyone to
| advanced statistics or formal logic, it 's _not_ showing any
| real world uses that can be applied by anyone coming of age.
|
| It's just generalized parables by someone not in any of the
| fields or positions mentioned, some weak conclusions, and a
| "Heuristics That Almost Always Works" book title.
| scoofy wrote:
| I mean _most people I know_ that are "very smart people"
| including myself regularly exercise the cool customer vibe
| of "yea right, that'll never happen." I think it's a good
| parable. I mean, it's not really important, and I didn't
| learn anything, but it's a good reminder that "probably
| not" is a lot different than "definitely not."
| pjc50 wrote:
| Everyone thinks _they 're_ the person who's right that 1% of
| the time about the thing everyone else is conservatively wrong
| about.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| The last sentence of the edit the author provides is the key
| insight of this piece.
|
| > the existence of experts using heuristics causes predictable
| over-updates towards those heuristics.
|
| That's the essence of this piece. If you expect that consultation
| with experts will leave you with a more accurate picture of
| things than before consultation, you should first be sure that
| their heuristics are not equivalent to reading a rock with a
| single message painted on it, otherwise no matter what your
| conclusions will be biased towards that rock. "X is an expert and
| X says Y is good so I should have more confidence that Y is good
| than before" is not a useful conclusion if that conclusion came
| from X looking at a rock that says "Y is good."
|
| The Queen example in particular, but all of the others as well,
| is a warning that looking only at the accuracy of predictions is
| not enough to avoid this problem. In order to make sure that
| those predictions are useful for yourself, you have to ensure
| that those predictions actually incorporate new information.
| crent wrote:
| Which is the rub, right? How can a non-expert reasonably come
| to a conclusion of whether or not an expert's prediction is
| baseless or is actually solid/insightful?
| bigodbiel wrote:
| consult another expert and hope his heurestics are different
| from the latter, ad infinitum (or you yourself end up
| creating a meta-heurestic of their heurestics)!
| rthomas6 wrote:
| This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been writing books about.
| He calls them black swan events, because if you took a sample of
| 1000 swans, chances are you'd conclude that all swans are white,
| but it just isn't so. People tend to round down the probability
| of very rare events to zero, even when the upside of them is
| small and the downside is catastrophically bad. Examples: the
| 2008 housing crisis, Fukushima, and our current supply chain
| problems.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| If you get to the end of the article, the author explains why
| black swan events are not what he is talking about.
| scoofy wrote:
| These are NOT black swan events. These are probably all White
| Swan events (possibly grey swan events, but i'd have to review
| stuff that i don't want to right now). E.g. High certainty,
| just low predictability. From the book, when you know the
| statistics of a rare event, and then the even occurs, it's
| absolutely not a black swan event.
|
| For an event to be a Black Swan event, you literally need to
| have no possibly for the event in your deductive framework
| (e.g. _the problem of induction_ which is what the book is
| actually about). In every single one of these examples, the
| possibly of the event occurring is accepted by everyone.
|
| This is why Taleb _lost his mind_ when people started calling
| the Covid Pandemic a "black swan event," which it was
| absolutely not. We know pandemics happen, we know about what
| power law they happen at. The fact we were not prepared at all
| is a problem of not being prepared for something _we know will
| happen with certainty_.
|
| https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-governmen...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| When I was doing a postdoc in Germany I would go eat
| mushrooms in Amsterdam and have the same trip about
| "exceptional events" over and over again.
|
| Than Taleb wrote that book and I wished I'd written something
| about "exceptional events".
|
| Then Taleb just coasted, drifted and became irrelevant.
| scoofy wrote:
| Lol, sure, starting Universa after basically inventing
| tail-risk trading strategies is definitely "becoming
| irrelevant."
| XorNot wrote:
| We know pandemics happen but we have no idea which viruses
| will become pandemic viruses - until one emerges, we're
| generally confident that there is not an imminent pandemic.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| I think it's what he calls "fat tails" : events happening at
| low frequency at the tail of the probability distribution, but
| which have a significant impact.
| ppsreejith wrote:
| IIRC, a black swan event highlights the problem of induction
| when there is _no_ prior event that you can use to learn from.
| Eg: humans thought all swans were white until the first black
| swan was encountered. So not just exceedingly rare but outside
| what you know AND extremely rare. Eg: Neither the housing
| crisis, Fukushima, supply chain crisis, nor the pandemic are
| black swans (they were seen before and was predicted/theorised)
| but the internet is.
| stevage wrote:
| It's such an annoying metaphor for those of us who live in a
| country where all swans are black.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's an annoying metaphor anyway. If you've defined a swan as
| a particular type of white bird, it's impossible for a black
| swan to ever come. "Black swan" is just a tautological term
| for _new thing we 've never seen before_, but pretending to
| be a term for _known thing that suddenly behaved
| differently._
|
| Sometimes things happen that, in order to make money or cut
| costs, we convinced people were impossible.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Maybe you're right but I don't see why this addresses the reply
| to (at least when I loaded it) the first comment on the post
| which claims the same thing and is disagreed with by the
| author.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| One interesting twist on the doctor example: we know she is
| almost always right that it's nothing, that it will all go away
| and that just two aspirins are ok. The article correctly points
| out that she will miss one or two cases where it was a terrible
| disease instead, and that her prescription of aspirin and to go
| away and rest will be misguided.
|
| However... doctors must do more than just cure you. They must
| also "do no harm"; in fact that is (or should be) their default.
| What if she intervened more directly in more cases, maybe poked
| and prodded and recommended more invasive treatments? She would
| get more cases wrong in the opposite direction (recommending a
| potentially invasive or even harmful treatment when some rest and
| an aspirin would have sufficed), maybe resulting in accidental
| death through _action_ rather than _inaction_.
|
| She must be alert, but hers is a good default/heuristic. It's not
| the same as a rock with "TAKE ASPIRIN" written on it.
|
| And this is just an example. I think the heuristics that work
| 99.9% of the time do so because they _do indeed work_. Erring in
| the opposite direction can, in some cases, be also harmful.
| klik99 wrote:
| Good point - he assumes that false positives are always less
| costly than false negatives, but that may not be true in this
| example.
| alexfrydl wrote:
| The problem is that people are not statistics. It may sound
| reasonable on the surface to say that this heuristic minimizes
| harm on average because she doesn't perform unnecessary
| interventions on the 99.9%. However, there are still actual
| human beings in the 0.1% who are harmed. What you're really
| saying is that if a group of people is small enough, it's fair
| for them to suffer preventable harm if preventing it would
| expose the larger group of people to risk.
|
| I'm not going to argue about whether that is true or not,
| because I think that clearly depends on many factors and may be
| unanswerable. But as a member of a minority group who is often
| denied health care, it is often denied for this very reason. If
| the wrong person is prescribed this treatment, it is harmful.
