Do you mean to say that you became aware of biases, internalized your belief in their importance, gathered the relevant info, became familiar with LW norms about style and tone, and wrote the article, all in one hour?
Certainly there were a lot of prerequisites that went into being able to do this exercise, and I did not mean to imply that everything that went into writing the above article itself was only one hour in total. The people here in the LW community are highly likely to have the prerequisites to do this exercise without additional time investment. Those five minutes included explaining the bias in question, when it was unfamiliar to any members of the group.
Even if you did, do you mean to imply that you thereby solved a major problem?
One of the explicit goals of the exercise was to gain awareness of the biases in question, which is the first step in modifying our behavior. Immediately following the exercises, everyone who participated was able to point out examples of it occurring left and right. Correcting these habits of thought will take reinforcement over a period of time, but by becoming self-aware and having others to point them out to us as well we are drastically closer to solving the problem than before the one hour of work.
That works the first 200 times, but at a certain point the low-hanging fruit is gone and the suboptimal habits you have turn out not to be as “irrational” as you thought
If you have actually picked all of your low-hanging fruit then congratulations, you are a supremely powerful human being.
I fully agree that what is holding us back is often conflicting emotional desires, and as you correctly point out there are methods of modifying those as well. We make mistakes on both an analytical and an emotional level, and dealing with both is vitally important to becoming the most effective person possible. Failing to take five minutes and actually trying optimize the situation is just one analytical failure mode, which I am trying to address with this one post.
Certainly there were a lot of prerequisites that went into being able to do this exercise, and I did not mean to imply that everything that went into writing the above article itself was only one hour in total. The people here in the LW community are highly likely to have the prerequisites to do this exercise without additional time investment. Those five minutes included explaining the bias in question, when it was unfamiliar to any members of the group.
One of the explicit goals of the exercise was to gain awareness of the biases in question, which is the first step in modifying our behavior. Immediately following the exercises, everyone who participated was able to point out examples of it occurring left and right. Correcting these habits of thought will take reinforcement over a period of time, but by becoming self-aware and having others to point them out to us as well we are drastically closer to solving the problem than before the one hour of work.
If you have actually picked all of your low-hanging fruit then congratulations, you are a supremely powerful human being.
I fully agree that what is holding us back is often conflicting emotional desires, and as you correctly point out there are methods of modifying those as well. We make mistakes on both an analytical and an emotional level, and dealing with both is vitally important to becoming the most effective person possible. Failing to take five minutes and actually trying optimize the situation is just one analytical failure mode, which I am trying to address with this one post.