Re: The Conjunction Fallacy Fallacy [WAS Re: Anti-singularity spam.]

From: Jef Allbright (jef@jefallbright.net)
Date: Wed May 03 2006 - 19:38:44 MDT


On 5/3/06, Damien Broderick <thespike@satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 12:21 PM 5/3/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote:
>
> >Richard Loosemore wrote:
> >>Human minds are designed for immensely sophisticated forms of
> >>cognitive processing, and one of these is the ability to interpret
> >>questions that do not contain enough information to be fully
> >>defined (pragmatics).
>
>
> >Old, old, old alternative hypothesis disconfirmed a dozen ways from
> >Tuesday... Go forth and read the literature before you make up your
> >own interpretations.
>
> Odd how often we see an imputation of the deficiency of an opponent's
> background research. This gets very old, old and tired.
>
> If Tversky and Kahneman take significant issue with the Roschian
> case, I haven't seen it--but then my damned library is thousands of
> klicks away.

Ironically, this highlights my experience the single time I was face
to face with Eli, and I was most interested in getting his opinion on
an idea of mine of teaching archetypal patterns to young people as a
means of moving them along the road to rational thinking.

He responded quickly and automatically (it seemed) that he recommended
I first read Robyn Dawes' _Rational Choice in an Uncertain World_.

Before I could inform him that I *had* read it (and in fact had the
OCR'd version in my pocket that very moment) and had also read and
appreciated _Judgement Under Uncertainty_, _Bounded Rationality - The
Adaptive Toolbox_, and of course _The Adapted Mind_ by Cosmides and
Toobey, Eli put his finger tips together, bowed, and removed himself
from our presence.

At that moment I became truly enlightened. ;-)

- Jef

P.S. Damien, if you need an excerpt from Kahneman and Tversky (or any
of several hundred books in my scanned collection) let me know if I
can help. I even have a few of yours...



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:56 MDT