| I'm just saying that when you're in the 0.1%, it can be
| difficult to accept the idea that you have to sacrifice
| yourself because someone in the 99.9% might be at risk
| otherwise.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You have no way to know if you're in the 0.1%. It's not
| written on your body anywhere. So if an early test can save
| 1/1000 from dying, but the false positives from an early test
| kill 3/1000, false positives are more dangerous than the
| disease you may or may not have.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think this is a little different - it's "doing the math." The
| best contemporary example I think is early/frequent
| mammograms/checks for prostate cancer. If we check how often
| what we can detect will develop into a threat to health, and
| compare that to the consequences of treatment at that early
| stage, we may determine that under some conditions the results
| of our diagnostics kill more people than the disease would, and
| therefore we shouldn't do them.
|
| That's different than not treating people at all - _even if it
| 's not treating people at all,_ because the reason you're not
| doing it is because your diagnostics and treatments are
| inadequate.
| robomc wrote:
| Yeah this is literally found to be the case with back injuries
| I think?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Ironically, the author is a medical doctor.
| mherdeg wrote:
| I liked Bob Wachter's story about how taking aspirin
| accidentally revealed early stomach cancer:
| https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1447972627956391941
| derbOac wrote:
| This article is a little misleading because it conflates a few
| things.
|
| The low base rate prediction problem is a problem not just
| because of lazy application, it's because the numbers make it
| impossible to do anything else in some situations. With a low
| enough base rate, you have to have a preternaturally good
| indicator to make anything but a negative prediction.
|
| Then you have to resort to utility theory and decide if false
| positives are worth the cost.
|
| Incidentally, the hiring example is poor because it's just not
| the same situation at all. The fact he's equating it to the
| other scenarios maybe says as much about the real problem as
| the scenario does itself.
| travisporter wrote:
| > But then you consult a bunch of experts, who all claim they
| have additional evidence that the thing won't happen, and you
| raise your probability to 99.999%
|
| I lose the line of reasoning here - 99.9 to 99.999 doesn't happen
| if you don't have new evidence, so why would you raise your
| probability? or maybe i'm being too literal?
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| You _think_ the supposed experts have additional evidence, so
| you 're treating their claim to have evidence as evidence in
| itself. You're unaware that they have no more evidence than you
| already did.
| Imnimo wrote:
| The flip side of this, is that if the rock is 99.9% right, and
| the high-minded rationalist is only 99% right, what does that say
| about the value of his rationality?
| josephcsible wrote:
| What if the rock's errors are all false negatives, the high-
| minded rationalist's errors are all false positives, and false
| negatives are 100 times worse than false positives?
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| The security guard still provides value because he deters would-
| be robbers who have no way of being certain that he is using the
| wind heuristic
| etchalon wrote:
| Generally agree with the article, though the reverse is
| obviously, "Heuristic which almost never works", and all the
| stories are about the 1 out 100000 times the weirdo was right and
| everyone lauded them as a genius but really they just got lucky
| the once.
| ajuc wrote:
| The reverse is heuristic that works 50% of the time.
|
| If you have heuristic that works 0.0001% of the time - it's
| almost as good as one that is correct 99.999% of the time. You
| will notice and learn to just invert it.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| There's 100000 or more weirdos out there claiming all sorts of
| spurious stuff, it's only natural one of them would be right
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He's
| excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way.
| He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words "THERE
| ARE NO ROBBERS" on it
|
| except for the value of having a security guard visible so that
| 99% of the robbers who might conceivably want to rob a Pillow
| Mart decide to go rob Quilting Heaven down the road instead.
| soheil wrote:
| It's not 99% of the robbers, you're exaggerating. Maybe at best
| you fool 5% of them, after all if they were that dumb to be
| fooled so easily they would have been caught by now. But now
| you have diminishing returns. Just like you, they know a
| security guard isn't effective, ... and down the game theory
| rabbit hole we go.
| wahern wrote:
| A coworker and I were once stuck in an office building for an
| hour or two. We were working as consultants at a client's
| building and ended up working rather late. Not particularly
| late by software programmer standards, but clearly
| exceptionally late by the culture of the client company.
|
| At some point in the evening all the exit doors, including the
| front door, became armed, and this was conspicuously noted as
| when we packed up for the night and tried to exit to the
| parking lot, we realized we couldn't open the door without an
| alert being sent to the police (not just the security company).
| There should have been a guard at his station (desk, CCTVs,
| etc) in the entryway, but we found none.
|
| We waited for awhile. Then we walked up, down, and through
| every corridor and restroom of that 4-5 story building,
| multiple times, looking for the guard. When that failed, we
| called the security company to ask them if it was okay to open
| the door. They swore there was a guard on duty and asked us to
| wait a little longer in case he was doing rounds. Despite
| knowing that couldn't possibly be the case, we obligingly
| passed more time waiting in the entryway. Then we walked up,
| down, and around the building _again_ , but this time splitting
| up and shouting. Nothing. Nobody.
|
| We go back down and inform the security company that we weren't
| going to wait any longer and that we'd be triggering the silent
| alarm as we left. And guess who exits the elevator just as we
| were about to open the door.... Apparently he had been sound
| asleep in a cozy nook somewhere in the upper floors--presumably
| in a conference room or more likely a private office, the
| former being something we inspected in passing (glass walls),
| the latter we didn't feel comfortable opening and entering, and
| both being the last place you'd expect to find a security
| guard. IIRC, he wouldn't admit it outright, but just played
| coy. We weren't mad. A little tired and frustrated because as
| consultants we still had to get in early the next morning, but
| that was mostly offset by the sheer absurdity of the situation,
| and by the fact that he seemed quite elderly.
|
| Anyhow, you may assume too much if you assume the security
| guard actually maintains some kind of useful presence. I guess
| these days it's more common to have electronic way stations to
| log a guard doing rounds. I dunno if this building had such
| measures (this was circa 2001-2002), but as the sole guard he
| probably was expected to spend most of his time, if not all of
| his time, manning the security desk, providing ample
| opportunity to be doing something else, instead.
| wheybags wrote:
| That security guard was performing the important function of
| allowing the management to legally tick the "we have a
| security guard" box on the insurance form.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Simple metaphors and examples always have holes in them. They
| exist to illuminate the point author is making. They are not
| the argument.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Yeah this was a particularly weak one though. The doctor
| example was much stronger.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Instead of a rock you just need an inflatable security guard.
|
| What's frightening about all this is that this article has
| gotten 15 upvotes despite 100% of the comments so far being
| about what a pointless article this is.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| People who agree upvote and have nothing more to say, people
| who disagree come to post their objections.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Or security cameras.. or a drone..
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I didn't unvote it and I think each of the example is missing
| subtle aspects.
|
| But I think it's interesting enough to discuss. The main
| thing is that are a whole lot of human activities where one
| can imagine completely rote activity could replace thinking.
| But in all of these, a deeper look shows to subtle factors
| actually require a human being to be present.
|
| It's a bit like self-driving cars. 90% of driving is really
| easy to get working. 99% is moderately hard. 100% looks like
| it won't arrive for quite a while.
| soheil wrote:
| Are you saying 15 votes isn't a lot? Also 100% of 2 comments
| is still 100% of the comments.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a lot of votes for something for which the best
| analysis is something like "move along folks, nothing to
| see here..."
