Our problems, of course, were constructed to elicit conjunction errors, and they do not provide an unbiased estimate of the prevalence of these errors.
See. Biased. Specifically designed to fool people.
What that says is that the test in question addresses only one of two obvious questions about the conjunction fallacy. It addresses the question of whether that kind of mistake is one that people do sometimes make; it does not address the question of how often people make that kind of mistake in practice. It’s like if they were trying to find out if overdosing on a certain vitamin can be fatal: They’ll give their (animal) subjects some absurd amount of it, and see what happens, and if that turns out to be fatal, then they go trying different amounts to see where the effect starts. (That way they know to look at, say, kidney function, if that’s what killed the first batch of subjects, rather than having to test all the different body systems to find out what’s going on.) All the first test tells you is whether that kind of overdose is possible at all.
Just because it doesn’t answer every question you’d like it to doesn’t mean that it doesn’t answer any questions.
Do you understand that the situation of “someone using his intelligence to try to fool you” and the situation “living life” are different? Studies about the former do not give results about the latter. The only valid conclusion from this study is “people can sometimes be fooled, on purpose”. But that isn’t the conclusion it claims to support. Being tricked by people intentionally is different than being inherently biased.
The point is “people can be fooled into making this specific mistake”, which is an indication that that specific mistake is one that people do make in some circumstances, rather than that specific mistake not being made at all. (As a counterexample, I imagine that it would be rather hard to trick someone into claiming that if you put two paperclips in a bowl, and then added two more paperclips to that bowl, and then counted the paperclips, you’d find three—that’s a mistake that people don’t make, even if someone tries to trick them.)
“Some circumstances” might only be “when someone is trying to trick them”, but even if that’s true (which the experiment with the dice suggests it’s not) that’s not as far removed from “living life” as you’re trying to claim—people do try to trick each other in real life, and it’s not too unusual to encounter other situations that are just as tricky as dealing with a malicious human.
What that says is that the test in question addresses only one of two obvious questions about the conjunction fallacy. It addresses the question of whether that kind of mistake is one that people do sometimes make; it does not address the question of how often people make that kind of mistake in practice. It’s like if they were trying to find out if overdosing on a certain vitamin can be fatal: They’ll give their (animal) subjects some absurd amount of it, and see what happens, and if that turns out to be fatal, then they go trying different amounts to see where the effect starts. (That way they know to look at, say, kidney function, if that’s what killed the first batch of subjects, rather than having to test all the different body systems to find out what’s going on.) All the first test tells you is whether that kind of overdose is possible at all.
Just because it doesn’t answer every question you’d like it to doesn’t mean that it doesn’t answer any questions.
Do you understand that the situation of “someone using his intelligence to try to fool you” and the situation “living life” are different? Studies about the former do not give results about the latter. The only valid conclusion from this study is “people can sometimes be fooled, on purpose”. But that isn’t the conclusion it claims to support. Being tricked by people intentionally is different than being inherently biased.
The point is “people can be fooled into making this specific mistake”, which is an indication that that specific mistake is one that people do make in some circumstances, rather than that specific mistake not being made at all. (As a counterexample, I imagine that it would be rather hard to trick someone into claiming that if you put two paperclips in a bowl, and then added two more paperclips to that bowl, and then counted the paperclips, you’d find three—that’s a mistake that people don’t make, even if someone tries to trick them.)
“Some circumstances” might only be “when someone is trying to trick them”, but even if that’s true (which the experiment with the dice suggests it’s not) that’s not as far removed from “living life” as you’re trying to claim—people do try to trick each other in real life, and it’s not too unusual to encounter other situations that are just as tricky as dealing with a malicious human.