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Chesterton-Miller Behavioral Fence: when you see people behaving in a seemingly suboptimal way, ask what you’re missing about what they’re actually optimizing for. Behavior is rarely suboptimal, but assumed cost functions are usually wrong.
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Apparently it needs to be explicitly stated that most people’s cost functions are mostly illegible, most of the time. We’re talking unconscious optimization and equilibria here.
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Corollary: when someone leaves out obvious qualifiers on a complex proposition, it’s generally safe to assume they’re solving for 240 characters and trusting readers to fill in the obvious supporting clauses
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