I think your post is quite ironic. You start by saying that you explicitly tried to teach them that to first detect biases in yourself and then in other people. Then you say how they got it all wrong without any investigation of whether your own beliefs might need updating.

You confuse the quest for reductionist with the quest for bias free thinking. Those two are different projects. Nobody gives you a good Anki deck for rationality because there nobody around who reduced rationality to atomic concepts that's you could stuff into an Anki deck. Most people usually don't take reductionism really seriously and try to use it on everything. Most people just use it for those questions for which other people use reductionism.

In many cases today the quest for empirical experiments is very different from the quest for reductionism. If you want to teach people to value empirical evidence, teach them to do QS experiments. If you do QS you will soon learn that it's pointless to try to reduce all phenomena you interact with to atomic units. It doesn't change anything about the data and you will make a lot of mistakes if you focus to much on reducing things to much.

If I on the other hand try to create an Anki deck for a topic it's very important to practice reductionism and reduce concepts to atomic units. Running empirical experiments however doesn't help much with creating a good Anki deck (at least if you don't have a lot of people to test variations of the deck).

Both reductionism and empiricism is a frame. It's useful to know when to use which one and when to use an even different frame.