Lesson 2
When to Trust a Quick Judgement
Tell a trained quick judgement from a confident guess, and spot when someone has forged the cues your shortcuts rely on.
Builds on
A shortcut reads a cue
A heating engineer listens to your boiler for ten seconds and says “pump” before she’s taken the cover off. On the radio, a property pundit is just as sure where house prices will be this time next year. Both have been doing their jobs for twenty years.
A quick expert judgement is a heuristic at work: a shortcut that reads a few cues, such as a whine, a rhythm or a smell, and jumps to an answer without working through everything. A cue is like a thermometer. It’s useful only while it’s connected to the thing it claims to measure.