Absurdity heuristic

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

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

Blog posts

• Absurdity Heuristic, Absurdity Bias
• Stranger Than History
• Why is the Future So Absurd?
• Arbitrary Silliness by Robin Hanson
• Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale by Yvain
• The Correct Contrarian Cluster

See also

• Representativeness heuristic
• Shut up and multiply
• Antiprediction
• Epistemic hygiene
• Exploratory engineering
• Illusion of transparency
• Status quo bias, Reversal test