Heuristic Quotes & Sayings

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Anachronism becomes a problem only in questions of historical meaning, and even then anachronistic analogies can still have heuristic value. — John J. Collins

To take an unequivocal stand, it seems to me, is of greater heuristic value and far more likely to stimulate constructive criticism than to evade the issue. — Ernst Mayr

I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka. — Daniel Kahneman

The case method is heuristic - a term for self-guided learning that employs analysis to help draw conclusions about a situation. Analysis is derived from a Greek word meaning, "a dissolving." In English, analysis has two closely related definitions: to break something up into its constituent parts; and to study the relationships of the parts to the whole. To analyze a case, you therefore need ways of identifying and understanding important aspects of a situation and what they mean in relation to the overall situation. — William Ellet

Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the third letter. You would have an easier time generating words that started with the letter t. Words starting with t would be more 'available'. — Barry Schwartz

The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards and punishment, or transfer of fragility between individuals. Ralph Nader has a simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one descendant (child or grandchild) exposed to combat. For the Romans, engineers needed to spend some time under the bridge they built - something that should be required of financial engineers today. The English went further and had the families of the engineers spend time with them under the bridge after it was built. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Affect Heuristic The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. — Daniel Kahneman

The test conditions that are chosen will depend on the test strategy or detailed test approach. For example, they might be based on risk, models of the system, likely failures, compliance requirements, expert advice or heuristics. The word 'heuristic' comes from the same Greek root as eureka, which means 'I find'. A heuristic is a way of directing your attention, a common sense rule useful in solving a problem. — Dorothy Graham

Heuristic is an algorithm in a clown suit. It's less predictable, it's more fun, and it comes without a 30-day, money-back guarantee. — Steve McConnell

To reprise language from the previous chapter, the solution isn't algorithmic (following a set path) but heuristic (breaking from the path to discover a novel strategy). — Daniel H. Pink

The second illusion is historical myopia: the closer an era is to our vantage point in the present, the more details we can make out. Historical myopia can afflict both common sense and professional history. The cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown that people intuitively estimate relative frequency using a shortcut called the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is.10 People, for example, overestimate the likelihoods of the kinds of accidents that make headlines, such as plane crashes, shark attacks, and terrorist bombings, and they underestimate those that pile up unremarked, like electrocutions, falls, and drownings. — Steven Pinker

The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies. — Imre Lakatos

Carnivalization is not an external and immobile schema which is imposed upon ready-made content; it is, rather, an extraordinarily flexible form of artistic visualization, a peculiar sort of heuristic principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen things. By relativizing all that was externally stable, set and ready-made, carnivalization with its pathos of change and renewal permitted Dostoevsky to penetrate into the deepest layers of man and human relationships. — Mikhail Bakhtin

The answer was straightforward: instances of the class will be retrieved from memory, and if retrieval is easy and fluent, the category will be judged to be large. We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by the ease with which instances come to mind. — Daniel Kahneman

If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning. — Edward O. Wilson

The almost universal nature of within-group amity and between-group
enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group
members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust
out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful. — Michael Shermer

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones. — Daniel Kahneman

Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally "moving" from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther. — Daniel Kahneman

For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic
helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public's mind while
others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of
issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory - and this is
largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media — Daniel Kahneman

We should finally note a more radical challenge to the concept of Platonic utility that arises from nascent work in the reinforcement learning field under the rubric of intrinsic motivation. One idea is that the "true" evolutionarily appropriate metric for behavior is the extremely sparse one of propagating ones genes. What we think of as a Platonic utility over immediate rewards such as food or water, would merely be a surrogate that helps overcome the otherwise insurmountable credit assignment path associated with procreation. In these terms, even the Platonic utility is the same sort of heuristic expedient as the Pavlovian controller itself, with evolutionary optimality molding approximate economic rationality to its own ends. It as a sober thought that understanding values may be less important as a way of unearthing the foundations of choice that we might have expected. — Tali Sharot

The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. The following are some conditions in which people "go with the flow" and are affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they retrieved: — Daniel Kahneman

The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis. — Wilhelm Wundt

Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments - both carrots and sticks - can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. — Daniel H. Pink

It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached. — Imre Lakatos

A heuristic we follow is that whenever we feel the need to comment something, we write a method instead. — Martin Fowler

Social scientists emphasize that people use the "availability heuristic," which means that we assess risks by asking whether a bad (or good) event is cognitively "available." It — Cass R. Sunstein

By now they had mastered my own language, but they still made simple mistakes, like using 'hermeneutics,' when they meant 'heuristic'. — Woody Allen

Heuristic decision making is fast and frugal and is often based on the evaluation of one or two salient bits of information. We — Amitav Chakravarti

The reliance on the heuristic caused predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions. — Daniel Kahneman

Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic. — Imre Lakatos

If the rule of thumb for attention literacy is to pay attention to your intention, then the heuristic for crap detection is to make skepticism your default. — Howard Rheingold

On another occasion, Amos and I wondered about the rate of divorce among professors in our university. We noticed that the question triggered a search of memory for divorced professors we knew or knew about, and that we judged the size of categories by the ease with which instances came to mind. We called this reliance on the ease of memory search the availability heuristic. — Daniel Kahneman

Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work. — Mark Jason Dominus

the availability heuristic. We draw on what is readily available as truth and generalize this information as knowledge. — Deborah L. Plummer

If someone you know gets sick from taking a flu shot, you will be less likely to get one even if it is statistically safe. In fact, if you see a story on the news about someone dying from the flu shot, that one isolated case could me enough to keep you away from the vaccine forever. On the other hand, if you hear a news story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic. — David McRaney

The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy. In the real world, of course, we often face painful tradeoffs between benefits and costs. — Daniel Kahneman