Alex Edmonds

If you give that simple message, that's going to be far more powerful than waking up at 5 a.m.

improves your productivity.

So long as you're also eating healthily and exercising daily and able to get in bed before 10 p.m.

So that more nuanced message is probably going to be more accurate.

But that's not the message that we want to hear, given our biases.

It actually can.

So there are some nice studies which look at trying to overcome this situation.

So not just studies highlighting the problem, but studies trying to solve this.

And so there were two sets of techniques that they tried.

So one set of techniques was just to say to people, be as unbiased as possible when evaluating the information.

And that just didn't work.

That would be like trying to tell a baseball player who's batting 200, try to hit the ball more accurately.

So they just don't have the ability to do that.

That's just a limit to their physical ability.

But there was a second set of techniques, which was to give people specific bias and counteracting thought processes.

So one of them was if you see a study whose findings that you like,

let's say it's gun control reduces crime, they told you to imagine the opposite.

So imagine that the study instead found that gun control increases crime.

How would you try to attack that study?

Well, you'd say, is it correlation or is it causation?