Pedro Domingos

Or “worked”

These trade offs are gold to mine for the premises of interesting new board games.

Or the blind spot between heuristics.

A heuristic that works in some situations, can fail in others. Humans live in a different environment than when many of our heuristics were adapted.

This is one reason why cognitive bias should be used first and foremost as a tool of introspection rather than as a way to assess others.

What we mean by the phrase "to understand" is we've formed an effective causal model explicitly or implicitly. All such models are simplifications and hence biased. Bias is a problem if it interferes with the key word "effective".

We need to remember that a heuristic isn't that different from a model. Both of them are highly useful but must be used with care, especially when the regime has just changed.

That's where academics have their advantage--just after regime change. We generally have worse heuristics-- too cumbersome-- but we are better at making new ones, and we actually understand the models. In fact, non-scholars use models at their peril.