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Ab­sur­dity Heuristic

TagLast edit: Jan 3, 2021, 9:05 AM by Yoav Ravid

The absurdity heuristic classifies highly untypical situations as “absurd”, or impossible. While normally very useful as a form of epistemic hygiene, allowing us to detect nonsense, it suffers from the same problems as the representativeness heuristic.

There are a number of situations in which the absurdity heuristic is wrong. A deep theory has to override the intuitive expectation. Where you don’t expect intuition to construct an adequate model of reality, classifying an idea as impossible may be overconfident. The future is usually “absurd”, although sometimes it’s possible to rigorously infer low bounds on capabilities of the future, proving possible what is intuitively absurd.

See also

External References

Stranger Than History

Eliezer YudkowskySep 1, 2007, 6:57 PM
137 points
335 comments1 min readLW link

Talk­ing Snakes: A Cau­tion­ary Tale

Scott AlexanderMar 13, 2009, 1:41 AM
190 points
235 comments3 min readLW link

Why is the Fu­ture So Ab­surd?

Eliezer YudkowskySep 7, 2007, 8:42 AM
52 points
17 comments3 min readLW link

The Cor­rect Con­trar­ian Cluster

Eliezer YudkowskyDec 21, 2009, 10:01 PM
67 points
255 comments5 min readLW link

Ab­sur­dity Heuris­tic, Ab­sur­dity Bias

Eliezer YudkowskySep 5, 2007, 3:20 AM
58 points
10 comments2 min readLW link

Com­mon sense as a prior

Nick_BecksteadAug 11, 2013, 6:18 PM
56 points
215 comments27 min readLW link

Glide #1: Learn­ing Ra­tion­al­ity from Absurdity

musicmage4114May 23, 2018, 6:18 PM
9 points
0 comments3 min readLW link

The Zom­bie Preacher of Somerset

Scott AlexanderMar 28, 2009, 10:29 PM
62 points
34 comments5 min readLW link

Ex­ist­ing Ab­surd Ideas

endoselfMay 30, 2011, 6:35 PM
2 points
0 comments1 min readLW link

[SEQ RERUN] Stranger Than History

MinibearRexAug 15, 2011, 3:21 AM
9 points
0 comments1 min readLW link

What is bunk?

[deleted]May 8, 2010, 6:06 PM
26 points
108 comments4 min readLW link

Univer­sal Law

Eliezer YudkowskyApr 29, 2007, 6:41 AM
111 points
28 comments3 min readLW link

Ex­ist­ing Ab­surd Technologies

DesrtopaMay 30, 2011, 6:12 AM
34 points
59 comments1 min readLW link
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