While you can’t fool your logical brain, if you want to have a false belief to make you happy, you don’t need to anyway. The brain is compartmentalized and often doesn’t update what you feel intuitively true, or what you base your actions on, just because you learned a fact. This sentence: “You can’t know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself” strikes me as most hard to believe. Reading about a bias and considering its consequences, esp. in an academic mindframe does NOT debias you. That requires applying it to your life and reasoning, recognizing when you are biased, sometimes even training and conditioning to change how you think. If after learning about a bias, I rationally decided that I want to keep it, I would just shelve it in my memory as academic trivia irrelevant to daily life, and I would stay just as biased as before in regards to what I do and how I feel.
While you can’t fool your logical brain, if you want to have a false belief to make you happy, you don’t need to anyway. The brain is compartmentalized and often doesn’t update what you feel intuitively true, or what you base your actions on, just because you learned a fact. This sentence: “You can’t know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself” strikes me as most hard to believe. Reading about a bias and considering its consequences, esp. in an academic mindframe does NOT debias you. That requires applying it to your life and reasoning, recognizing when you are biased, sometimes even training and conditioning to change how you think. If after learning about a bias, I rationally decided that I want to keep it, I would just shelve it in my memory as academic trivia irrelevant to daily life, and I would stay just as biased as before in regards to what I do and how I feel.