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Step 1: Steal Underpants Step 2: ????? Step 3: Profits!!!!
Eliezer,
Not so much recognizing mistakes too early. Rather, mistakenly seeing a mistake where there isn't one. False positives abound.
What's the heuristic supposed to be, here? Taking your medicine early and going for the big change sounds better, in principle, but I think it amounts to more fuzziness. The first small bit of evidence that you made a mistake may or may not actually relate to an error. There are false positives as well as false negatives. At some point the evidence overwhelms your own risk tolerance (as it relates to future costs, the historical ones are sunk) and you change your mind....or not. It isn't clear to me that you minimize your costs by jumping to the conclusion that you were wrong any more than you do so by clinging to the idea that you remain correct.