Vladimir_Nesov comments on Heuristic is not a bad word - Less Wrong

8 Post author: HughRistik 06 April 2009 06:55AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 April 2009 11:21:29AM 2 points [-]

The article looks as if you are arguing, but at the same time the arguments seem so obvious that you can only argue against an invisible strawman.

Comment author: HughRistik 07 April 2009 06:08:25PM 1 point [-]

I'm curious about why you think I'm setting up a straw man. The heuristics and biases literature in psychology seems to focus on the costs of heuristic, but not on its potential. I illustrated this point with the quote from Tversky and Kahneman: "in general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors." When I searched Overcoming Bias about heuristic, which I linked to in my post, it is mainly discussed the same way it is discussed in the psychological literature. Perhaps computer science, AI research, and mathematics take a more positive view of heuristic than psychology does.