3 ms·

There was a great post on lesswrong.com about this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_b

• alok-g 13y ago
  Very interesting. I have always wondered if teaching people about cognitive biases can help them avoid them. On the very least, I am convinced that this may not be as easy as I was thinking. Some relevant excerpts from the cited article: >> If you're irrational to start with, having more knowledge can hurt you. >> I've seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. >> You can think of people who fit this description, right? This makes sense now. If the brain behind is close to a random baseline in interpreting statements, how can you feed more statements (about interpreting) to expect a positive outcome. A question still remains: Would it help to teach people of these biases when they are kids.
  • leoc 13y ago
    The impression I keep getting is that (with due respect to "the power of the context" http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf) teaching someone about fallacies automatically makes them about 15 IQ stupider.
    • alok-g 13y ago
      Darn! I would be -150 by now. :-)
      • leoc 13y ago
        It's a one-off effect rather than -15IQ per fallacy, though I wouldn't deny that adding more fallacies could have some cumulative effect. Maybe deeper, rather than more extensive, understanding of fallacies, cognitive biases and so on may start to reverse the effect, though I wouldn't exactly bet on it doing do consistently.
    • sitkack 13y ago
      I am not sure what you are getting at. That the PARC people were too deep in awesomeness to productize it? Just grabbing at straws I haven't read the whole article.
      • leoc 13y ago
        I'm referring to the maxim often repeated by Alan Kay that "[point of view|context|a change of context] is worth [40|80] IQ".
• maxerickson 13y ago
  It should be named the basilisk bias.