Comment by jancsika

This being HN, it's worth noting explicitly:

All humans, including children, live with irrational tendencies which they never become fully aware of, much less fully control.

Moreover, our hardware/software is probably many orders of magnitude better at identifying irrational patterns in others vs. ourselves.

Moreover moreover, we've all seen how nearly anyone's attempt to change those patterns in themselves happens at a glacial pace measured in decades or-- if they're lucky-- years.

So you'd better carry around a queue of recent cases where your own irrational tendencies caused you to make sizable errors in judgment. Or some kind of static analysis tools that can constantly remind you of this truism.

Otherwise, this being HN, you're going to get roped in to a discussion where the implication is that adult humans can avoid irrational tendencies by spending a few minutes reasoning our way out of them from first principles. (Well, unless the implication in the comment you're responding to is that adults should also be told and accept lies as a means to some end.)

Edit: clarification