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ciphergoth comments on So You Think You're a Bayesian? The Natural Mode of Probabilistic Reasoning - Less Wrong
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I must wonder whether, and to what extent, these results would replicate in a real-world situation where the question is perceived as truly important by the parties concerned.
When discussing research like this, people often imagine the subjects fully applying themselves, as if they were on an important exam or in a business situation where big money is involved. However, to get a more realistic picture, you should imagine yourself in a situation where someone is asking you obscure TV quiz-style questions about things that you don't care about in the slightest, bored to death, being there only because of some miserable incentive like getting a course credit or a few dollars of pocket money. I can easily imagine people in such a situation giving casual answers without any actual thought involved, based on random clues from the environment -- just like you might use e.g. today's date as an inspiration for choosing lottery numbers.
Therefore, the important question is: has anyone made similar observations in a situation where the subjects had a strong incentive to really give their best when thinking about the answers? If not, I think one should view these results with a strong dose of skepticism.
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.