Heuristic

Colloquial language is the best way to explain what a heuristic is: Rule of thumb. It's a rule that can be applied to a certain context that's not necessarily true, but reliable for most times. Think of it as a mental shortcut.

Backlinks

• Heuristics as the positive framing for biases

  • We have many Cognitive bias. Bias is typically associated with something negative, as in, we have a flaw in our heads. Take Inattentional blindess, for example, where we are not able to see what we are not paying attention to. This may sound like a problem to be solved, but you could frame it positively as a Heuristic, i.e. our brain is being efficient, we take only the information we're paying attention to.

• Use heuristics as a constraint
  • In a Complex system, hard and fast rule is not effective. Defining a comprehensive rules that will work for 100% of the time will be too costly and will overly constrained a system, preventing the system from generating emergent patterns. A Heuristic on the other hand would typically be a single sentence and a more cost effective Constraint to be applied.