Acquiring some explicit reasoning skill can make a person worse than they were, because it displaces working intuitions before it replaces them.
The claim is that the intuitions being overridden were doing real work, and the explicit substitute is initially worse at the job. It is offered as a warning against the confidence that arrives with a new framework, and it is unusual in being a self-criticism from a community devoted to the skill in question.
In practice
- A manager who has read one book on decision-making makes worse decisions for six months than before reading it.
- A driver taught to think about the steering drives worse until the thinking stops.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is displacement: a new explicit method overrides intuitions that were doing real work, and the substitute is initially worse at the job, so performance falls before it recovers.
- In its favour
- The shape is familiar from skill acquisition, where explicit instruction temporarily disrupts a fluent performance, and the warning against confidence arriving with a new framework is sound.
- Against it
- It is argued from anecdote within one community and not measured, and it is unfalsifiable in practice, since any failure can be attributed to being in the valley and any success to having crossed it.
- Standing
- A coinage of the rationalist community, argued from examples rather than tested. Argued from anecdote within the community and not measured. The related finding that instruction in a heuristic can impair performance before it improves it does appear in the expertise literature.
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Why reasoning works the way it does