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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work

The Security Guard

He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there\u2019s a noise, and he checks to see if it\u2019s robbers, or just the wind.

It\u2019s the wind. It is always the wind. It\u2019s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber.

At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it\u2019s just the wind, bro.

This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.