CONCEPT
The Availability Heuristic
Tversky and Kahneman's 1973 finding that people judge probability by the ease of recall — the cognitive shortcut that makes the AI discourse a case study in systematic distortion at civilizational scale.
The availability heuristic is the mental shortcut by which people estimate the probability or frequency of an event by the ease with which examples come to mind. Vivid, recent, emotionally charged, or narratively compelling instances are more cognitively accessible than mundane, distant, or statistically representative ones, and the cognitive system treats accessibility as evidence of frequency. This produces systematic overestimation of memorable events and underestimation of forgettable ones. In the AI discourse, the heuristic operates at civilizational scale: the solo founder who shipped in a weekend and the elegist mourning lost craft dominate the conversation because their stories are vivid, while the statistical middle — the modal experience of incremental productivity gain with modest disruption — is invisible because it lacks narrative structure.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Tversky and Kahneman documented the availability heuristic in a series of experiments in which subjects estimated the frequency of words, causes of death, and occupational categories. Systematically, subjects overestimated categories whose instances were easy
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