srdiamond comments on The Substitution Principle - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 28 January 2012 04:20AM

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Comment author: JoachimSchipper 26 January 2012 02:31:53PM 6 points [-]

This involves three skills: first recognizing a problem as a difficult one, then figuring out what heuristic you might have used, and finally coming up with a better solution.

Figuring out the particular heuristic seems more interesting than useful - "don't trust immediate answers" is a good rule, but it seems easier to start again than to de-bias an immediate guess (i.e. look up average salaries instead of trying to figure out how much you need to discount your guess of doctors' average salaries.)

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 26 January 2012 02:59:43PM 2 points [-]

Good point. I think I mostly intended the second step to be a way for you to evaluate whether the heuristic you were using seems to be a reasonable one - there could be cases where you look at it and decide that it's probably good enough for your purposes.