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| yeah I don't know I think people might spot the difference.
| But maybe most of these robbers have a method that says if
| you see anything like a security guard don't figure out if it
| is one just go rob somewhere that definitely doesn't have it
| because there's always somewhere else to rob - but maybe one
| of the groups of robbers is better than everyone else and
| they have a real robber mastermind in charge who determines
| the security guard is inflatable. Then it's on.
|
| on edit: added in missing two words that clarified meaning.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| People mostly seem to object to the security guard example as
| missing a part of the analysis.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| All of them are missing a big part of the analysis, that it
| is often not a choice of "a rock" but of a person with a
| heuristic that works way less than 99.9% of the time. A
| security guard that constantly harasses shoppers, a
| "futurist" that buys into every new fad, the conspiracy
| theorist that believes everything on Facebook.
|
| Would anyone really think a weatherman that had say a 70%
| correct heuristic was good? Or go to a doctor like that?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Seems like the article writer has fallen for the very issue
| they're trying to portray, by writing so many examples that
| they've stopped thinking and just resorted to writing
| "PERSON CAN BE REPLACED WITH ROCK". If this isn't ironic
| then I don't know what is.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| "Rationalism" is so ironic you might say it is an iron or
| at least made of iron.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I suspect a lot of them are stopping when they see that
| when is bogus and aren't bothering to poke holes in the
| rest of them. Readers have their own heuristics, but that
| doesn't mean the rest of the examples aren't full of holes.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| It's really not about several examples of the same thing,
| but interrogating our intuitions around each one. I at
| least found I felt differently about different heuristics
| being replaced by rocks.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Specifically around the security guard example, the mere presence
| of a security guard should deter thieves (in theory), so I think
| the analysis is a little more nuanced than "security guards
| investigate weird noises".
|
| Unless this all went over my head and that's all sort-of the
| point of what he's getting at . . ?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| He's not talking to you, he's talking to the other people in
| his pod.
| zwieback wrote:
| Heuristics? For amateurs and lazy folk. We find metrics that
| reliably measure something, find or make a gauge that measures
| that metric, then make sure our gauge stays good over time by
| doing R&Rs or recalibrations.
| Traster wrote:
| I feel like a lot of this is just... bullshit. Yes, if a security
| guard literally decided to ignore every sound as the wind they
| would probably be useless - as long as their role is literally
| only fast response. Except they don't, and it isn't. Their role
| is just as often to politely escort someone out, or remind
| someone of their manners. So there's that but also, maybe over
| time the security guard doesn't ignore everything as wind, maybe
| the security guard...learns quite well what wind is like. If I
| hear a vague rumbling on a monday I know it's my neighbour
| bringing the bins out. Similarly, the security guard probably can
| go from 5 false positives a day to 0.01 false positives a day
| without increasing their false negatives at all.
|
| It's like, it's a nice thought, but if you really apply attention
| to it, it doesn't hold up for long.
|
| >Fast, fun to read, and a 99.9% success rate. Pretty good,
| especially compared to everyone who "does their own research" and
| sometimes gets it wrong.
|
| I would wager the "do your own research" crowd hits much lower
| than 99.9% success rate, so what's the argument here? The person
| who accepts mainstream view - which is apparently what this
| article calls a skeptic - is no better than a rock. But that
| actually, the people who contradict the skeptic are no better
| than a rock thrown in a glass house.
|
| In my experience though, the skeptic is far more likely to be a
| "skeptic" of the mainstream view and to advertise themselves as
| that (see: literallly thedailyskeptic.org) and in reality,
| they're taking the bad side of the bet, by this logic you're
| 99.9% right by dismissing contrarians and accepting the
| mainstream view. if you're constantly endorsing the contrarians,
| you're basically taking the 0.01%. And this isn't theoretical,
| the skeptics I listed earlier literally posted an article today
| telling us how global warming is fine, because the earth was
| warmer... 50 million years ago when no human life was viable. The
| problem with skeptics isn't their skepticism, it's where they
| choose to apply it.
|
| There is value in there being contrarians, in order to hold
| people's feet to the fire, but that doesn't really apply if
| they're just bringing up dumb arguments and are no more complex
| than the people they're questioning.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This article uses a trope that is frustratingly common in
| rationalist articles: It sets up over simplified straw-man
| versions of real world scenarios and then knocks them out of the
| park.
|
| In the real world, a doctor who ignores the complaints of every
| patients will quickly find themselves the subject of malpractice
| lawsuits. Not by _every_ wronged patient, but it only takes one
| or two angry patients with lawyers in the family to cause huge
| problems. Malpractice insurance is expensive for a reason.
|
| Real-world security guards do a lot more than just catch robbers
| in the act. I've had security guards catch employees trying to
| remove company assets late at night, catch doors left open,
| notice faulty security mechanisms that need to be repaired (e.g.
| door sticks open), and so on. Not to mention the presence of a
| security guard is a huge deterrent for getting robbed in the
| first place.
|
| And so on. Yes, there are situations where you can get away with
| betting on the most common outcome for a while, but unless the
| people around you are all oblivious then eventually they'll
| notice.
| mediaman wrote:
| And for the robber, crime is a lot more common than he seems to
| think it is. Metal theft, for example, is extremely frequent:
| it is rare that an industrial facility would have so little
| theft that such a proposed heuristic would be reasonable.
|
| If crime were that low, then the guard's position doesn't exist
| anyway.
|
| So then we're just left with an empty thought exercise with no
| relation to reality, as an argument for how we should think
| about reality.
| operator-name wrote:
| I don't think there's the need to take the examples in the
| article hyper literally. You can call them strawmen if you'd
| like but simplification for the sake of presenting a point
| (which you seem to have ignored) is necessary.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| aka exactly what straw man means
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Great article, really enjoyed it. I second the Talib connection.
|
| But anyways... Does anyone else struggle with Substack's
| typeface, specifically it's width and spacing between characters?
| I'm a bit of a typeface nerd, and I genuinely like or enjoy most
| of our common fonts. Substack is the only site that I find the
| typeface to significantly affect the reading experience.
| AlanYx wrote:
| I tend to agree with you about the typeface they use, Spectral.
| I think it's a combination of factors: loose tracking designed
| to permit slightly over-emphasized differences in weight (which
| were a design goal for the font) and somewhat selective
| replacement of inktraps from the inspiration face (Elzevir)
| with angular serifs, which creates a bit of a visual
| discordance. I don't find it unreadable, personally, but it
| does call attention to itself.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You'd do a lot better with one strong example rather than seven
| weak examples.
|
| For instance, if you are interested in Bayes Theorem like a lot
| of rationalists say they are, you could talk about the medical
| test which is 99.99% accurate but for which 90% of the positives
| are false positives.
