Going back to your general argument, are you saying that Eastern philosophical traditions are better at getting people to use checklists (or other tools) without understanding them, while Western ones encourage people not to use things they don't understand explicitly?

In Confucism a wise person is a person who follows the proper rituals for every occasion (as the book argues). I think checklists do define rituals. A person who values following rituals is thus more likely to accept a checklist and follow it.

Culturally there's a sense that asking a Western doctor to use a checklist means to assumes that he's not smart enough to do the right thing. I don't think that exists to the same extend in China.

Before germ theory Western doctors refused to wash their hands because they didn't see the point of cleanness as a value. I need to do a bit of research to get data about Chinese medicine but from what I have seen of Ajuvedic medicine they do tons of saucha rituals that are about producing cleanness like tongue-scrapping.

Why do you think so? To me (as a programmer) heuristics about when to check what feel perfectly knowable and able to be verbalized. To be sure, they would take a lot words.

I think you can describe me easily a system II heuristic that you use to decide when to check more. I don't think you can easily describe how you feel the emotion of surprise that exists on a system I level. Transfering triggers of the emotion of surprise from one person to another is hard.

Yes, if you look at software engineering, its state of formal education is quite bad compared to some other engineering professions. I even have a good idea of the historical causes of this.

I would say it's because the relevant professors see issues of algorithm design as higher status than asking themselves when programmers should recheck their code. It seems no Computer Science professor took the time to setup a study to test whether teaching programmers to be faster at typing increases their programming output. That's because the mathematical knowledge get's seen as more pure and more worthy. It has to do with the kind of the knowledge that's valued.

Mathematical proofs can provide strong justification and are thus more high status than messy experiements about teaching programming that can be confounded by all sorts of factors.

This leads to a misallocation of intellectual resources.