Interesting post, I’m glad to see that there is evidence that learning about biases can at least diminish their effect. Most of the things I’ve read regarding biases seems to imply that they are conquerable (“try really hard to remember that you must”...) without actually presenting evidence that subjects aware of their biases tended to overcome them more effectively. It’s as though the burden of evidence only applies to proving the existence of the bias, and hand-waiving is sufficient for strategies to conquer it.
I’m mostly curious about the (slightly touched on here) question of whether rationality training of any kind carries over into everyday life and big-picture issues. I don’t know that answering baseball questions after taking a statistics course is a good test: Everyone who knows baseball thinks of statistics as clearly applicable to it because you hear them mentioned together constantly. There’s a pattern already present for “baseball question”->”statistics answer”.
I’d love to see some very general happiness studies done: Would a group of people given a bunch of rationality training beat a control group in happiness/life-satisfaction/goal-achievement after a few years? Would they beat a group of people who were specifically trained in happiness/life-satisfaction/goal-achievement? Would they be happier about the choices they’d made, or just better at arguing why they were the right choices?
Interesting post, I’m glad to see that there is evidence that learning about biases can at least diminish their effect. Most of the things I’ve read regarding biases seems to imply that they are conquerable (“try really hard to remember that you must”...) without actually presenting evidence that subjects aware of their biases tended to overcome them more effectively. It’s as though the burden of evidence only applies to proving the existence of the bias, and hand-waiving is sufficient for strategies to conquer it.
I’m mostly curious about the (slightly touched on here) question of whether rationality training of any kind carries over into everyday life and big-picture issues. I don’t know that answering baseball questions after taking a statistics course is a good test: Everyone who knows baseball thinks of statistics as clearly applicable to it because you hear them mentioned together constantly. There’s a pattern already present for “baseball question”->”statistics answer”.
I’d love to see some very general happiness studies done: Would a group of people given a bunch of rationality training beat a control group in happiness/life-satisfaction/goal-achievement after a few years? Would they beat a group of people who were specifically trained in happiness/life-satisfaction/goal-achievement? Would they be happier about the choices they’d made, or just better at arguing why they were the right choices?