I can (a) present my recollections and try to collaborate to find an agreement; (b) just nod and accept X as the agreed-upon finding; (c) insist that !X, using all the art of persuasion I possess; I will choose the course of action which I believe will lead to a better marital life (this includes long-term consequences and personal stress as factors). [Sidenote: I do have a preference for relationships in which (a) tends to be the best choice]

In any of these cases, I keep track of my own estimate of P(X), adjusting it as appropriate during and after the exchange, on the evidence provided by the spouse's testimony and behaviour.

You are confusing "being right" with "being believed to be right". Making the right calculations is always the correct course of action (tautology), but that doesn't imply that you should necessarily say them.

It obviously depends on whether the expected utility of both people having the correct answer exceeds the disutility of spending the time and energy (physical and emotional) to locate/confirm it.

Your spouse insists X. You remember !X. What is the rational course of action?

If X matters, look for further evidence beyond your and your spouse's recollections, at least one of which is known to be wrong, but not which.

Um, what point were you making?

It depends on my preferences.

Also, what does scope neglect have to do with this?

The key phrase for me is this one:

bluntly letting people know when they are wrong, as if this will somehow endear others to them.

This sounds like it's definitely about signaling that you are right. The second sentence, though I do agree with it, doesn't seem like it's the main point of the paragraph because of the "also."

Economics tells us there is no free lunch.

Economics tells us lots of false things.

Most lawyers don't make millions

Whether someone will become a partner at biglaw and make millions per year is hard to predict, but it is fairly easy to predict who will get a permanent job as a biglaw associate making 500k per year. I'm not saying that this is a good job, but if you want such a job (and a chance at partner), it's pretty easy to predict before law school whether you can get it. The main point is which law school admits you. Whether you can get adequate grades and whether you can put in the hours on the job are two other factors. It's true that demand for these jobs makes it hard to get into top law schools, but if you don't get in, you should know you've lost without wasting tuition or 3 years.

But most law students make the simple error of not knowing that, of going to law schools that don't produce lawyers, or at least not lawyers that make more than they would having skipped law school. The kind of error economists refuse to believe in.

I've heard that a very high proportion of the economy is sales to businesses, but relatively few people who are thinking of starting a business think of anything but selling to consumers.

I'm guessing it's just that most people have little or no contact with selling to businesses, so it's a blind spot. There may also be an element of preferring to sell an obviously interesting product-- if you're selling to retail, you can still have that, but a lot of business-to-business products are infrastructure.

He must be referring to the multitudes of die-hard ALGOL 60 users.

I disagree. I know that I can't read emotions well at all. That's a weakness, not a strength. I also know that I'm good at explaining math. That's a strength. Each list has items that are not on the others. I'd be inclined to agree that for almost everyone a proper list of strengths should have overlap with a proper list of weaknesses but that's a much weaker claim.

I don't think I see what you were going for--in my reading it's one of those things that sounds wise briefly but doesn't hold up very well.

I think of the "smart people weakness" as potentially being"the same"--the things I might admit to in the sort of ridiculous job interview question where they ask your greatest weakness. They tie into an identity and a thinking style: "I'm a nerd, I want to do too much research and need to be better at identifying when what I have is good enough"; "I've been told all my life that great things are expected of me and I haven't taken as many risks as I should have because I wanted those paths to be open to me."; "I've always been so focused on my studies that I didn't have as full a personal life as I would have liked." (Equally-spun rephrasings available ad infinitum.) Geeks half-brag about this sort of thing--implying that the weaknesses were necessary tradeoffs for (or accompaniments to) the strengths, which should be obvious to and respected by all, naturally.

But not so much, for the weaknesses I have that I wouldn't consider to be mainly affecting smart people (among others, a tendency to self-sabotage, also overwhelming feelings of inefficacy and self-doubt--so yes, I'm just wonderful at those interview questions). I don't think they tie in very strongly to my identity, they're not complements to strengths, they reflect nearly nothing but negatively on me. I wouldn't consider them "the same" at all.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I can't think of any sensible definitions of the words "strength" and "weakness" for which this statement even can be true.

I actually think this is a great point, though apparently most people disagree.

That would make a bit more sense if it was "are the same". Otherwise that was a classic example of a completely wrong aphorism.