The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

Only this bit of NNT, but lots of Khaneman, Tversky, Thaler etc. as well, in this excellent article.

It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas. As the trader turned epistemologist Nassim Taleb says: “We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.” But readers of popular psychology books on rationality must recognize that there’s a lot they don’t know, and they must be beware of how seductive stories are. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.

via The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network.

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