As an aside, when I wrote “we usually need to have a good understanding …” I was thinking about explicit heuristics. Trying to understand the implications of our implicit heuristics (which may be hard to influence) seems somewhat less promising. Some of our implicit heuristics may be evolved mechanisms (including game-theoretical mechanisms) that are very useful for us today, even if we don’t have the capacity to understand why.
I don’t think there’s always a clear line between implicit and explicit heuristics, e.g. often I think they might start out as implicit and then be made (partially) explicit in the process of reflecting on them.
If you’re going to import an explicit heuristic I think that it’s usually a good idea to have a good understanding of its mechanism. But you might forgo this requirement if you have enough trust in its provenance. Also moderately often I think hearing an explicit heuristic from someone else gives you a hypothesis that you can now pay some attention to and see how it performs in different contexts and then work out whether you want to give it any weight in your decision-making. (I think a lot of distilled advice has something of this nature.)
Thank you for the thoughtful comment!
As an aside, when I wrote “we usually need to have a good understanding …” I was thinking about explicit heuristics. Trying to understand the implications of our implicit heuristics (which may be hard to influence) seems somewhat less promising. Some of our implicit heuristics may be evolved mechanisms (including game-theoretical mechanisms) that are very useful for us today, even if we don’t have the capacity to understand why.
I don’t think there’s always a clear line between implicit and explicit heuristics, e.g. often I think they might start out as implicit and then be made (partially) explicit in the process of reflecting on them.
If you’re going to import an explicit heuristic I think that it’s usually a good idea to have a good understanding of its mechanism. But you might forgo this requirement if you have enough trust in its provenance. Also moderately often I think hearing an explicit heuristic from someone else gives you a hypothesis that you can now pay some attention to and see how it performs in different contexts and then work out whether you want to give it any weight in your decision-making. (I think a lot of distilled advice has something of this nature.)