I, too, enjoyed Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But note that Tolkien was a devout Catholic who took the Bible very seriously. To announce that LOTR is superior to the Bible puts you in the same camp as the woman who, reading “Hamlet” for the first time in middle-age, stopped reading it halfway through because it was filled with cliches.
Try overcoming anti-religious bias.
I regret that I have to disagree with the post, even though I am a great fan of Orwell.
Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity. They knew exactly what they were doing, knew why they were doing it, and were glad of the outcome. More logic and better writing would simply have helped them be even more effectively evil. Teaching clear thinking is important; but it will not stop evil people from having evil intentions or acting evil. Evil emerges from the heart and soul, not the head. Intellectuals who supported, and support, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Osama, Saddam, and so forth, knew what they doing. They got a vicarious thrill from the results, even if they did not get their hands dirty. Yes, they may have used wretched writing to hide the consequences from others, but they knew what they wanted. I might add that Orwell’s hands were not clean; he fought with the Communists in Spain, he advocated hard-line total socialism in England of a type that would make George Mason economists gag.
Maybe you suffer from “intellectualist bias.” Academics commonly do. That is a bias, that might go all the way back to Socrates, that the world only needs education to be good. A few courses in logic, rhetoric, and good writing, and everthing will be okay. So, sorry, but intellectualist bias may be the hardest to overcome.
So, in a sense, I am with Tyler on this one. It is good to overcome confirmation bias, or attribution bias, and so forth, but they are not at the top of my list.
Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes. Maybe that is just my bias.
Regarding the quote from J. K. Galbraith, all I can say is he was a major practitioner of exactly that point. I don’t believe he ever ran a single statistical test in his life, I never heard him ever doubt his own beliefs, and I don’t believe he ever changed his mind (or at least admitted to changing his mind) on a single point of economics. He tended to regard his own private observations has infalliable evidence. One could do a major study of bias just studying the work of Galbraith. Galbraith is a great example of how a large ego is the greatest barrier to seeking truth. The world needs more genius, but it needs more humility more.