It seems to me that how to be smart varies widely between professions. (...) Yet such concepts as “be willing to admit you lost”, or “policy debates should not appear one-sided”, or “plan to overcome your flaws instead of just confessing them”, seem like they could apply to many professions. And all this advice is not so much about how to be extraordinarily clever, as, rather, how to not be stupid. Each profession has its own way to be clever, but their ways of not being stupid have much more in common. And while victors may prefer to attribute victory to their own virtue, my small knowledge of history suggests that far more battles have been lost by stupidity than won by genius.
Debiasing is mostly not about how to be extraordinarily clever, but about how to not be stupid. Its great successes are disasters that do not materialize, defeats that never happen, mistakes that no one sees because they are not made. Often you can’t even be sure that something would have gone wrong if you had not tried to debias yourself. You don’t always see the bullet that doesn’t hit you.
The great victories of debiasing are exactly the lottery tickets we didn’t buy—the hopes and dreams we kept in the real world, instead of diverting them into infinitesimal probabilities. The triumphs of debiasing are cults not joined; optimistic assumptions rejected during planning; time not wasted on blind alleys. It is the art of non-self-destruction. Admittedly, none of this is spectacular enough to make the evening news.
Related: Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction
An awesome reminder, thanks.