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royf comments on Internal Availability - Less Wrong Discussion
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I was trying to give a specific reason that the availability heuristic is there: it's coupled with another mechanism that actually generates the availability; and then to say a few things about this other mechanism.
Does anyone have specific advice on how I could convey this better?
It seems obvious why the availability heuristic is there. The ease with which images, events and concepts come to mind is correlated with how frequently they have been observed, which in turn is correlated with how likely they are to happen again. So, the heuristic is a reasonably-good one which just happens to have some associated false positives.
Yes, and I was trying to make this description one level more concrete.
Things never happen the exact same way twice. The way that past observations are correlated with what may happen again is complicated - in a way, that's exactly what "concepts" capture.
So we don't just recall something that happened and predict that it will happen again. Rather, we compose a prediction based on an integration of bits and patches from past experiences. Recalling these bits and patches as relevant for the context of the prediction - and of each other - is a complicated task, and I propose that an "internal availability" mechanism is needed to perform it.
I'm still unsure of what you're actually saying. Perhaps you're talking about some sort of a "plausibility heuristic", where we look for instances of something in our model of the world, not just our experiences. That seems trivial, but that's not necessarily a bad thing (I would prefer to see more stuff here that seems really obvious to people, because those few times it's not obvious to everyone tend to be very valuable). If you're saying something else, I'm still not getting it.
Take for example your analysis of the poker hand I partially described. You give 3 possibilities for what the truth of it may be. Are there any other possibilities? Maybe the player is bluffing to gain the reputation of a bluffer? Maybe she mistook a 4 for an ace (it happened to me once...)? Maybe aliens hijacked her brain?
It would be impossible to enumerate or notice all the possibilities, but fortunately we don't have to. We make only the most likely and important ones available.