| will4274 wrote:
| > You'd do a lot better with one strong example rather than
| seven weak examples
|
| Tend to disagree. It's easy to dismiss one example as "well,
| medicine is special because XYZ." Multiple examples are the
| core aspect of showing a general pattern.
|
| He could probably have stopped at 3, 4, or 5 though, not 7.
| Corence wrote:
| Fortunately I have a rock that says "the next example will make
| the same point as the example I just read" so I saved a bunch
| of time.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Drug testing is a good example for most people to understand
| why Bayesian thinking is relevant.
|
| https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/4250_Bayes_Theorem.html
|
| Imagine that a driver gets hit by accident. He's tested as part
| of company policy, and tests positive. He gets fired, even
| though the test only really tells us there's a 33.2% chance he
| was actually using the drug.
|
| Real world drug tests are a lot worse than 1% false positive
| and false negative rate.
|
| Every time someone gets fired for a positive test, or loses
| custody of their kid, or so on, it reinforces whatever
| statistics are being collected as if the test were a ground
| truth. They're hardly ever questioned, and there's usually no
| recourse without an expensive legal fight.
|
| The false positive rate for drug dogs is higher than 40%, for
| contrast. When a dog "alerts" its worse than a flip of a coin.
| All that matters is if an officer feels like fucking up your
| day.
|
| Testing used in situations that are legally significant in
| people's lives should be required to reach a statistically
| valid threshold of accuracy, like 99.999% of the times this
| process is performed, it matches reality. A high sensitivity
| and high specificity aren't enough, but they're framed as
| highly accurate and reliable by often well intentioned people
| who simply aren't thinking in a Bayesian way.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >All that matters is if an officer feels like fucking up your
| day.
|
| This is what most people don't seem to get. Devices like the
| ADE 651 or the GT200 were bought by the thousands by law
| enforcement agencies worldwide, not because they were stupid,
| but instead, so they could have another "data point" against
| you that they can use at their discretion.
|
| "Sorry, this dot blinked three times so I'm gonna have to
| detain you: It's standard procedure, I'm only doing my job."
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I am completely in love with how this article introduces itself.
| gegtik wrote:
| What I'm getting here is we should listen to the 0.1% when
| they're right.
|
| I'll leave it up to the reader to determine when that is
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think a lot of folks are missing the point (and the author
| could have been more clear).
|
| The point is not that bad heuristics are bad, but to think about
| when heuristics should be used and what value they add.
|
| In the examples, heuristics shouldn't be used to reduce
| probabilistic occurrence to binary likelihood before deciding to
| act. Decisions should be informed based on the actual data when
| available. Application of a heuristic results in a loss of
| information, which reduces accuracy and applicable scope.
| Sometimes this can be entirely defeat the purpose.
|
| Perhaps the recommendation is that if you are tempted to use a
| heuristic, stop and ask if it is necessary, and what you stand to
| gain from using it instead of other data or new analysis.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Repackaged straw men, in the form of several narratives that
| describe the exact same thing.
| pdonis wrote:
| I stopped reading the examples after the second one and
| scrolled straight to the end, to confirm my suspicion that
| there was actually no useful information in the article at all.
| leto_ii wrote:
| I haven't gone through the whole thing, but the point seems
| belabored and superficial tbh.
|
| I imagine the whole piece is essentially a comment on having a
| discriminator with great true negative rate and terrible true
| positive rate in a context where there is a large class imbalance
| (very rarely do positives occur). In real life this is quite easy
| to account for (just fill in your confusion matrix and see how
| you stand). I also strongly suspect that it doesn't really happen
| that much. People do have a conscience, professional pride etc.
| At the very least they will get bored and actually do smth
| different from time to time.
|
| > The Security Guard [...] The only problem is: he now provides
| literally no value. He's excluded by fiat the possibility of ever
| being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a
| rock with the words "THERE ARE NO ROBBERS" on it.
|
| At the very least such a security guard would act as a human
| scarecrow. More realistically, the guard would actually look for
| robbers from time to time, if for no other reason then because if
| he misses them he might be out of a job.
|
| > The doctor [...] "It's nothing, take two aspirin and call me in
| a week if it doesn't improve"
|
| In my experience this sums up the Dutch (country where I
| currently reside) medical system quite well :)) Somehow they
| manage to have good health results.
|
| EDIT: moved concluding paragraph up.
| born-jre wrote:
| No We are not going to die, hit by some asteroid. believe me.
| tempestn wrote:
| I agree with this, with the caveat that you don't want to fall
| into the opposite trap of believing the people who just use the
| contrarian heuristic.
| somethingAlex wrote:
| I'm surprised how many people are just nitpicking the examples
| like they are supposed to be rigorous analogies.
|
| The point that I walked away with is that oftentimes experts use
| these same heuristics even when people assume they are not.
| People think that experts don't have to use them because they
| have better tools and skills at their disposal. However, for
| reasons involving human factors, they oftentimes do use them.
| Finally, these opinions then get thrown into the body of evidence
| as if they are ground truth values.
| moralestapia wrote:
| One could add:
|
| _The Barking Dog_
|
| Barks at everything all the time, people learn to ignore it.
| Then, when there's real danger, no one cares, providing literally
| no value and becoming only an annoyance.
|
| It's kind of like a dual for the security guard one.
| kuratkull wrote:
| I think the best known illustration for this concept is
| actually called "The boy who cried wolf"
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes, but one important difference is that on OP's examples
| there is some sort of system that you put in place for a
| specific purpose, and it fails to do so in practice.
|
| It would be akin to that lying boy being the officially
| appointed wolf-spotter for his village.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| That's only true if the burglar knows that the owners ignore
| the dog's barking.
| verisimi wrote:
| This is an interesting article. In fact I really do think _all_
| any of us do is heuristics - where "A heuristic is a mental
| shortcut that allows an individual to make a decision, pass
| judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with minimal mental
| effort."
|
| I think this is how all of us are when we are doing something.
|
| I also think this is existence is a free will experience.
|
| That might seem incompatible, but I think our free will is
| engaged in selecting what heuristics we can choose.
| Alternatively, you can say we are programmable creatures, but we
| get to choose what programming we run.
|
| I would also say, that the heuristics/programming we mostly run
| is that which has been provided to us by default - a consequence
| of our education and situation.
|
| Not many of us take the time to review our programming - or to
| engage with the more 'meta' elements of our experience. I
| daresay, that the principles we run are not really coherent. Eg,
| we are reasonable, we do the right thing, we also take shortcuts
| to get what we want, or save time, etc. These are examples of
| principles that cannot all be true!
|
| If you were to ask me, the best thing we can do in this life is
| to consider our values. Are these truth and reason, personal
| gain, saving time, etc. What means most to us? And the review the
| heuristics/programming we run according to those values. At least
| we have a foundation for our programs that we selected ourselves,
| rather than running the programs that were provided to us by
| default!
| efitz wrote:
| A big straw man.
|
| In real life some people are more or less diligent about their
| jobs, and more or less contrarian, and have different expertise,
| strengths and weaknesses.
