The availability heuristic
A heuristic is another way of saying rule-of-thumb. It’s a thing you refer to when making a decision when fully considering the situation you’re in (from first principles) would be too time-consuming, expensive or about which you simply do not have trusted skills available. The availability heuristic is what happens when you rely on an immediate example of something when considering a topic. The flaw here is that the immediate example you’re thinking about may in fact have nothing to do with the topic at all....