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.
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People who influenced my thoughts here:
@rsnous for putting this question in my head in the first place @ctbeiser for concrete argument against: https://web.archive.org/web/20170916053902/http://cbeiser.me/on-time-free-theories-of-decision-making/ …@gwern tangential argument that sunk cost fallacies specifically might not apply to individuals1 reply 0 retweets 1 likeShow this thread -
Just going to throw out some ideas Well studied violations of rationality may pop up regularly for individuals, but most of it is about truth seeking and being more correct. There may be very few cases where a clear cognitive bias can be squashed while making personal decisions.
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Lets say that LW rationality addressable problems do pop up in individual decision making. It could be that intuitive gut feelings integrate your values and priorities well. Overriding gut feelings in order to excise a bias you identified might throw you off more than you fixed
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Maybe learning to identify bias *is* helpful for people but the folks gravitating to LW and reading about biases for fun are the least likely to benefit from this because their thinking might be more rigorous than average already.
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Maybe we are worse at achieving goals if we remove our own bias in favor of correctness. Convincing yourself that your new company is a guaranteed success probably makes you a more convincing leader. Your politics are probably more convincing if you give in to confirmation bias.
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Replying to @backus
I have a very long answer to your questions, but if I were to force myself to give a short summary... 1) Knowing about biases is helpful if you're genuinely motivated to notice your own blind spots, but it's not if you're not (cont)
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Think I agree fully here. Part of me does also think that we probably replace the existing blind spots with new (better) blind spots, but that is sorta off topic. 
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