Basically, the problem is that K&T-style insights about cognitive biases -- and, by extension, the whole OB/LW folklore that has arisen around them -- are useless for pretty much any question of practical importance. This is true both with regards to personal success and accomplishment (a.k.a. "instrumental rationality") and pure intellectual curiosity (a.k.a. "epistemic rationality").

From the point of view of a human being, the really important questions are worlds apart from anything touched by these neat academic categorizations of biases. Whom should I trust? What rules are safe to break? What rules am I in fact expected to break? When do social institutions work as advertised, and when is there in fact conniving and off-the-record tacit understanding that I'm unaware of? What do other people really think about me? For pretty much anything that really matters, the important biases are those that you have about questions of this sort -- and knowing about the artificial lab scenarios where anchoring, conjunction fallacies, etc. are observable won't give you any advantage there.

Note that this applies to your biases about abstract intellectual topics just ... (read more)

Here are some tentative guesses about this whole rationality and success business.

Let's set aside "rationality" for a minute and talk about mental habits. Everyone seems to agree that having the right habits is key to success, perhaps most famously the author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But if you look at the 7 habits the Covey identifies ("Be Proactive", "Begin with the End in Mind", "Put First Things First", "Think Win/Win", "Seek First to Understand, Then Be Understood", "Synergize", and "Sharpen the Saw") they don't look too much like what gets discussed on Less Wrong. So what gives?

I think part of the problem is the standard pattern-matching trap. Perhaps books like Covey's genuinely do address the factors that the vast majority of people need to work on in order to be more successful. But analytical folks tend not to read these books because

• they're part of a genre that's sullied its reputation by overpromising
• even when they don't overpromise, analytical people are rarely part of the target audience, and the books do things like give incorrect folk explanations for stuff tha

Eliezer noted (in a comment on a blog post I made about Nonprofit Kit For Dummies) that he did in fact buy the book and try to apply it. This suggests the difference was in fact Luke, and that we need How To Be Lukeprog For Dummies, which he is of course posting piecemeal ;-)

But if you look at the average person and ask why they aren't getting what they want, very rarely do you conclude the issue is that they're suffering from anchoring, framing effects, the planning fallacy, commitment bias, or any of the other stuff in the sequences.

I very often conclude that people are suffering from the planning fallacy.

I really don't like the word 'bias' especially in combination with 'overcoming'. It implies that there's the ideal answer being computed by your brain, but it has a bias added to it, which you can overcome to have a correct answer. Much more plausible is that you do not have the answer, and you substitute some more or less flawed heuristic. And if you just overcome this heuristic you will get dumber..

No, it's because lukeprog did what seems like common sense: he bought a copy of Nonprofits for Dummies and did what it recommends.

There's a similar principle that I use sometimes when solving physics problems, and when building anything electronic. It's called "Do it the Right Way."

Most of the time, I take shortcuts. I try things that seem interesting. I want to rely on myself rather than on a manual. I don't want to make a list of things to do, but instead want to do things as I think of them.

This is usually fine - it's certainly fast when it works, and it's usually easy to check my answers. But as I was practicing physics problems with a friend, I realized that he was terrible at doing things my way. Instead, he did things the right way. He "used the manual." Made a mental list. Followed the list. Every time he made a suggestion, it was always the Right Way to do things.

With physics, these two approaches aren't all that far apart in terms of usefulness - though it's good to be able to do both. But if you want to do carpentry or build electronics, you have to be able to do things the Right Way.

Use direct replies to this comment for suggesting things about tackling practical biases.

I think that you are using the word 'bias' somewhat idiosyncratically here, and that this might be causing some people to have a hard time understanding the main point of this post, which (if I may) I would summarize as follows:

Many people in this community seem to believe that, when we do not get what we want, this is primarily because we are afflicted by one or more cognitive biases, such as anchoring or scope insensitivity. But this is not so. The main source of practical irrationality is lack of certain practical skills or habits, like "figuring out what your goals really are" or "looking at your situation objectively and listing the biggest problems". What are the best ways to develop these skills?

As much as I think lukeprog - EY comparisons are informative, I wonder if the difference is just different amounts of energy. I hear that lukeprog is working 60 hour weeks and that EY had trouble being productive for more than 4 hours a day, and looking for citations I noticed this down the page.

That can't explain everything- there's another comment that comes to mind that I'm having difficulty finding, in which one of lukeprog's hacks dramatically increased EY's writing output- but it seems like it's part of a complete explanation.

As I recall, experiments show that people who learn about anchoring are still susceptible to anchoring, but people who learn about the sunk cost fallacy are less likely to throw good money after bad.