Habits

In CF, a habit is the end product of practice: once a skill is fast, low-attention, and low-error, you can run it on autopilot while thinking about something else. This is automatization viewed from the conscious side—the subconscious does the work cheaply, freeing scarce conscious attention for harder tasks and letting you build more complex skills on top of mastered components.

CF’s distinctive point is that habits cut both ways. Because an automatized skill is stable against your current mood, a good habit resists bias and emotion: even upset or motivated to see otherwise, you still recognize a bird as a bird, or still type accurately. But the same stability means a bad habit embeds its error durably, and a bias built in during learning fires automatically regardless of an honest anti-bias mood. So habits are simultaneously a defense against irrationality and a vector for it.

A second CF emphasis: habits get harder to change with age. Recently formed ones are flexible, but as a habit settles you forget the details and reasons behind it, so fixing it often means relearning the subject almost from scratch. Hence CF’s advice to decide carefully what is correct before drilling something into a habit, rather than constantly rebuilding.

During discussion, conscious attention monitors the habits and supplies overrides in cases the automatic routine handles wrongly. Change is also easiest when you are convinced the new way is strictly better, not a tradeoff—lingering internal disagreement keeps the old habit alive.