These articles talk only about the conjunction fallacy. Maybe it wasn’t clear enough from the context, but my above reply was to a comment about the anchoring bias, and was meant to comment on that specific finding.
But in any case, I have no doubt that these results are reproducible in the lab. What I’m interested in is how much of these patterns we can see in the real world and where exactly they tend to manifest themselves. Surely you will agree that findings about the behavior of captive undergraduates and other usual sorts of lab subjects should be generalized to human life in general only with some caution.
Moreover, if clear patterns of bias are found to occur in highly artificial experimental setups, it still doesn’t mean that they are actually relevant in real-life situations. What I’d like to see are not endless lab replications of these findings, but instead examples of relevant real-life decisions where these particular biases have been identified.
Given these considerations, I think that article by Eliezer Yudkowsky shows a bit more enthusiasm for these results than is actually warranted.
You should read Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down) before proposing these sort of things.
In particular, if you haven’t already, please read Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment in full—it contains details of 22 different experiments designed to address problems like this.
These articles talk only about the conjunction fallacy. Maybe it wasn’t clear enough from the context, but my above reply was to a comment about the anchoring bias, and was meant to comment on that specific finding.
But in any case, I have no doubt that these results are reproducible in the lab. What I’m interested in is how much of these patterns we can see in the real world and where exactly they tend to manifest themselves. Surely you will agree that findings about the behavior of captive undergraduates and other usual sorts of lab subjects should be generalized to human life in general only with some caution.
Moreover, if clear patterns of bias are found to occur in highly artificial experimental setups, it still doesn’t mean that they are actually relevant in real-life situations. What I’d like to see are not endless lab replications of these findings, but instead examples of relevant real-life decisions where these particular biases have been identified.
Given these considerations, I think that article by Eliezer Yudkowsky shows a bit more enthusiasm for these results than is actually warranted.