#availability heuristic

If you put ten minutes into writing a prompt, and Mallory gives a completely off-the-rails, useless answer, and you lose ten minutes, well, that’s just what using a computer is like sometimes. Mallory malfunctioned, or hallucinated, but it does that sometimes, everybody knows that. You only wasted ten minutes. It’s fine. Not a big deal. Let’s try it a few more times. Just ten more minutes. It’ll probably work this time.

If you put ten minutes into writing a prompt, and it completes a task that would have otherwise taken you 4 hours, that feels amazing. Like the computer is magic! An absolute endorphin rush.

Very memorable. When it happens, it feels like P=1.

Today’s Book of the Day is Thinking, Fast and Slow, written by Daniel Kahneman in 2013 and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist whose main research topics have been the psychology of judgment and decision-making, and behavioural economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L.…

Availability is a heuristic whereby people make judgments about the likelihood of an event based on how easily an example, instance, or case comes to mind. For example, investors may judge the quality of an investment based on information that was recently in the news, ignoring other relevant facts (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Similarly, it has been shown that individuals with a greater ability to recall antidepressant advertising estimate the prevalence of depression to be higher than those with low recall (An, 2008), while less knowledgeable consumers use the ease with which they can recall low-price products as a cue to make judgments about overall store prices (Ofir, Raghubir, Brosh, Monroe, & Heiman, 2008).

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