Good Quality Heuristics

That corresponds to valuing a marginal increment of your time at $180/hr, which seems a bit high - the base concept makes sense, though.

The problem is that the very fact that experts are listened to and respected creates incentives to become certified as an expert or to claim to be an expert, and that these incentives are non-truth-tracking. If you lust for fame and glory, or you want to seem original, or if you have a political agenda, or if you're worried about what your publisher thinks will sell---all these sorts of things might help your bid to be certified as an expert or hinder it, but they're not directly about the map that reflects the territory, and everything that's not directly about the map that reflects the territory just adds noise to the process.

In a physical science with conclusions nailed down for decades, sure, don't even think about questioning the consensus. But on an issue people actually care about (sorry, physics nerds, but you know what I mean), if you have a concept of epistemic rationality, and you know about Aumann agreement and updating your beliefs on other people's beliefs as a special case of updating your beliefs on any data you get from your environment and you take all of this dead seriously, and you've read the existing literature, and you've spent many, many hours thinking about it, and you still find yourself disagreeing with the consensus---I'm not going to say you should forfeit your vision. You can't trust the mainstream, because the mainstream is insane. The fact that you're insane too doesn't mean you can just trust the authorities; it means you have to lower your confidence in everything.

But please---don't take my word for it!

I agree, except that a non-expert needs to have some rules by which they can distinguish fields which really do have experts (eg climate science) from those that don't (eg theology)

An expert who disagrees with the majority opinion in his field is an iconoclast. Such experts are usually at least acknowledged as experts by other experts, and, sometimes, their opinions turn out to be right all along.

A layman who disagrees with the majority of the experts in a field is a crank, and cranks that turn out to be right are rarer than winning lottery tickets.

I'm not convinced that the initial disclaimer is necessary. Would it make sense for a non-expert to base his opinion on that of one expert or a large group? Why does it make sense for an expert to base his opinion on his perceptions only instead of looking at his entire group?

Note that a relevant application of this heuristic would be global warming.

Yet to understand the opinions on any nontrivial question, you have to become enough of an expert yourself to have at least some say in judging the validity of experts' opinions.

Does the quote have any origin beyond "Final words?" I started there but the search only brought me here. I would be interested in more discussion around it before I adopt it as a method.

Certain kinds of knowledge are also power. Intelligence is power; you can build intelligence through dual-n-back.

I think this is a good heuristic.

However, another possibility is that either you or your discussant is unduly influenced by an informational cascade.

Chesterton said something similar about reforming social institutions that you don't understand.

I'm not a fan of that first XKCD, though. It seems to suggest that any possibility of alternative sexuality is doomed to failure, whereas many people do form alternative arrangements of various types.

I would change that to "easily conceived" instead of "simple", and make sure to distinguish between "unsolved" and "unagreed upon".

(Even better optional xkcd link.)

Corollary, test them if possible.

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.

I'm not sure that I read your point (3) correctly. One feature of heuristics is that you need to trust them to do a better job than you can do without them. As you refine the understanding of where the heuristics are appropriate, the expected effectiveness of heuristics increases, but all the way heuristics need to pay rent. The useful side of heuristic needs to win over the bias part, which is more of an issue for heuristics than for declarative beliefs.

Related to: The Parable of the Dagger.

This is a good heuristic? I wouldn't have guessed it, but then I don't pay a lot of attention to what exactly I eat. Why is this a good idea, do you think? For now I'll adopt your beliefs, but I'd like more evidence. :)

Explain the difference please.

Better: Imitate what successful people do/did in your situation.

Or perhaps: Adopt the most successfully tested strategy; if you think you've figured out something better, ask first why you don't see others doing it already.

I am skeptical that enough people do the best thing enough of the time to make this a good heuristic, even if you ignore the fact that "what other people do in your situation" isn't always available information.

You can also replace "do" with 'believe".

One interesting question is whether you should believe what the experts do, or what the majority of people do, in situations where they differ. (See CronoDAS's suggestion on this page about believing the experts.)

I suggest the following revision: If you don't think it's worth your time to analyze your options, choose whatever option people seem to be choosing. Exceptions in the case of situations where too many people choosing one option is bad for all of them (for example, too many people with degrees in y is bad for all of them.)

Nitpick: To what extent should I tolerate tolerance of evil? (For example, I'd condemn a reporter who writes an uncritical piece about some new kind of medical quackery, such as the healing powers of magnets, or what have you.)

Link: Hold Off On Proposing Solutions.

Didn't you just violate that heuristic? Don't you pretty much have to, unless you want to live your live in permanent decision paralysis?

Limit it to large, important decisions and I'd agree.

What types of problems do you expect this heuristic to be successful with? If the problem is something like improvizing jazz, it will fail miserably.

But that's Think More.

I've always thought of this in terms of "improving the first derivative", or working not only on current knowledge but on the rate at which we are acquiring knowledge. Improved tools are a great way to increase the rate of change. Some other techniques are improving understanding of foundational topics (dependencies), inventing better representations of the problem domain (e.g., notation in mathematics and computer science), improving one's health (so as to operate at peak efficiency) through things like good diet and exercise (there are many cognitive benefits of exercise), and to the extent that fluid intelligence may be malleable, working to improve intelligence itself (e.g., dual n-back as in the 2008 Jaeggi et al. study).

How about this for a heuristic:

Exploiting the resources, tools, techniques etc. that you presently have, and coming up with better ones for the future, are both important and neither should be neglected. "50/50 split" obviously shouldn't be taken too literally, the point is that it shouldn't be 1/99 or 99/1.

It's true that we don't have any experience telling us we will survive if we sign up for cryonics, so there's no way to even estimate its chances of success.

We do however have lots of experience making it very clear we are definitely dead if we don't.

If heuristic is adaptive, it takes a form depending on experience, more optimal than a fixed procedure, sometimes successful, sometimes terribly wrong. Simpler kinds may not be adaptive.

You use a heuristic because it's useful, and "proof" of usefulness may involve any connection between concepts at all, only extreme cases of such connections constitute direct experience.

What if you're trying to figure out how much time to spend deciding?

Don't read the following sentence if you follow jimrandomh's heuristic. What is your favorite three-color combination?

Fixed.

Why? Regardless of his strategy, you do no worse by switching.

Other heuristics link to articles that are longer than #3's proof.