orthonormal comments on Learn a foreign language to reduce bias? - Less Wrong

10 Post author: AShepard 22 April 2012 03:37PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 22 April 2012 04:21:10PM 15 points [-]

Anything that activates System 2 (for instance, writing questions in a difficult-to-read font) has the same effect.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 22 April 2012 10:29:51PM 4 points [-]

Sounds interesting; got a citation?

Comment author: Lightwave 23 April 2012 09:58:19AM *  4 points [-]

Here's a quote from Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow:

The experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the CRT (Cognitive Reflection Test). Half of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1.

Comment author: private_messaging 27 June 2012 05:06:35PM *  -1 points [-]

Is there really a 'system 1' and 'system 2' anyway? Brain is a real-time system, and has to provide gradual de-rating when the time is shorter. When facing a really complicated problem that would take a lot of time to solve, there's "system 2" type reasoning being not even wrong if not given enough time.

Comment author: orthonormal 28 June 2012 07:38:39PM 3 points [-]

"System 1" and "System 2" aren't meant to represent separate sub-minds; they're just a helpful categorization of mental processes. If you want a fuller disclaimer on this useful oversimplification, Kahneman has an excellent one in Thinking, Fast and Slow.

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