# Heuristic Traps for Systems Operators DevFeed: [Heuristic Traps for Systems Operators]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Marc Brooker Published: 2015-11-05T00:00:00Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Marc Brooker's Blog](), [Marc Brooker's Blog]() Topics: [systems](), [data]() Tags: [article](), [learn](), [systems](), [training]() ## AI overview The article examines how intuition and heuristic traps affect risk decisions by systems operators and designers. Drawing on avalanche-safety research, it argues that experience and instinct can support fast decisions but may also produce poor long-term outcomes, contributing to data loss, customer disappointment, and business failure. Training can improve decision-making, although familiarity and social-proof heuristics may remain influential even among experienced professionals. ## Source excerpt Heuristic Traps for Systems Operators What can we learn from avalanche safety? Powder magazine's new feature The Human Factor 2.0 is a fantastic read. It's a good disaster story, like the New York Times' Snow Fall: The Avalanche At Tunnel Creek, but looks deeply at a very interesting topic: the way that we make risk decisions. I think there are interesting lessons there for operators and designers of computer systems. "That's the brutal thing," Donovan said. "It's hard to get experience without exposing yourself to risk." The consequences of making bad decisions in back-country skiing can be life and death. As designers, builders and operators of systems of computers our bad decisions are generally less dramatic. But they are real. Data loss, customer disappointment, and business failure have all come as the results of making poor risk decisions. One way to mitigate those risks is experience, and it's product: intuition. Unfortunately, as David Page's article reminds us, intuition isn't always the route to safety. The difficulty, he explained, especially when it comes to continuing education for veteran mountain guides and other professionals, is breaking through a culture of expertise that is based on savoir-faire - in other words, on some deep combination of knowledge and instinct derived from experience - especially if that experience may happen to include years of imperfect decisions and sheer luck. "When we talk about human behavior, people feel a bit attacked in their certainty, in their habits" The problem with intuition is exactly that it is not the product of conscious thought. Intuition is Daniel Kahneman's System 1: effortless, implicit, and based on heuristics rather than reason. It's well documented that these heuristics serve us very well in many situations, especially when speed of movement is important above all else, but they don't lead to us making good decisions in the long term. Ian McCammon's Evidence of heuristic traps in recreational avalanche