# Heuretics cannot exist separate from humans Many theories of technology talk about it as an epiphenomena of people. The strawman argument is that these theories ignore the fact that people create technology, but that is not true. They acknowledge the people but then assume that they can be abstracted away. People cannot be abstracted away from heuretic creation. The interactions between people and technology are complex and cannot be cleanly separated. [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]] and [[Conception is the imaginative design of a heuretic]] so the representation of the components of the heuretic *inside* the mind matters. This means that analogies make heuretics more or less likely to be conceived. Ideas in the world affect how we see the world, so if everybody is thinking in terms of bits and optimization, we are biased towards heuretics that can be thought of in terms of bits and optimization. The [[Einstellung Effect]] is powerful! #### Why is this not naval-gazing? It means that it’s important to consider human incentives and communication when thinking about how heuretics develop. *of course, if computers can count as minds for [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]] (which I cannot argue against) then arguably heuretics could come entirely from non-human minds, but at that point I suspect it would just be general AI and all of this is pretty irrelevant. ### Related - [[bhattacharyaStagnationScientificIncentives2020]] - [[Understanding a thing has to do with intuiting the affordances of a thing]] - [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]]