|
| Each of the vignettes portrays the counter position as stupid
| (literally using a rock as a metaphor).
|
| The reality is much different. In each of the cases there's an
| argument to be made that the proposition was flawed- the security
| guard never finds anything but instead of just not looking
| anymore, maybe they propose installation of cameras. The
| volcanologists aren't very helpful if they don't have predictive
| value - if they are always waffling then they are no more useful
| than the rock cult. And if they are over-activated, then they run
| the risk of "boy who cried wolf" or of being dismissed because
| too frequent false positives cost the rest of the society too
| much.
|
| Overall I think the essay is shallow and not a useful treatment
| of the subject.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I think you're correct in thinking the situation is
| complicated, and wrong in thinking the author disagrees! Each
| situation is subtly different, and some seem more wrong than
| others. Regardless, a security guard recommending cameras is
| different from a rock precisely because they suggested that!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What I really don't get is how this article is getting so many
| upvotes but the comments are unanimous about how vacuous it
| is... Unless Aella asked her "fans" to vote it up or something.
| (I for one manufacture my flying monkeys with a statistical
| model but it's been a really long time..)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| This is like the turkey on the day before Thanksgiving. "They fed
| me today. They fed me yesterday. They fed me the day before that.
| _Of course_ they 're going to feed me tomorrow!" Except they
| aren't.
|
| So, yeah. Our heuristics fail on black swan events. There needs
| to be a balance between "trust your heuristics" and "watch out
| for black swans".
| prakhar897 wrote:
| 1. I think the author forgot the term "Anomaly Detection" and is
| trying to reinvent it. Also, Anomaly or "Sensing something is
| wrong" is one of the most basic human instinct.
|
| 2. >By this time they were 100% cultists, so they all consulted
| the rock and said "No, the volcano is not erupting". The sulfur
| started to smell different, and the Queen asked "Are you sure?"
|
| Even the queen deciphered that something is wrong without any
| volcano knowledge. The author itself is providing an example of
| human instinct without acknowledging it,
|
| 3. The author assumes all guards as the same when in fact they
| all are different individuals. Sure most of them might be lousy
| at their jobs but there will be some who understand how rare the
| "robbery event" is and so will still look when there's sound.
|
| 4. The examples suffer from cold start problem. What if robbery
| happens the first month of a new guard. Will he still be asleep?
| If not, then Utility (hiring a guard in all cases) > Utility (not
| hiring a guard).
|
| 5. As another commentor mentioned that the value of having a
| security guard visible so that 99% of the robbers who might
| conceivably want to rob decides to go someplace else instead.
|
| 6. Contrarionism is seen as a virtue by certain people hence "I
| don't like this generation's music" and "Popular thing bad"
| phenomenon. Also, they make sure to be as loud as possible
| whenever their contradiction is right. This helps humanity in
| mentally modelling rare events.
|
| All in all, the author is underestimating the capabilities of
| humans and humanity.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| 99.9% right isn't great: that means 1 in 1000 is bad. If this
| were a medical condition, that'd be a pretty high rate.
|
| I work with large-scale testing, and we use a measure called
| "DPPM", or Defective Part Per Million (manufactured). For my
| team, a DPPM in 10s is noise/acceptable loss, ~100 we keep an eye
| on, and 100s-1000 is cause for investigation. Going back to
| percentage, that translates to 0.001% fail-rate is noise, 0.01%
| we keep an eye on, and 0.01-0.1% is cause for investigation (and
| 1% is "Stop The Line").
|
| My point is that the "percentage" scale of failure/risk is one
| tuned to human perception: "1 in 100 is nothing!", but at the
| scale of events that we deal with in many areas of our modern
| life, it's actually huge.
|
| Or: don't use humans for dealing with large numbers.
| Alternatively, exercise them with the occasional positive result
| to keep them on their toes.
| XorNot wrote:
| I've generally stopped using percentages to communicate these
| days because it's apparent people don't understand them.
| Someone will say 80% like it's a sure thing - until you point
| out the failure rate is 1 in 5.
| spongechameleon wrote:
| I find it so comforting to believe in Heuristics That Almost
| Always Work even when I know I ought to employ more scrutiny.
| It's too easy to jump on board.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This is where Bayesian inference really signs.
|
| For the security guard, hearing a single noise is likely to be
| nothing. However, what if you heard two noises, and the sound of
| tires outside?
|
| Same thing with the doctor. Most good doctor's I know have a
| sixth sense, about when something is off and needs further tests
| beyond just take an aspirin. So maybe the person had a stomach
| ache, and they had lost some weight, and they were looking a
| little yellow. All of a sudden the probabilities start looking a
| lot different.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You would think Bayesian inference is good at integrating
| multiple information sources but practically you have to model
| the dependencies between different information sources and even
| doing a good job of that doesn't save you away from logical
| fallacies such as "Explaining away". In real life people use
| Naive Bayes a lot because properly modelling a Bayesian network
| is hard and trying to learn the network gets you in all sorts
| of problems -- allow arbitrary dependencies between N inputs
| and you are talking e coefficients in your model and you'll
| never solve it.
|
| This is one of the reasons why people got frustrated with
| Expert Systems as real-life reasoning requires reasoning with
| uncertainty and we don't have a satisfactory general way to do
| it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The whole point of Bayesian networks is to have something
| that's asymptotically simpler than "arbitrary dependencies
| between N inputs" while still being able to model useful
| scenarios.
| political12345 wrote:
| Lol, this article can be replaced exacty with a rock with same
| title.
|
| This is why we have 2727272 self help books that I can't read
| past chapter 3 as they regurgitate the same idea in every
| sentence
| guyzero wrote:
| This essay, but not ironically.
|
| If you think you have something that no one else in the world has
| noticed, you're probably wrong. You're going to need a LOT of
| evidence to prove yourself right. Lots of people & companies
| spend years, decades even, proving themselves right. You're not
| going to do it overnight and you're not going to do it with a
| wikipedia article.
| stevage wrote:
| I think my main takeaway is how profitable it would be to be one
| of these naysayers. Good career move.
| dools wrote:
| I think history has shown it is far more profitable to amplify
| fringe theories and capitalise on everyone's fears that we are
| being deliberately mislead by corrupt authorities claiming
| false expertise.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The Futurist
|
| > He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech
| companies. This will change everything! say the press releases.
| "No it won't", he comments. This is the greatest invention ever
| to exist! say the press releases. "It's a scam," he says.
|
| He's got the name backwards on this one. What he's describing is
| more of an anti-futurist. IMHO, futurists and the ones that make
| implausibly grand predictions about the future that almost always
| end up not being true.
| SolarNet wrote:
| I think you are listening to the wrong futurists then.
| quocanh wrote:
| I think the irony here is more pleasing.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| Legitimate futurists are objecting to some pop-culture nonsense
| with NFT's, cryptocurrency, etc., often describing such things
| as scams. I suspect that the author may've had that in mind
| there.
|
| It may be sorta like the problem with science: there's real
| science and pop-culture science-flavored junk, and pop-culture
| audiences may perceive real scientists as dismissive because
| they're always so critical of the latest pop-culture fads.
