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Absurdity Heuristic

Edited by Vladimir_Nesov, habryka, et al. last updated 3rd Jan 2021

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

There are a number of situations in which the absurdity heuristic is wrong. A deep theory has to . Where you don't expect intuition to construct an of reality, classifying an idea as impossible may be . The future is usually "absurd", although sometimes it's possible to , proving possible what is intuitively absurd.

See also

  • ,

External References

  • Arbitrary Silliness by
impossible
Antiprediction
epistemic hygiene
Epistemic hygiene
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2
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2
override the intuitive expectation
Shut up and multiply
representativeness heuristic
Representativeness heuristic
Discussion1
Discussion1
Reversal test
Robin Hanson
Status quo bias
rigorously infer low bounds on capabilities of the future
Exploratory engineering
Illusion of transparency
adequate model
overconfident
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52Why is the Future So Absurd?
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114Universal Law
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2Existing Absurd Ideas
[anonymous]14y
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34Existing Absurd Technologies
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