When it comes to rationality and biases, the key question is whether learning more about biases results in people just rationalizing their decisions more effectively or whether they are actually making better decisions.
As far as I understand the academic literature, there’s little documented benefit of teaching people about cognitive biases even so various academics studied teaching people about cognitive biases.
CFAR started out partly with the idea that it might be good to teach people about cognitive biases but in their research they didn’t found a way to teach people about cognitive biases but moved to a different curriculum.
Julia Galef for example (who was one of the CFAR cofounders) later wrote the book on the Scout Mindset suggesting that focusing on being in the Scout Mindset instead of the Warrior Mindset is a better focus on how to actually increase rationality in a way that’s relevant for people’s life.
If we look at the question of “does training recognizing cognitive biases actually translate into better decisions”, the way you approach the subject sounds to me like you decided on the answer before actually reasoning about whether or not it does translate in a critical way.
When it comes to rationality and biases, the key question is whether learning more about biases results in people just rationalizing their decisions more effectively or whether they are actually making better decisions.
As far as I understand the academic literature, there’s little documented benefit of teaching people about cognitive biases even so various academics studied teaching people about cognitive biases.
CFAR started out partly with the idea that it might be good to teach people about cognitive biases but in their research they didn’t found a way to teach people about cognitive biases but moved to a different curriculum.
Julia Galef for example (who was one of the CFAR cofounders) later wrote the book on the Scout Mindset suggesting that focusing on being in the Scout Mindset instead of the Warrior Mindset is a better focus on how to actually increase rationality in a way that’s relevant for people’s life.
If we look at the question of “does training recognizing cognitive biases actually translate into better decisions”, the way you approach the subject sounds to me like you decided on the answer before actually reasoning about whether or not it does translate in a critical way.