It might be a more valuable use of cognitive resources to recognize where bias in general comes from.
Rote memory tasks are good for trying to, say, guess the teacher’s password. But it’s a lot more efficient if you know what cognitive biases feel like and correct for that feeling ahead of time. In general, anytime something just feels right, you should trust but verify. Hindsight bias feels right when we look at things that already happened. Confirmation bias feels right when we see information that confirms what we already believe. Motivated skepticism feels right when we encounter information that challenges our beliefs. It feels wrong to argue against our ingroup.
As an example of what I mean: I knew a mathematics grad student for a while. Once I asked him (because I had forgotten) what the quadratic equation was. Surely, he’s in grad school for math and memorized all of that stuff right? Wrong. He didn’t know, but he did know how to derive it from (I’m guessing) certain principles in math. He re-figured it out and showed it to me.
It might be a more valuable use of cognitive resources to recognize where bias in general comes from.
Rote memory tasks are good for trying to, say, guess the teacher’s password. But it’s a lot more efficient if you know what cognitive biases feel like and correct for that feeling ahead of time. In general, anytime something just feels right, you should trust but verify. Hindsight bias feels right when we look at things that already happened. Confirmation bias feels right when we see information that confirms what we already believe. Motivated skepticism feels right when we encounter information that challenges our beliefs. It feels wrong to argue against our ingroup.
As an example of what I mean: I knew a mathematics grad student for a while. Once I asked him (because I had forgotten) what the quadratic equation was. Surely, he’s in grad school for math and memorized all of that stuff right? Wrong. He didn’t know, but he did know how to derive it from (I’m guessing) certain principles in math. He re-figured it out and showed it to me.