Is it always good thing to know your limitations?
Over at Scientific American, Samuel McNerneywrites about the dangers of learning about common human cognitive biases. The problem is that it's easy to find out about, say, confirmation bias, and think "Well, it affects other people, but now I know about it, I am immune to it" - and then proceed exactly as you did before, suffering the bias but now with misplaced confidence in your abilities. I fear that a similar thing is at work in science, in the form of the Limitations Section. It's become fashionable for scientific papers to end with a few paragraphs about "the limitations of the work". Why is this a problem? Well, just as a morally confused Catholic might prefer to confess his sins regularly rather than change his sinful ways, the Limitations Section can serve as a kind of ritual cleansing which makes ...
