Although the title of this post is “The Law of Least Effort Contributes to the Conjunction Fallacy”, almost all of the actual post is dedicated to explaining what the LOLE is, to suggesting that it’s neglected because of prejudice against the people it’s associated with, and so forth.
The portion that actually purports to link the LOLE to the conjunction fallacy just says this:
LoLE encourages people to try to look casual, chill, low effort, even a little careless—the opposite of tryhard. The experimental results of Conjunction Fallcy research fit these themes.
And, sure, something like that might be true, but you need to do better than that to be convincing. E.g., come up with some experimental design where, if your theory is right, the LoLE should have a stronger effect on some participants than others, and look for systematic correlation between expected-LoLE-ness and conjunction effect. (If your theory is right then it seems like this should apply to many other “effort-conserving” fallacies besides the conjunction effect, so maybe those should be tested for too.) And then actually do the experiment or persuade someone else to do it.
Although the title of this post is “The Law of Least Effort Contributes to the Conjunction Fallacy”, almost all of the actual post is dedicated to explaining what the LOLE is, to suggesting that it’s neglected because of prejudice against the people it’s associated with, and so forth.
The portion that actually purports to link the LOLE to the conjunction fallacy just says this:
And, sure, something like that might be true, but you need to do better than that to be convincing. E.g., come up with some experimental design where, if your theory is right, the LoLE should have a stronger effect on some participants than others, and look for systematic correlation between expected-LoLE-ness and conjunction effect. (If your theory is right then it seems like this should apply to many other “effort-conserving” fallacies besides the conjunction effect, so maybe those should be tested for too.) And then actually do the experiment or persuade someone else to do it.
[EDITED to fix a typo.]