tl;dr: How we think affects how we think.

As the host of SingularityNet‘s Decentralized OS video series, I had the opportunity to interview Joel Dietz.

Joel is an accomplished person in many rights, a fellow at MIT and the co-founder of Swarm. He is perhaps most well known for having been a part of the core team that built MetaMask, the leading interface into the world of Web 3.0

If you want to watch the full interview, it’s here. I’ve also posted it below.

During our broad interview, we came up with a term “Heuristic Debt.” A play on “technical debt” which accrues to an organization as they depend on technology which, by definition, gets older each day and which determines the course of action that must be taken, because of the technology dependence.

A heuristic is a short cut for how we think about the world, helping us to avoid the logical sequence over and over again, saving brain energy in the meantime. Many times, heuristics are powerful tools to help us quickly assess a situation and determine an appropriate course of action.

The challenge, however, is that heuristics become ever-deepening neural pathways that become our default associations and reactions to events, people, and things.

That makes it increasingly difficult as we age to change our minds.

This is heuristic debt.

The first step is to be aware of it.