I’ve become good at resolving fights in my family—people don’t understand why the other person’s angry, and I can explain the mistakes they’re making in terms of probability, or in biases, cognitive science or often status-seeking behaviour, and they understand.
Also, I’ve become a lot better at managing my life romantically. I kept changing my mind about whether someone had feelings for me—she did, she didn’t, she did, she didn’t—and I could never be sure if I was re-interpreting evidence to suit my preferred hypothesis. So I decided upon a test, decided ahead of time how I should update my beliefs based on how she’d react, and did it. Saved myself a lot of heartache.
Learning about priming, consistency effects and cached thoughts has also helped me steer my future self towards what I’d like to be.
I’ll be going!