Empirically speaking, logical-reasoners are some of the most bias people I know, particularly in their unwillingness to consider any topics or possibilities that aren’t reasoned according to their rules of critical thinking (which are taught to them in a system that is very much an indoctrination). In fact, many logical-reasoners prefer simply not to SPEAK with people who aren’t capable (say, through lack of training or “indoctrination”) of forming “logic-game” context arguments.

Many of the rules of logic simply make conversation and the exploration a “game” of sorts where whoever can reason better and prove their case better “wins”.

Being more logical does NOT make a person right. Being UNBIASED (which, it could be argued, is a state that does not exist), does not make a person right.

Nor does “winning” an argument by proving the logical flaws of your “opponent” make you right, although many lawyers might argue the opposite.

Critical thinking and logical reasoning are wonderful tools, but when you speak of them in terms of “debiasing” and “education” you commit what you are supposedly trying to avoid. Critical thinking should most certainly not be a religion, but its adherents are rarely any different than the “fanatics” they are trying to cure.

In practical terms, a fella dislikes talking to smarmy “you’re biased and I’m right” types as much as he does door-to-door 7th day adventists.

All that being said, I’m all for “debiasing” (ie, brainwashing) experiments that indoctrinate people into the system of critical thinking. Sounds like fun. Parties are better when you have folks to offset the religious nutcases. Put them in a pit for gladiator combat for the amusement of the masses. We should just avoid kidding ourselves about what’s being done. Go forth and multiply your flock, o prophet. Teeheehee!

-MRA
PS I like critical thinking books better than religious texts. They’re usually shorter.

An easy research program would be to explore the debiasing effect of simply studying H&B. My impression is that this is not being pursued because H&B is seen as descriptive, not normative. It also seems to me that there is more work that takes the position that H&B describes humans working optimally (and not even because of bounded rationality, but really optimally!) than the position that humans can do better.

For naive subjects, you can just hand them a set of fifty or so experiments listed in Judgment Under Uncertainty and see how well their answers match reality. For people who have studied H&B *at all*, this won’t work, because the minute you tell them “This is a test on cognitive bias”, they’ll start to think about the well-established ways in which they might be biased, which wouldn’t happen in a real-world situation.

There have been some attempts at teaching critical thinking, with varying results (see e.g. http://www.arts.monash.edu/phil/research/thinking/08peer.html at the end) but this has apparently been framed as traditional logic, argumentation analysis etc and not as directly reducing major biases.

Would there be a market for courses reducing bias? At least some people obviously think it is an Important Thing, so there is some market for it. And for some situations like police or certain experts there might be a demand that they reduce biases before being hired.

Apply a little General Semantics here. Is the bias[1] that seems neccessary for fanaticism the same as the bias[2] that a course in critical thinking could hope to cure? I don’t think so.

In particular, of the 3 biases he specifies, 2 don’t fit what he’s saying.

Bias #1 (”dissenters are evil”) seems not at all amenable to being educated out of. This is both because it will apply to any such educators and because this model of bias #1 has cause and effect backwards or at least sidewards. It seems to come from associated social effects at least as much as they come from it.

#2 (”I’m less biased than others”) has an intrinsic problem so serious that the writer is committing it himself as he writes. I’m not accusing him of hypocrisy, I’m accusing him of a hopelessly circular point #2.

Bias #3, agreed.

On a slightly different note, I’m reminded of observations in Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. He concludes in an early chapter that religious beliefs are not generated by a lowered threshhold of skepticism, rather the belief comes first and then comes the credulity when problems with the belief need to be rationalized away. I’m paraphrasing him from memory, and I recommend the book.

You can make the best proposal in the world, eg, “Stop the Nazis from shooting innocent children”, sound like this. Translated into word salad, it would read something like:

“We should implement a clear, effective, and comprehensive plan for ensuring that the present circumstances do not impede the mental and physical development of the youth in the labor camp system.”