I agree. I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position, which seems ridiculous to me. The paper you referenced shows that if you present an extremely simple problem of probability and ask for the answer in terms of a frequency (and not as a single event), AND you present the data in terms of frequencies, AND you also help subjects to construct concrete, visual representations of the frequencies involved by essentially spoon-feeding them the answers with leading questions, THEN most of them will get the correct answer. From this they conclude that people are good intuitive statisticians after all, and they cast doubt on the entire heuristics and biases literature because experimenters like Kahneman and Tversky don't go to equally absurd lengths to present every experimental problem in ways that would be most intuitive to our paleolithic ancestors. The implication seems to be that rationality cannot (or should not) mean anything other than what the human brain actually does, and the only valid questions and problems for testing rationality are those that would make sense to our ancestors in the EEA.
I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position.
I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge, but here goes anyway ...
I think you are being ungenerous to the position Tooby and Cosmides mean to defend. As I read them (see especially Section 22 of their paper), they are trying to do two things. First, they want to open up the question of how exactly people reason about probabilities -- i.e., what mechanisms are at work, not just what answers people give. Second, they want to argue that humans are slightly more ra...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.