|
| So while futurists may love new-tech and scientists may love
| science, pop-culture may see things differently because they
| see futurists/scientists dismissing (what they perceive to be)
| new-tech/science.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| Your idea that there's a format to the names is a great
| heuristic that works most of the time :-)
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Bruce Sterling did an OK job. _Heavy Weather_ reads like
| prophecy, these days.
| koboll wrote:
| This seems like the weakest example. I immediately thought of
| that Paul Krugman quote from the 1990s where he pooh-poohed the
| internet, something that's stuck with him forever and made him
| a laughingstock where futurism is concerned.
| [deleted]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This story reminded me of a story written by a Czech biologist
| who studied animals in Papua-New Guinea and went to a hunt with a
| group of local tribesmen.
|
| The dusk was approaching, they were still in the forest and he
| proposed that they could sleep under a tree. The hunters were
| adamant in their refusal: _no, this is dangerous, a tree might
| fall on you in your sleep and kill you_. He relented, but
| silently considered them irrational, given that his assessment of
| a chance of a tree falling on you overnight was less then 1:5000.
|
| Only later did he realize that for a lifelong hunter, 1:5000 are
| pretty bad odds that translate to a very significant probability
| of getting killed over a 30-40 year long hunting career.
| reactspa wrote:
| Also: in the version of the story I remember reading somewhere,
| all night they kept hearing trees fall. And that had a
| significant effect in affecting their impression of the
| probability.
| EGreg wrote:
| I am just wondering what skydivers must think every time they
| do it ... given so many trials, the odds of nothing happening
| are going down exponentially right?
| beaned wrote:
| Reminds me of the fact that on overage, one out of every
| hundred places you know will be experiencing a once-in-a-
| hundred-years event.
|
| When you hear once-in-a-hundred-year event, it makes it sound
| quite rare. One might look around and say (for example, in
| relation to climate) "why are so many of these happening?"
|
| But it is unsurprising statistically. If you know just a
| thousand distinct geographic places, about 10 of them would
| experience such an event each year.
| [deleted]
| 323 wrote:
| Taleb has a similar example: the difference between playing
| Russian roulette once for a chance of winning $10 million,
| versus playing it repeatedly.
| memish wrote:
| robaato wrote:
| Jared Diamond talks about dead trees:
| https://www.openculture.com/2015/08/jared-diamond-underscore...
| kadoban wrote:
| Is 1:5000 an actually good assessment? I'd suspect it's very
| much not, especially if you avoid obviously dead trees and
| maybe move if a storm comes.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| You could calculate it by taking the average lifetime of a
| tree and dividing by the length of time slept and the number
| of trees in squashing distance.
| gpm wrote:
| 1:5000 would suggest an average lifetime of 13.7 years for a
| grown tree (i.e. not counting the years where it's too young
| to sleep under), and that's before the ability to avoid trees
| that look more likely to fallover.
|
| I don't know anything about trees around there, maybe they're
| really short-lived? For forests around here, it's a gross
| overestimate.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Somehow I suspect trees in Papa New Guinea are different
| than the trees where you are
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Great anecdote.
|
| The tricks in this article might work in the short term.
| However, over the length of a career, it's difficult to outrun
| a negative reputation forever. Especially in the age of the
| internet, people will eventually catch on to what you're doing.
| gringoDan wrote:
| Great example of a non-ergodic event. The outcome (odds of
| dying) when considering of one individual longitudinally is
| entirely different from the outcome when considering a
| population of individuals at a single point in time.
|
| https://taylorpearson.me/ergodicity/
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Isn't this from Jared Diamond? I read this in The World until
| Yesterday I thought, from his time in New Guinea.
| kbuchanan wrote:
| It's a great example. This is the very reason I have scaled
| back the amount of time I rock climb as I've gotten older --
| not because any individual outing is dangerous, but there's an
| element of Russian roulette wherein the mere act of doing it
| more often dramatically changes the risk.
| segmondy wrote:
| I would imagine that if you scale back enough tho, you won't
| be as sharp. Sure the odds increase the more you do it, but
| not just because you do it, but often because of other
| variables, such as the weather, not listening to your body,
| over confidence, etc.
| kqr wrote:
| Also known as the Kelly criterion. If one possible outcome of
| an action is associated with a great enough loss, it doesn't
| make sense to perform the action no matter how unlikely the
| loss.
| Fernicia wrote:
| Isn't that called Pascal's Wager?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Pascal's Wager is a fallacy resulting from plugging
| infinity into your risk analysis and interpreting [?]/0
| in a way that suits you.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Which of course directly leads to Pascal's Mugging: I can
| simply say "I'm a god, give me $10000 or you will burn in
| hell for all eternity". Now if you follow Pascal's Wager
| or GP's logic you have to give me the money: I'm probably
| lying, but the potential downside is too great to risk
| upsetting me.
| kqr wrote:
| There's actually a rational explanation for that: humans
| don't care very much about burning in hell for all
| eternity, when it comes down to it.
|
| There's actually a similar though experiment that might
| seem even more bizarre: I could tell you "give me $100 or
| I will kill you tomorrow" and you probably wouldn't give
| me the $100. That's because when it comes down to it,
| humans don't see the loss of their life as that big a
| deal as one might think. It's a big deal, of course, but
| in combination with the low likelihood, still not big
| enough to forgo the $100.
| anter wrote:
| If anyone wants to play around with an interactive
| explanation of the The Kelly criterion:
| https://explore.paulbutler.org/bet/
| PaulHoule wrote:
| No, Kelly is about what fraction of your bankroll you
| should bet if you want to maximize your rate of return for
| a bet with variable odds.
|
| It's essential if you want to:
|
| * make money by counting cards at Blackjack (the odds are a
| function of how many 10 cards are left in the deck)
|
| * make money at the racetrack with a system like this
| https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Beat-Racetrack-William-
| Ziemba/dp/0...
|
| * turn a predictive model for financial prices into a
| profitable trading system
|
| In the case where the bet loses money you can interpret
| Kelly as either "the only way to win is not to play" or
| "bet it all on Red exactly once and walk away " depending
| on how you take the limit.
| kqr wrote:
| That is a much narrower view of the Kelly criterion than
| the general concept.
|
| The general idea is about choosing an action that
| maximises the expected logarithm of the result.
|
| In practise this means, among other things, not choosing
| an action that gets you close to "ruin", however you
| choose to measure the result. Another way to phrase it is
| that the Kelly criterion leads to actions that avoid
| large losses.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Actually
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
|
| "The Kelly bet size is found by maximizing the expected
| value of the logarithm of wealth, which is equivalent to
| maximizing the expected geometric growth rate"
|
| In real life people often choose to make bets smaller
| than the Kelley bet. Part of that is that even if you
| have a good model there are still "unknown unknowns" that
| will make your model wrong some of the time. Also most
| people aren't comfortable with the sharp ups and downs
| and probability of ruin you have with Kelley.
| kqr wrote:
| I've long found that Wikipedia article woefully lacking
| in generality.
|
| 1) The Kelly criterion is a general decision rule not
| limited to bet sizing. Bet sizing is just a special case
| where you're choosing between actions that correspond to
| different bet sizes. The Kelly criterion works very well
| also for other actions, like whether to pursue project A
| or B, whether to get insurance or not, and indeed whether
| to sleep under a tree or on a rock.
|
| 2) The Kelly criterion is not limited to what people
| would ordinarily think of as "wealth". It applies just as
| well to anything you can measure with some sort of
| utility where compounding makes sense.
|
| The best overview I've found so far is The Kelly Capital
| Growth Investment Criterion[1], which unfortunately is a
| thick collection of peer-reviewed science, so it's very
| detailed and heavy on the maths, too.
