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I haven’t done much longform writing lately, between getting Tales From When I Had A Face out the door and really just overall shifting gears mentally. (And the pandemic). So Modern Mythology has also suffered from that, both in terms of pieces I’m writing and pieces that I’m editing for contributors.
I’m not sure if that will be changing anytime soon, but I did want to do a little experiment with a shorter, off-the-cuff post. Quite a departure from most of what we’ve run on this web journal, historically. Not quite a full essay, but hopefully something for you to chew on as you have your own afternoon I mean morning coffee, or whatever it is you do.
While I have my “morning” coffee, I thought I’d share some thoughts about those mental shortcuts we use to make sense of the world. (That’s what a “heuristic” is, more or less).
Heuristics can be hard to unearth because they aren’t “beliefs” in the common sense, but rather meta-beliefs that help us come to conclusions, and over time maybe accumulate a belief structure and re-enforce it. Our heuristics are unavoidable, sometimes useful, and sometimes quite dangerous.
When you derive a quick conclusion, how do you get there? What assumptions are you making — do you need to make — to get there without spending the better part of a lifetime so you no longer require a shortcut? They are…
