The conclusion to draw, then, should be a more general one: given an observation O and an explanation E of O, people can over-weight E as a piece of evidence about O’s probability.
But is it overweighting to use the fact that the explanation is bad as evidence against the statement being true? A true statement is more likely to have a good explanation than a false one, so it seems that one could do a Bayseian update on the truth of the staement based on the quality of the explanation.
Sounds reasonable. Although I think it’s evidence against that kind of updating if it leads one to get a question wrong, one might well get more evidence in favour of that kind of updating in everyday life.
But is it overweighting to use the fact that the explanation is bad as evidence against the statement being true? A true statement is more likely to have a good explanation than a false one, so it seems that one could do a Bayseian update on the truth of the staement based on the quality of the explanation.
Sounds reasonable. Although I think it’s evidence against that kind of updating if it leads one to get a question wrong, one might well get more evidence in favour of that kind of updating in everyday life.