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/KELLY-CAPITAL-GROWTH-
| INVESTMENT-CRITE...
| vincentmarle wrote:
| This is called ergodic theory, the more you repeat an action
| that could result in catastrophe, the likelihood of that
| catastrophe occuring will be close to 100% if the number of
| events is high enough.
| derbOac wrote:
| "There are bold X, and old X, but no old, bold X."
|
| Replace X with any practitioners subject to sufficient risk
| as a result of their practice.
|
| I first heard it in the context of mushroom foraging.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Mountaineers is where I heard it.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > It's a great example. This is the very reason I have scaled
| back the amount of time I rock climb as I've gotten older --
| not because any individual outing is dangerous, but there's
| an element of Russian roulette wherein the mere act of doing
| it more often dramatically changes the risk.
|
| Indoor climbing, and especially bouldering, can be a lot of
| fun at the right gym, and with dramatically reduced risk of
| death (though injury is still a very real possibility, I say,
| recalling all the time I spent nursing my sprained ankle).
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes
| the risk.
|
| Kind of. However, you already know that the first N outings
| didn't have a disaster. So those should be discarded from
| your analysis.
|
| Doing it N times _more_ has a lot of risk, doing it the N+1th
| time has barely any.
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| The parent comment talks about scaling back the amount of
| rock climbing they do in order to reduce risk.. And now you
| are saying that they should go one more time, because a
| single climb is low risk?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Yes. I am saying their analysis of risk is incorrect, and
| therefore if that's the only reason they aren't climbing
| then they should climb more often.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Under this assumption, by the principal of mathematical
| induction, you can easily do it K more times for any K
| without taking on barely any risk at each step of the way.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| In a skill-based game, N+1 has less incremental risk than
| adding 1 more trial with N-1 games did.
| 323 wrote:
| This is called the Turkey fallacy: the turkey was feed by
| humans for 1000 days, and after each feed event he updated
| his belief that humans care for him until it's now almost a
| statistical certainty.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Is this the reverse of the Gambler's Fallacy? Instead of
| "The numbers haven't hit in a while, therefore they're
| going to hit soon." it's "The numbers haven't hit yet,
| therefore they're never gonna hit."
| jaggederest wrote:
| Also known as complacency. Working in a woodshop, one of
| the things you are most vulnerable to is failing to
| respect the danger you're in. This is why many
| experienced woodworkers have been injured by e.g. a table
| saw - you stop being as careful after such long exposure.
| 323 wrote:
| A related thing is normalization of deviance. You start
| removing safety because you see nothing bad happened
| before, until you are at a point where almost no safety
| rules are respected anymore. You can see this a lot in
| construction videos.
| ska wrote:
| That only applies if you are updating priors. In this
| case the odds are fixed, the GP is correct.
| 323 wrote:
| The odds of a rocking accident are known and fixed?
| mrow84 wrote:
| This assumes a lot about the underlying process,
| particularly independence. Whilst assuming independence
| might hold reasonably well for low numbers of samples, the
| assumption might be increasingly (and dangerously)
| misleading. The intuition expressed by GP captures that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you'll die if a roll of three dice comes up sixes,
| you're not really in a lot of danger. If you do it every
| day, you have about 15 months to live.
| [deleted]
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| If you've already done it for 12 months without it
| happening though, the next 3 months are no more dangerous
| for you than for someone starting from scratch.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >you have about 15 months to live
|
| Or a few minutes ... or 20 years.
|
| That's the thing w/ statistically independent trials.
| ska wrote:
| That's like the difference between
|
| You could win 100mm in the lottery (true statement!)
|
| Lottery tickets are a good investment (almost always,
| false statement).
|
| Planning on "well it could happen, technically" isn't a
| good approach.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The "slippery slope" principle applies here though: N+1
| enables N+2, which enables N+3 and so on.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| but the risk is independent. so once you do the N+1 time
| safely, you are back to N and your next time is _also_
| just an N+1.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| True but it would be incorrect to assume that you can
| safely keep basejumping every day in a year, just because
| you haven't died in the last 50 days. Eventually the
| stats say you will be 87% likely to have an accident when
| you consider your choice at the beginning of the year. It
| might be day 20 or day 300, but you won't know what case
| you end up in. The chance of your next jump being your
| last is always the same, but that doesn't decrease the
| risk of repeated trials.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Not exactly. If you've done it 50 days without an
| accident, your current chances of the accident happening
| in the remainder of the year are NOW _less_ than 87%.
|
| If you've made it Jan 1 to July 1 months without an
| accident, the chances of you making it to Dec 31 _are_
| now better than they were on Jan 1 -- because now they
| are just the chances of you making it six months, not a
| year.
|
| The chances of flipping 6 heads in a row are 1/64. But if
| I've already flipped _3_ in a row... the chances of
| flipping three _more_ heads in a row is 1 /8, the same as
| always for flipping 3 heads in a row. The ones that
| already happened don't effect your future chances.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Continuing to do something regularly doesn't ever mean
| you're just going to do it once more.
| nefitty wrote:
| Psychologically, behaving in a certain way makes it more
| likely that you'll behave in the same way in the future.
| That's an integral idea underpinning justice systems.
| Stronico wrote:
| Risk is independent of prior events, habits are not - I
| think that was what the anthropologist story is about
| mkolodny wrote:
| Slippery slope is a fallacy, not a principle. Just
| because you took N steps, that doesn't necessarily mean
| you will take N+1 steps.
|
| It's a convincing fallacy because sometimes you do take
| N+1 steps. But just like in the article, heuristics
| aren't always right.
| vojvod wrote:
| Slippery slope arguments aren't inherently fallacious. If
| you can justify one more climb on the grounds that
| probability of injury or death is very low then you will
| be able to justify every subsequent climb on the same
| basis.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I'm confused. These heuristics don't almost always work. The
| security guard has a 0% chance of investigating. How is 0% almost
| always?
|
| If you make a confusion matrix its precision and recall is 0. If
| it almost always worked then its precision and recall would be
| close to 1.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| You're only counting the positives. When positives are rare,
| just guessing the result will be negative is usually a really
| good starting place.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >is usually a really good starting place
|
| No, you are getting misleading results because you have an
| imbalanced dataset.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This is how you can throw out most of the COVID tests in the
| trash and say they all were negative and get away with it...
