Decisions with an utility equivalent of less than 0.50$ should be made after at most 10 seconds, by coin flip if necessary.
The time is more valuable.
In a field in which you personally are not an expert, the closest you can come to the truth is to accept the opinion of the majority of the experts in the age in which you live.
(Courtesy of my father.)
If it feels like someone won't accept your basic, obviously-true point, the culprit is a communication error.
This is as opposed to what it will feel like in the moment: they are stupid, they are obstinate, they won't listen, etc. If you have no good reason to believe the other party has stopped acting like a reasonable social being, then back up and find the communication error before proceeding. Maybe you are accidentally attaching riders to your point. Maybe they are reading too much into your point. Who knows. But it's probably not that whoever you're talking to suddenly turned into a bad human being, which points to a communication error of some sort.
If the situation you are considering is novel, your intuition about it is probably wrong. Use more reliable, if less powerful, tools.
Make important decisions in a quiet, featureless room
Might this prime you to make a quiet, featureless decision?
To be more specific and a little less snarky: I tend to be too socially withdrawn and a bit of a loner. To make a decision about, say, whether or not to go to a party, in a quiet, featureless room, would be a mistake.
Don't trust heuristics, unless you can (1) re-derive them, (2) know their limits explicitly, or (3) are willing to accept the risks for the moment, but will reevaluate them later.
The limit of this heuristic is that it relies on self-knowledge, and so is vulnerable to self-deception. It breaks down when we start operating with heuristics for domains where we can no longer trust ourselves as much.
If you previously committed to a decision for good reasons, don't reverse your choice without good reason. (Related to "When in doubt, think what your past and future selves would say", but applies in broader circumstances.)
Given an important decision and unlimited time, think until your thoughts repeat themselves, and no more.
Never decide what to do until you've thought of at least half a dozen alternatives beyond the ones you immediately thought of. [Sometimes the obvious thing is the best, but do it because you actually made that decision.]
Distrust any impression given by fragmented quotations, be they text, audio, video.
(The mere existence of the phrase "out of context" reflects the danger of trusting these. Note, however, that this doesn't apply merely to quotes. To give an example I personally fell for: a false impression as to who said what in a 'documentary' about a psychic detective was given by rapidly cutting between the accounts of the officers working the case and the account given by the detective.)
At the overcoming bias meetup a couple days ago, Robin Hanson mentioned that the singularity institute should devote half its people to working on AI problems and the other half to improving the tools used by the first half. Any way we could turn this into a heuristic?
Some questions: Should the tool-improving group also split itself in half so that half of them can help with the tools used by the tool-improvers? Has there been any academic research on what the right ratio of workers to tool-improvers is? How do things change when the group consists of o...
Good quality heuristics would indeed be useful.
But I thought heuristics were about experience-based techniques, of the type 'when X occurs, there's a pretty good chance that Y happens as well'. The example heuristics do not really follow that pattern.
'Sign up for cryonics' does not seem like a heuristic at all - how does it follow from experience? Also, for me to trust them, heuristics have to be supported by facts -- either my own experiences or some trusted other party. I'd only use Dale Carnegie lessons after some own experimentation with them - no mat...
For purposes of making a decision, any statement which leads to the conclusion that the decision has no effect, is false.
“Apply deodorant before going to bed” lacks information. If I hadn't seen the previous discussion, I would assume the point was "Do apply deodorant", not "...rather than in the morning".
I'm pretty sure that 'if presented with a Monty Hall Problem, switch', is a bad heuristic: you'd need to know what Monty's strategy for deciding whether or not to open any doors before you could make a sensible decision.
A better heuristic might be 'If presented with a Monty Hall problem, ask Monty why he decided to open a door and show you a goat'.
"Avoid counterfactuals and thought experiments." Seems inconsistent with: "If presented with a Monty Hall problem, switch."
You're probably not going to encounter an actual Monty hall problem, but maybe something kind of similar. I think "If presented with a Monty Hall problem, Think" is a better heuristic.
Perhaps the most important heuristics are the ones that tell you when to stop using heuristics.
If some talk includes obvious rhetoric tricks, flip the bozo bit on the whole talk
The speaker probably prepared for maximum effect on human brains. Thus the arguments in the talk are likely one-sided and omit essential data.
Also, by ignoring the talk you are likely to counterbalance the unduly influence over most of the rest of the audience.
We use heuristics when we don't have the time to think more, which is almost all the time. So why don't we compile a big list of good quality heuristics that we can trust? (Insert eloquent analogy with mathematical theorems and proofs.) Here are some heuristics to kick things off:
Make important decisions in a quiet, featureless room. [1]
Apply deodorant before going to bed rather than any other time. [1]
Avoid counterfactuals and thought experiments in when talking to other people. [Because they don't happen in real life. Not in mine at least (anecdotal evidence). For example with the trolley, I would not push the fat man because I'd be frozen in horror. But what if you wouldn't be? But I would! And all too often the teller of a counterfactual abuses it by crafting it so that the other person has to give either an inconsistent or unsavory answer. (This proof is a stub. You can improve it by commenting.)]
If presented with a Monty Hall problem, switch. [1]
Sign up for cryonics. [There are so many. Which ones to link? Wait, didn't Eliezer promise us some cryonics articles here in LW?]
In chit-chat, ask questions and avoid assertions. [How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie]
When in doubt, think what your past and future selves would say. [1, also there was an LW article with the prince with multiple personality disorder chaining himself to his throne that I can't find. Also, I'm not sure if I should include this because it's almost Think More.]
I urge you to comment my heuristics and add your own. One heuristic per comment. Hopefully this takes off and turns into a series if wiki pages. Edit: We should concentrate on heuristics that save time, effort, and thought.