back when I read a bunch of behavioral psych books by people like kanheman and arielly in my 20s I didn't actually care about the studies and just looked at the results and decided for myself if they were intuitive in some way, in hindsight this was definitely the right call

"priming" was obvious bullshit

"anchoring" was self evident because you need some kind of yardstick or else there's no meaning to any number. it's not even a "bias" it's the cognitive necessity that makes bias inevitable

"availability bias" is just like uh yeah no shit

"Texas sharpshooter fallacy" also needs no study, you obviously *can* come up with a pattern for anything post-hoc and what kind of idiot thinks people *wouldn't* do that?

"no true scotsman" isn't even a bias that's just called shifting the goal posts lmfao

and then for when "gut feelings" work or don't work, that's actually more a mathematical issue than an empirical one: it's just whether or not your history of pattern matching is a convergent series. and even then it really only addresses whether or not you improve some metric

and ultimately system 1 vs system 2 is very poorly elaborated because it talks as if there's simply computing everything thoroughly or blindly probabilistically pattern matching and that these two things are orthogonal. in other words, the interesting questions are elided

the problem is that "biases & heuristics" sees everything as a game to win by maximizing some score, when in real life the way you relate to the world ("subjectivity" beyond some cartesian pretense) js constantly changing in ways that change the very "rules" of any such game

pretty much everything interesting you can do can't really be evaluated by some score. only way you can really evaluate it is by your own internal sense of agency, which is in fact very real because when you feel impotent there's usually no talking yourself out of it