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Just making people aware that any cognitive biases exist would be a huge win.
by buss 15y ago
Just making people aware that any cognitive biases exist would be a huge win.
- mcobrien 15y agoWhenever I'm pretty sure of a hunch I have, I like to review this list to remember how utterly useless human cognition is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- radiowave 15y agoStuart Sutherland's book, "Irrationality", is about as concise and readable an account of these as you could wish for. My New Year's resolution (last year) was to always make a New Year's resolution to re-read it that year, because the insights tend to slip away with time.
- Symmetry 15y agoNot necessarily. If a person uses their knowledge of biases only to look for them in other people, it can make them less rational by making them less open to opposing points of view. http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo... And for some biases, e.g. anchoring bias telling someone explicitly that they ought to be resisting anchoring bias in an experiment doesn't seem to actually cause them to suffer from anchoring bias any less. There are some biases that can be eliminated this easily, but many that can't. Presumably you would need some sort of explicit training to resist anchoring bias.