Thanks for writing this, this is an interesting area, and improving decision making is a worthwhile goal.

However, what I am a bit skeptical about is the extent to which people want to improve the decision making process. In LW-circles I can see that desire, but in the world at large it seems more important to win the argument than necessarily be right; there is some more work to do before they would even want to use the tools.

If we focus on LW-readers which are (hopefully) more interested in truth seeking, it would be interesting to see if there has been a discussion where one of these tools could really have made a difference. Personally, I usually don't have so much trouble following the causal steps - the difficulties lie usually in missing the background knowledge to weigh the arguments.

As a programmer I know the urge to come up with some solution for a problem, preferably in the form of some algorithm. But is there evidence that these tools actually help in realistic situations?