Bob Barton once called systems programmers "High priests of a low cult" and pointed out that "computing should be in the School of Religion" (ca 1966).
Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds of caching Kahneman's "System 1" does for us for real-time performance and in lieu of actual thinking.
1. Spaced repetition can make the recalling - and thus the thinking and pondering - easier. It can certainly make one more consilient, given the right choice of "other things to study" e.g. biology or social psychology, as you've mentioned in an earlier comment.
2. It takes quite a bit of training for a reader to detect bias in their own cognition, particularly the "cognition" that happens when they're reading someone else's thoughts.
What to do about System 1, though? Truly interactive research/communication documents, as described by Bret Victor, should be a great help, to my mind, but what do you think could be beyond that?
I think that the "training" of "System 1" is a key factor in allowing "System 2" to be powerful. This is beyond the scope of this AMA (or at least beyond my scope to try to put together a decent comment on this today).
There's a recursive sense in which "training" "System 1" involves assimilating more abstractions, through practice and spaced repetition, such as deferring to the equations of motion when thinking about what happens when one throws a ball in the air. Going as far as providing useful interfaces to otherwise difficult cognitive terrain (a la Mathematica) is still part of this subproject. The process of assimilating new abstractions well enough that they become part of one's intuition (even noisily) is a function of time and intense focus. What do you see as a way to aggregate the knowledge complex and teach further generations of humans what the EEA couldn't, fast enough that they can solve the environmental challenges ahead? What's HARC's goal for going about this?
Personally, I've found that discovering "hazy" intuitive connections between otherwise dissonant subjects/ideas (such as the mentioned physics example) cements new concepts at a System 1 level quickly if done early in the learning process. It's also surprising how far one can go on such noisy assimilations alone as well, before needing to dig deeper.
Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds of caching Kahneman's "System 1" does for us for real-time performance and in lieu of actual thinking.