think it through

Knowledge of logic and probability wasn’t important for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But when it comes to writing about rationality and intuition we must remember that readers are going to jump to conclusions about how people jump to conclusions. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s not 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.