Experiment is surely not the only way to acquire knowledge, but it’s one of the easiest ways to reduce the frequency of tricking yourself into reinforcing what you wanted to believe to begin with. As you say, the system of knowledge production is imperfect, so let’s try to use rigorous tools more often, not less.

I think we all agree that financial literacy is probably, on average, good. But, as the parent post said, the magnitude is unknown. Is it the “passport to financial freedom”, in which case it’s probably reasonable to spend a lot of class time in school on it? Or is it just nice to have, and outcomes are mostly dependent on other factors, in which case we could just as well use those classroom hours for something else. This is a hard thing to disentangle from good survey data, and nearly impossible from the kind of anecdotal reporting in most of the article.

Personally, I think some of the article cuts against its own thesis. “ Leanne Fielden fits the bill for the disadvantaged. She is an unemployed woman living in the deprived Middlesbrough region. […] Her profile belies her own financial expertise. “I’m fortunate that I’ve worked for Barclaycard and Visa. I often help family and friends with money issues,” she says. So she herself has no fear of finance.” If financial literacy were a magic bullet, why is she disadvantaged? Let’s not motte and Bailey this argument from the title (“financial literacy is a passport to financial freedom”) to the more defensible position of “financial literacy is helpful, in most situations”.