“A heuristic, not an algorithm”: what difference are you intending to convey? (I wasn’t trying to suggest that you think avoiding poor people gives some kind of guarantee, or anything like that. A heuristic is what I took you to be saying it was. For me, at least, a heuristic is a kind of algorithm.)
“Not … for safety”: do you mean that there are other purposes to it besides safety? OK, fair enough (though your presentation of this “skill” here has been all about safety) but I don’t think it makes a difference to what I’m saying: safety together with the other things you intend this to achieve are still not the only things that matter, and I gravely doubt that the broad-brush policy of avoiding poor people is a great way of achieving those other things (by comparison with less-simplistic heuristics) -- though on that point I’m prepared to be convinced.
A heuristic is a fuzzy set of principles that are correlated with the outcomes you want. An algorithm is a set of directions that give you the outcome you want. When I say “avoiding poor people is a heuristic” I mean that it is the high level abstraction of a bunch of low level behaviors in various situations.
Edit: the boundaries between algorithms and heuristics are complicated. Colloquial usage referring to heuristics as something like “rules of thumb” and algorithms as “a set of directions” is what was intended.
“A heuristic, not an algorithm”: what difference are you intending to convey? (I wasn’t trying to suggest that you think avoiding poor people gives some kind of guarantee, or anything like that. A heuristic is what I took you to be saying it was. For me, at least, a heuristic is a kind of algorithm.)
“Not … for safety”: do you mean that there are other purposes to it besides safety? OK, fair enough (though your presentation of this “skill” here has been all about safety) but I don’t think it makes a difference to what I’m saying: safety together with the other things you intend this to achieve are still not the only things that matter, and I gravely doubt that the broad-brush policy of avoiding poor people is a great way of achieving those other things (by comparison with less-simplistic heuristics) -- though on that point I’m prepared to be convinced.
A heuristic is a fuzzy set of principles that are correlated with the outcomes you want. An algorithm is a set of directions that give you the outcome you want. When I say “avoiding poor people is a heuristic” I mean that it is the high level abstraction of a bunch of low level behaviors in various situations.
Something can be an algorithm despite not necessarily giving you exactly the outcome you want. Hence approximation algorithms and probabilistic algorithms.
Edit: the boundaries between algorithms and heuristics are complicated. Colloquial usage referring to heuristics as something like “rules of thumb” and algorithms as “a set of directions” is what was intended.