From The Sideview, November 4, 2021:
Human cultures have used rules of thumb for centuries. During the past century, however, they have been vilified to near extinction. Is their demise justified?
Rules of thumb are simple and practical cognitive shortcuts that make use of bodily and environmental features. Human cultures have used rules of thumb for centuries to guide agriculture, technological development, and other aspects of social life. During the past century, however, rules of thumb have been vilified to near extinction. Is their demise justified?
Frederick Winslow Taylor was on a mission—to replace traditional rule of thumb methods with scientific and standardized procedures. Following the rapid industrialization in the 19th century United States, a bottleneck in factory workflows had appeared that was all too obvious to Taylor. The unique, mnemonic, and idiosyncratic working methods of each artisan, engineer, or craftsman were incompatible with the modern factory operations that demanded scientific precision, timeliness, and predictable outcomes. Local artisanal traditions were not fit for the emerging modes of global mass production.
Taylor’s industrial philosophy came to be known as Taylorism. One key aspect of Taylorist principles,1 quoting Taylor himself, was to do away with “inefficient rule-of-thumb methods,” which were “still almost universal in all trades,” and in practicing which workmen “wasted a large part of their effort.” An effective industry, Taylor asserted, would have standardized workflows, guaranteed outcomes, and optimized divisions of labor. Notably, Taylorism caught the eye of communist and capitalist regimes alike: both were determined in the quest for what James C. Scott calls high modernism,2 where locally adapted knowledge would gradually be replaced with universally applicable standards and scientific guidelines.
For traditional rule of thumb methods, this was only the beginning of their misery. The vigor for thinking in terms of standardization, optimization and rationalization swept through the industrial world in the early 20th century, and soon found its way into the human and social sciences. First, unsurprisingly, this happened in the more established field of economics. But later, the standardization ethos found its way to our minds, as well, taking over the nascent fields of psychology and cognitive science. The cognitive revolution, as it came to be known, sought to discover the “laws” of how the mind, and its contents, operate. Its driving motives were to measure cognitive aspects such as intelligence and reasoning in terms of standardizable terminology—bell-curves and universal diagnostics. The upshot was that practically anything that deviated from the standardized, optimized, textbook “rational man” would be denigrated as invalid, malfunctional, or biased.
And so, rules of thumb received another blow. This time they were denigrated in the field of behavioral economics, where rules of thumb were discussed interchangeably with “heuristics”. Heuristics, these authors argued,3 were intuitive rule of thumb methods that people often resort to, but which regardless often led our minds astray and to suboptimal decisions. Eventually, a range of public policies ensued, led by fervent social scientists—the Nudge4 advocates—who took on their quest to help citizens overcome their heuristics and biases.
Altogether, it seems fair to say that rules of thumb have got a bad rap during the past century. Recently, however, critics have pointed out this isn’t entirely justified. Researchers in the new fields of ecological5 and adaptive rationality6 have highlighted that often, in everyday environments, good judgments do not require complex cognitions,7 and in appropriate contexts, rules of thumb may prove to be particularly adaptive. As Herbert A. Simon once wrote,8 rationality should be thought of as a pair of scissors, where one blade represents the mind and the other the structures of the environment. Only when both are in place is the mind’s cutting edge sharp. Instead of dismissing rules of thumb altogether, we should focus on context, studying rules of thumb in the local environments they have adapted to operate in....
....MUCH MORE
Bringing to mind that guy and the fence.
