Pardon my cynicism, but you could use these as a guide for drawing money from people that are predisposed towards having many strong cognitive biases. There seems to be a near limitless number of people with money suffering from extreme social isolation in addition to narcissistic personality disorder. These people have little interest in reality and will happily give you their money if you play into these biases.
Bingo. These (the authors) are people with no ideas of their own, but they still need funding. So they "classify" other people's ideas and make some nice graphics.
Read "Thinking Fast and Slow" (which, to their credit, they do list as a resource) and skip the rest of their grant seeking.
What's the use of knowledge of optical illusions? So that you know that "seeing is believing" is not 100% dependable.
Also you just listed their "use" in your very comment. People build upon these to convince others, and if you would like to be less manipulated, then they are useful to know.
It’s useful when evaluating your own actions and reasoning, especially when you might have a vested interest in the result. From evaluating investment opportunities to understanding the state of science in an area, being aware of cognitive biases can help you get to the real truth.
Knowing about them is supposed to be an introspection tool to help you make better arguments/philosophies. For example, I've seen some ex-christians who decided to turn atheists by learning more about cognitive biases, and then realizing that some of their former religious arguments were circular reasoning or appeal to authority or whatever.
There is a bit of a dunning-kruger effect to be sure: accusing other of cognitive biases that one just stumbled into on wikipedia is itself going off-topic. It takes a bit more effort to actually internalize it.
On a semi-related topic, I find it a bit weird the way people think about "winning an argument". People usually prize being "right", but if you think about it from a strictly selfish perspective, you don't really gain anything from that outcome, whereas learning seems like a better outcome.
> For example, I've seen some ex-christians who decided to turn atheists by learning more about cognitive biases, and then realizing that some of their former religious arguments were circular reasoning or appeal to authority or whatever.
Similarly, there are some people (a much smaller number I would expect) that have moved from atheism to "spirituality", for the same reasons.
Yeah, I'm one of those, though I'm not sure my belief system qualifies as spirituality. The gist in these cases is realizing that atheism is not the opposite of christianity (in the sense that there ought to be a conflict between two incompatible ideologies) and that there's quite a bit more depth and breadth to theism, moral frameworks and philosophy in general than the who-is-more-right crowd might think.
Totally agree - my general take on it is that standard Atheism and Christianity/etc (as understood & practiced by the average person) are incredibly simplistic, but most people in either ideological camp are fairly oblivious to it.
The mantra I follow is "strong opinions held weakly" (meaning, strive to be as well-informed as I can, but be willing to change my mind to even the polar opposite of my current view in light of new evidence)
IMHO, the key is in realizing that your ego has a tendency to gets tangled with the notion of being right. It's a lot easier to "let go" if you internalize the idea that your worth/identity is not the same thing as your beliefs and that a lot of what you think you "know" is actually not factual knowledge, but merely interpretation or inference of previous experiences.