Posts tagged heuristics
Often, we need fast answers with limited resources. We have to make judgements in a world full of uncertainty. We can’t measure everything. We can’t run all the experiments we’d like. You may not have the resources to model a product or the impact of a decision. How do you find a balance between finding fast answers and finding correct answers? How do you minimize uncertainty with limited resources?
via https://medium.com/@akelleh/speed-vs-accuracy-when-is-correlation-enough-when-do-you-need-causation–708c8ca93753
The belief that agency can be distributed is hard to internalize even after you’ve been intellectually convinced. I nodded along as I read Mike’s posts last year, but I keep catching myself acting in violation of these beliefs. As an example but without intending to get bogged down in politics, it’s easy to read about congressional corruption and gain a sense that all congressmen are bad people. Then you might read a story about a specific congressman and think, “hmm, he wasn’t so bad.” Ok, so maybe he’s an exception. Or today’s congressmen are more corrupt. But there’s a third possible synthesis that the mind shies away from: perhaps the system made them that way. Perhaps sequences of simple actions that are each beyond reproach can cause the group as a whole to grow hostile toward the people who form it or who caused it to be formed.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/12/consensual-hells/
The loss of ecological resilience (Holling 1973, 1996) tests the adaptive capacity of the human dimensions of the system. Patterns of abrupt change (Gunderson 2003) are described, in a handful of heuristics, by (1) an adaptive cycle, (2) panarchy, (3) resilience, (4) adaptability, and (5) transformability. The first two describe the dynamics of systems within and across scales, whereas the last three are the properties of social-ecological systems that determine these dynamics. Each is described in the following sections, and together they provide the foundation for the subsequent propositions.
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art13/