Very interesting. I have always wondered if teaching people about cognitive biases can help them avoid them. On the very least, I am convinced that this may not be as easy as I was thinking.

Some relevant excerpts from the cited article:

>> If you're irrational to start with, having more knowledge can hurt you.

>> I've seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases.

>> You can think of people who fit this description, right?

This makes sense now. If the brain behind is close to a random baseline in interpreting statements, how can you feed more statements (about interpreting) to expect a positive outcome.

A question still remains: Would it help to teach people of these biases when they are kids.

The impression I keep getting is that (with due respect to "the power of the context" http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf) teaching someone about fallacies automatically makes them about 15 IQ stupider.

I am not sure what you are getting at. That the PARC people were too deep in awesomeness to productize it? Just grabbing at straws I haven't read the whole article.

I'm referring to the maxim often repeated by Alan Kay that "[point of view|context|a change of context] is worth [40|80] IQ".

Darn! I would be -150 by now. :-)

It's a one-off effect rather than -15IQ per fallacy, though I wouldn't deny that adding more fallacies could have some cumulative effect. Maybe deeper, rather than more extensive, understanding of fallacies, cognitive biases and so on may start to reverse the effect, though I wouldn't exactly bet on it doing do consistently.

It should be named the basilisk bias.