Does personal knowledge about psychology or rationality actually help with large or small personal decision making? Seems like a premise of learning about cognitive biases, LessWrong, etc.
Ex: Lukewarm on potential hire after interview. Leaning towards passing but I recognize my perception is tainted because I wanted to end interview during because I have a lot of work and I find the median interview boring. Can't spend more time interviewing. Am I better off?
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Also if it isn't obvious where the LW rationality fits into that example, I'm mainly thinking that 1. I'd be labeling the desire to stop early as motivated stopping 2. My desire to stop the interview would introduce confirmation bias where I'm looking for reasons to pass
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Here's what my personal-idiosyncratic-inner-CFAR-voice says about this situation: 1. If your company's interview process only yields good results when employees exert willpower/insight to notice biases and manually correct, the whole process is too brittle. ...
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1... Noticing that your boredom is shaping your decision, which in turn could throw the overall decision, is extremely valuable. But it's an insight about the *whole setup*. This one choice is so small compared to the fact that every interview at your company is at risk of this.
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1. Your company should collect enough complementary signals that one interviewer's boredom won't swing the whole call. You could make interviews less boring. 2. In fact, that's a great question. Why *are* those interviews so boring? Get curious about that. ...
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2... Boredom is often S1 telling you that something isn't worth your time, and is often 100% correct. In this hypothetical, your interview might in fact be providing *zero* useful signal about the candidate's future performance. So deciding bc "I'm bored" may not be any worse!
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CFAR rationality says kind of the opposite of "1. notice what you're doing, 2. slap a label on it by pattern-matching to the nearest Cognitive Bias, 3. apply standard de-biasing". Instead: "1. Notice 2. Get really curious. 3. ...no I mean REALLY curious. Listen! 4. Keep going!!"
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It's definitely true that this process of going down the rabbit hole can sometimes put you in "a less familiar place that net hurts ability to decide". You can end up with weird opinions about what's good to do that are hard to explain to others or fit into social narratives.
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But, I would hope that you end up in a more robust place to decide from, from a stance of collaborating with yourself, rather than fighting yourself.
End of conversation
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