This involves three skills: first recognizing a problem as a difficult one, then figuring out what heuristic you might have used, and finally coming up with a better solution.
Figuring out the particular heuristic seems more interesting than useful—“don’t trust immediate answers” is a good rule, but it seems easier to start again than to de-bias an immediate guess (i.e. look up average salaries instead of trying to figure out how much you need to discount your guess of doctors’ average salaries.)
Good point. I think I mostly intended the second step to be a way for you to evaluate whether the heuristic you were using seems to be a reasonable one—there could be cases where you look at it and decide that it’s probably good enough for your purposes.
Figuring out the particular heuristic seems more interesting than useful—“don’t trust immediate answers” is a good rule, but it seems easier to start again than to de-bias an immediate guess (i.e. look up average salaries instead of trying to figure out how much you need to discount your guess of doctors’ average salaries.)
Good point. I think I mostly intended the second step to be a way for you to evaluate whether the heuristic you were using seems to be a reasonable one—there could be cases where you look at it and decide that it’s probably good enough for your purposes.
Well, except for all those times where second-guessing makes you worse off.
That’s like saying people are being too rational. Get better at second guessing. Get better at being rational.