The candle problem may be one of the background ideas which contribute to the belief that large incentives don't change biases, even though it's a loose connection-- it shows that incentives reduce creativity.
I think I've found the source of the meme here Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.
I'm not sure it quite proves everything it wants to prove-- big rewards do induce creativity among scammers, even if it's mostly variations on a few themes.
A lot of creativity went into creating the financial crisis-- I'm not sure how much of it was deliberate fraud, and how much was people not wanting to think about the consequences of behaviors which could lead to big rewards for them.
I know about the motivation science stuff. But that's very much distinct from debiasing.
I'm trying to better understand the relationship between incentivization and rationality, and it occurred to me that it is a "folk fact" around here that large financial incentives don't make cognitive biases go away.
However, I can't seem to find any papers that actually say this. It's not easy to google for (I have tried) so I wonder if the Less Wrong collective memory knows how to find the papers?
Is there a pattern to which biases go away with incentivization? Do we have at least 5 examples of biases that go away with incentivization and 5 examples that don't go away with incentivization?
As an incentive, I'll paypal $10 to the commenter whose answer is least biased and most useful.