Over the past couple of years, I became increasingly curious about how we make decisions — as individuals, groups, and societies. The more I learned about cognitive biases and reasoning errors, the more I felt that this knowledge isn’t just interesting but super useful, and important for the world.
So I decided to try and share it with others.
I’ve been working on a small, independent educational project that helps people learn about cognitive biases in a more interactive way. Instead of just reading about heuristics and biases, users can experience them through short simulations, guided roleplays, and simple practice games. It’s free and open, built in spare hours, and still evolving.
What I’ve found is that creating something alone, without institutional support or a clear roadmap, although it is incredibly rewarding, is also hard in ways I didn’t expect. So I began to wonder if this is even an effective way of altruism, and if so, how do I make it work?
So I wanted to ask:
What helped you most when building your own educational tool or project?
How did you gather useful feedback early on?
How did you handle the tension between wanting to do good and not knowing if your work had an impact?
Do you see this kind of work as effective altruism, even if such projects are often small and their impact is hard to measure?
I’d love to hear any advice, experiences, or thoughts. And I’d be especially grateful for honest feedback.
Thanks for reading this.
I just wanted to say that this is awesome and very impressive. How long did it take you? I agree that this seems like an excellent way of interactively learning about these biases and how they operate, compared to just reading about them.
Hi!
Thanks, I’m glad it seemed helpful!
It took me around 4 months to get to that stage. I am mostly working evenings/weekends, as I’ve got a full-time job and some other volunteering activities.
Although I work as product manager and was familiar with some concepts, I did not have coding experience and this is my first such project. So a good chunk of that time was spent on understanding the basics.
I certainly couldn’t have done it without AI, honestly, it’s been such a great help! I feel like we live in a time when everyone with some tech basics and enough dedication can create much more impressive stuff than this.
I’m still working on this project though, I think it is far from completion yet. I’ve got a lot of ideas, primarily in structuring it more as a concrete “learning path” rather than just a directory of tools.
Also, if everything works out, I want to add an online “serious game”, as they have been proved by multiple research papers to be more effective in cognitive bias education, and yet none of them seem to be available online. But that’s a long shot!