The Illusion of Sufficiency: Can Knowing the Names of Cognitive Biases Cure the Ignorance of Our Age?

This article, the second in the "Illusion of Sufficiency" trilogy, tests a common belief: that knowing the name of a cognitive bias is half the battle in correcting it. Drawing on Wilson and Brekke's (1994) four-condition framework and behavioural evidence from anchoring experiments, it shows that awareness of a bias, even when a person is explicitly warned about it, does not on its own correct the resulting error in judgement. This article calls that gap "meta-ignorance". It then shows that meta-ignorance does not stay at the individual level: the bias label becomes a weapon for discrediting rivals in identity conflicts, and the attention economy of the media strips it of its empirical and methodological grounding, as the fate of the Dunning-Kruger effect in public discourse shows. The article's claim, however, is corrective rather than refuting. The available meta-analytic evidence shows that training which includes practice, feedback and real application can produce a small but meaningful reduction in bias, though its transfer to real-world decisions remains uncertain, and decision-environment design offers an independent route that can complement or substitute it. The overall conclusion is that knowing a name builds awareness but does not correct behaviour; real correction comes only through practice and feedback.