I totally agree with this for some/many use cases. I would caution against doing so in the following situations:
Novel situations—If a type of situation is new to you, the closest pattern may fail to match well.
Unanalyzed situations—If you have always used pattern matching to decide something, it would be valuable to verify the pattern, at least once, to make sure you are not missing or abusing opportunities.
Repeated situations—This is a bit trickier, but sometimes we have repeated applications of the same pattern over and over. It would still be useful to analyze these in depth every once in a while, to maintain the calibration of the heuristic.
In reality it is a balancing act, and it would be best to avoid over-reliance on either approach: over-analysis or pattern heuristics.
Exactly. For the purposes of the post I framed it as a single interaction, but my honest response would be ’Cool. Do you have a video?”
While I recommend looking up the real thing or news, in case you are curious I started with a much longer version of the story before I realized it was distracting from the rest of the post:
“So I have an amazing fish. Marcy. She’s an archerfish. You know, the kind of fish that can spit at flying insects? She can recognize human faces! You see, I trained her to spit at politicians.
“We play a game sometimes, where I tap a spot on some glass by the tank. If she hits it, she gets a treat. We’d been doing this for a couple months when I put a TV behind the glass to see if she would react. She didn’t really; not at first. I turned it to the news though, and on a lark tapped the glass where that politician was talking. You know, the boring, long-winded one? She spat at ’em and got her treat.
“So I thought, why not? What if I tap all politicians faces when they come on? It became part of our game. Marcy couldn’t predict when I’d tap the glass because I couldn’t. She got a game and treats and I got to watch the news. Win-win.
“But then one day I got bored. I wasn’t tapping all the politician faces. It was that day, remember, where the thing happened? News was getting sound bites from everyone and their dog? Pelosi and Trump came up and Marcy nailed ’em both. Dead center. I was already giving her the treat before I realized that I hadn’t tapped the glass.
“So I test her, you know? She spitting at anyone now? Talking heads? Nope. Snoop? Nope. Vance? Dead aim. AOC? A little to the left but Marcy still got a treat. Every politician got hit. Well, not that Canadian guy. But I don’t think she’s seen that one before. So I figure she can spot faces. I mark the target and she spits ‘em when she sees ’em.
“So what do you say? Come see her, please? I want to know if she’ll do it for you, you know? Before I call a fish scientist? Promise it will be a hoot.”