| for a while!
| jstx1 wrote:
| 99.9% chance of being right (i.e. no robbers) => the heuristic
| almost always works
|
| (This is accuracy. You can get recall of 1 if he always
| investigates; for precision to be 1 he needs a way to discern
| wind from robbers based on the noise)
| operator-name wrote:
| There's some very interesting discussion here and in the
| comments. Many have pointed out the similarity of ideas to
| Taleb's Black Swan, and extremisation, which was also brought up
| in Superforcasting by Gardner and Tetlock.
|
| Instead of such a discussion, I'd like highlight a book that
| provides the "oposite" perspective: Gerd Gigerenzer's Rationality
| for Mortals. Gigerenzer presents the an anti hyper-rationalist
| perspective for heuristics, arguing that they're not only human,
| but necessary and inevitable for time and compute bounded beings.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The reasoning in this post is completely backwards: just
| _because_ a job could be completely replaced with a rock without
| affecting the majority of cases doesn 't mean that the _actual
| practitioners_ of that job are either completely useless or are
| themselves on autopilot.
|
| Siskind assumes the latter and reasons towards the former, which
| isn't aligned at all with _what actually happens_ in the world:
| we do predict hurricanes and exploding volcanoes, and there 's no
| particular evidence that the average doctor is ignoring their
| patients. We're all subject to biases and fatigue, but neither of
| those supports the claim that we're all phoning it in all the
| time.
|
| Edit: I will also note that "when nothing happens at all, a
| person can be replaced with a note on a rock" is not an
| interesting statement to make. Dressing it up with eloquent prose
| (and he is indeed eloquent!) does not change this, and does not a
| poignant observation make.
| three14 wrote:
| His whole point is that the occasional person who IS "phoning
| it in all the time" will appear to be very good at their job,
| possibly better than the people who are really trying their
| best to get it right.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Where are you seeing the author suggest most people in the
| described jobs could actually be replaced by rocks?
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Where are you seeing the author suggest most people in the
| described jobs could actually be replaced by rocks?
|
| I really think it's harder to get more literal than this:
|
| > He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words
| "THERE ARE NO ROBBERS" on it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think the point is that the person who inappropriately
| uses a heuristic instead of doing their job, is in fact,
| not doing their job.
| andrewla wrote:
| A guard who adopts the heuristic "there are no robbers" can
| be replaced with a rock, but has adopted a heuristic that
| almost always works.
|
| Guards that do not adopt that heuristic cannot be replaced
| by that rock.
| mgas wrote:
| I feel like this article does a much better job of reviewing
| Don't Look Up than the article that passed through here last
| week. As an allegorical reading, it calls out the major plot
| points of the film and hits on the ulterior motivations of both
| those using heuristics to naysay experts, and the experts who
| inevitably fall out of grace because of them.
| im3w1l wrote:
| One way to solve this is that instead of asking for a yes - no
| answer, you ask for a ranking, and you disallow equally likely.
| Is bigfoot more or less likely than telepathy? Is telepathy more
| ore less likely than the vaccines being dangerous? Are the
| vaccines being dangeroues more or less likely than some guy
| achieving cold fusion in his garage?
|
| A ranking forcibly brings the metric away from accuracy (which
| the heuristic can score well on) to something based around
| precision-recall (which it cannot).
| bsuvc wrote:
| Sure, relying too much on heuristics can be a bad idea in tail
| risk situations.
|
| But other times, they make perfect sense and save a lot of time
| and effort.
|
| This post reads like a series of straw men created to show that
| heuristics are dangerous. I'm not sure who is going to argue that
| heuristics are appropriate in those situations.
| pards wrote:
| The doctor rings true. I had 3 separate doctors on 3 separate
| occasions diagnose my 21 month old son with an ear infection,
| instead of the plum-sized malignant brain tumour that it was.
|
| From their point of view, pediatric brain tumours are very rare
| and ear infections are common.
|
| Their 99% heuristic almost killed him.
|
| That was 2010. He survived and is now a vibrant 13 year old, but
| only because of one curious intern/fellow at the children's
| hospital ER that decided to order a CT to rule out the remote
| possibility. Her diligence got him admitted and into surgery
| within a day.
| osrec wrote:
| While the security guard doesn't actively catch criminals, he
| still may act as a deterrent. In that sense, he's still somewhat
| useful.
|
| Interesting article nonetheless!
| ghostly_s wrote:
| What is the impetus for this writing style that repeats different
| versions of the same analogy 10 times when one would have
| sufficed? Surely Substack doesn't have a word count minimum.
| yccs27 wrote:
| I actually found the ramp-up from security guard to sceptic
| pretty clever. Demonstrate the principle on an easy,
| constructed case; verify on a real-world example; then present
| the applications you care about and have somewhat more
| controversial content. Although I agree that the number of
| repetitions is higher than optimal here.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| A long article is a sign of effort expended, which rationalists
| value as a sign that a lot of thought has gone into the ideas
| the article puts forward. (They have a rock in their heads
| saying "DON'T BOTHER YOURSELF WITH BRIEF EXPOSITIONS.")
| drzoltar wrote:
| Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like
| a charm.
|
| Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
|
| Homer: Thank you, dear.
|
| Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers
| away.
|
| Homer: Oh, how does it work?
|
| Lisa: It doesn't work.
|
| Homer: Uh-huh.
|
| Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
|
| Homer: Uh-huh.
|
| Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
|
| Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/xSVqLHghLpw
| deltaonefour wrote:
| Sounds like he's describing software architects. I feel software
| architects follow a slightly more complicated heuristic. They
| can't do the same thing every time when they draw the line
| connecting all the boxes. It has to be a little different every
| time with different boxes and a different set of lines.
| joosters wrote:
| A pedantic criticism of the title: ' _Heuristics that almost
| always work_ ' is a truism, or a tautology. If a heuristic worked
| 100% of the time, it would no longer be a heuristic, it would be
| a rule!
| pessimizer wrote:
| But if a heuristic worked 75% of the time, it wouldn't almost
| always work.
| rakejake wrote:
| Funnily enough, you could replace this article with a rock that
| said, "When people are confronted with a very skewed probability
| distribution, after a while they become complacent and default to
| the most probable outcome".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... You mean you can replace some text with some other text?
| banku_brougham wrote:
| This is the best summary of the article. How is this #1 on HN
| right now.
| dools wrote:
| This 2189 word essay can be replaced with a rock that says "ALARM
| FATIGUE" on it and a QR code pointing to this Wikipedia article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
| asplake wrote:
| > Whenever someone pooh-poohs rationality as unnecessary, or
| makes fun of rationalists
|
| Fun and clever article, but for it all to land on that was
| jarring and disappointing. Preaching to the choir I guess.
| _Microft wrote:
| He's not complaining about those criticizing rationalists but
| warns fellow rationalists to not fall into this heuristics trap
| themselves.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-08 23:00 UTC)