michael_nielsen

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.

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 individuals

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.

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

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.

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.

Kahneman himself seems skeptical that it's helpful.

Kahneman's skepticism has been shifting in response to evidence, e.g. Phil @PTetlock's success finding & training superforecasters.