The primary purpose of practicing ideas and skills is to enable your subconscious to do them. Subconscious energy and attention are more plentiful and cheap than conscious energy and attention. This is called automatization (including by Ayn Rand) because, from the perspective of your conscious mind, what your subconscious does is largely automatic. Practice can teach mental tasks to your subconscious mind and free up your conscious mind for more advanced tasks.
I thought it’s interesting that habits, automatized knowledge and the subconscious can be both a source of bias and also can resist bias.
It is. It seems pretty simple now that you said it but it felt surprising and unintuitive since I’ve never heard of this before but I’ve heard about unconscious bias lots.
This is related to something I’ve talked about before: mastery of good ideas → you can get stuff right anyway when tired, biased, sloppy, distracted, etc → practice/mastery/automatization can help reduce bias.
added this paragraph to essay:
Also, generally speaking, if you practice good ideas and master them, and get them automatized in your subconscious, then that helps you get things right even when tired, sloppy, distracted, upset or biased.
I wish I had written down what I thought automatized knowledge that can resist bias would be when I read the headline. I think I thought about how you’ve talked about how mastery/automatization can make you correct despite tiredness and emotions. But I can’t remember it exactly and I guess my bias would be to believe that I knew what it was gonna be.