This list is useful for people who are already used to thinking in these ways, intuitively, by being exposed to other people and learning by osmosis. Formalizing intuition leads to easy growth.
For other people, you're right, it's about as useful as reading through a list of course descriptions rather than taking the actual courses.
"This list is useful for people who are already used to thinking in these ways, intuitively, by being exposed to other people and learning by osmosis. Formalizing intuition leads to easy growth."
That's exactly what I'm questioning though, if that's the right way to learn things. Especially with the premise of the article, there's a risk that people are just "collecting facts" to be used as anecdotes to avoid reasoning.
"For other people, you're right, it's about as useful as reading through a list of course descriptions rather than taking the actual courses."
Somewhat ironic I read course curriculums all the time to figure out which subjects are covered and what are good beginner books.
I think everything on this page is about encouraging reasoning rather than just collecting facts. If someone takes each one as a truism and blindly follows it, then yes, it would turn these mechanisms (which are supposed to help us identify and fight our own cognitive biases) into just another form of cognitive bias. That's why they're not laws, they're just handy patterns to help us reason about things that we see every day.
I'm not sure what you mean by using them as tools to avoid reasoning- they are explicitly meant to help with reasoning. I don't know what sort of reasoning could be done without incorporating any sort of logical frameworks at all. That's all this stuff is, tools to aid reasoning by identifying common patterns and antipatterns in thoughts and perceptions about the world around us. Anyone who treats these ideas as absolute laws rather than occasionally (frequently) useful abstractions is doing it wrong.
"That's all this stuff is, tools to aid reasoning by identifying common patterns and antipatterns in thoughts and perceptions about the world around us."
Identifying patterns is second to learning something. Logical fallacies are examples of bad arguments. You should first learn how to evaluate an argument [0] before trying to identify logical fallacies. Not only will you learn more, but there's a greater chance you will be able to put any given "model" in context. That people find things like logical fallacies useful is an indication that they don't understand the fundamentals.
For other people, you're right, it's about as useful as reading through a list of course descriptions rather than taking the actual courses.