> And the word "heuristics" is as meaningless to real knowldge as "pincarpion", by the way.
And there you have it. pfortuny has declared"heuristics" in quotes and meaningless. Let's all black out that word with a felt tip marker in our dictionary. If you didn't have enough reasons to already not find pfortuny as credible, well now you have another.
My point is that the heuristics in the list are so general as to be useless. They fit somewhere in a category between tautology, platitude, and plain old stream-of-consciousness nonsense.
As I’ve grown older I have developed a heuristic, which is that people who talk/write like this, i.e. being completely convinced that one way of doing things is always wrong and one way of doing things is always right, and that people doing things the other way are just ignorant/stupid/wrong, usually have no idea what they are talking about.
i'm kinda hesitant to say most of them. Like I said, they sound silly and reductive at first. And none of them is exactly what people here will find interesting. One thing he said that a game becomes engaging when 'things that were once hard, is now easy'. I like the formulation cause it works on just right abstraction level. It lends to many interpretation and it works as long as the 'rule' is satisfied. And I've obsessed over it and just how true it is. Another thing he said that fantasy is about 'sky upon sky'. Which is one of the more abstract things he said. I swear I was fuming when he said it with such elation as if he's discovering electricity. The refusal to elaborate was also infuriating, as if I was supposed to understand what he meant. And I did, eventually. The abstraction works perfectly, at least for me...
I think he's suggesting that any given random set of preconceptions will itself be a 'sample' from the entire preconception-space, and therefor itself a preconception - just one that you didn't involve yourself in choosing.
I love this idea of words which have negative(or positive) connotations in someones belief systems triggering theme based sentence generation via markov chains. I feel like this is a bizarrely insightful take on how people actually think and respond to things.
You are splitting hairs. We don't need to stick to the precise dictionary meaning of various terms. Sometimes you gain more insight when you don't do that.
It's a pity you're getting down voted, because I believe your concern is genuine and confusion valid. But precise language is very important here, epistemologically speaking - just because we sometime make decisions based on heuristics doesn't mean those heuristics are good models of reality. The distinction between making arguments to collectively determine "what model is representative of reality" and using heuristics to decide what is a convenient way to spend one's time are very different things.
I read them as sloppy caricatures that provide little value to the conversation.
Let's take 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."
That is blatantly not true, the guard provide value since the wanna-be robbers don't know whether the guard will be of any value, and a rock could not provide any deterrent. Losslessly?
The doctor (if there is someone skeptical of doctors it is me, if I were less lazy I would have greatly enjoyed fighting to make some useless US dermatologists lose their license): "Her heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, but she provides literally no value. There is no point to her existence. She could be profitably replaced with a rock saying “IT’S NOTHING, TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND WAIT FOR IT TO GO AWAY”.
This is an unhelpful caricature, too, because if we add "and call back if it does not", it looks like a very reasonable approach.
Un-nuanced and quite sloppy presentation of heuristics.
Lots of vote thrash but no replies. I invite you to examine whether you are reacting to keywords or to concepts, and if the latter, to chime in with what you’ve found, I’m legitimately interested.
A few of these are reasonnable to see how someone is able to explain a concept or make sense of something very anstract. Most of them though would make me walk out the door in a heartbeat.
Mhhhh.
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