lukeprog comments on Do people think Less Wrong rationality is parochial? - Less Wrong
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Samuels et al.'s Ending the Rationality Wars is a good paper and I generally agree with it. Though Samuels et al. mostly show that the dispute between the two groups has been exaggerated, they do acknowledge that Gigerenzer's frequentism leads him to have different normative standards for rationality than what Stein (1996) called the "Standard Picture" in cognitive science. LessWrong follows the Standard Picture. Moreover, some of the criticisms of Gigerenzer & company given here still stand.
I skimmed chapter 5 of How the Mind Works but didn't see immediately the claims you might be referring to — ones that disagree with the Standard Picture and Less Wrong.
I don't have access to Stein, so this may be a different issue entirely. But:
What I had in mind from Pinker was the sections "ecological rationality" (a term from Tooby and Cosmides that means "subject-specific intelligence") and "a trivium."
One key point is that general-purpose rules of reasoning tend to be designed for situations where we know very little. Following them mindlessly is often a stupid thing to do in situations where we know more. Unsurprisingly, specialized mental modules often beat general-purpose ones for the specific tasks their adapted to. That's reason not to make too much of the fact that humans fail to follow the general-purpose rules.
And in fact, some "mistakes" are only mistakes in particular circumstances. Pinker gives the example of the "gambler's fallacy," which is only a fallacy when the probabilities of the events are independent, which outside of a casino they very often aren't.
Pinker seems to be missing the same major point that Gigerenzer et al. continuously miss, a point made by those in the heuristics and biases tradition from the beginning (e.g. Baron 1985): the distinction between normative, descriptive, and prescriptive rationality. In a paper I'm developing, I explain:
Or, here is Baron (2008):
What does mainstream academic prescriptive rationality look like? I get the sense that's where Eliezer invented a lot of his own stuff, because "mainstream cogsci" hasn't done much prescriptive work yet.
Examples: Larrick (2004); Lovallo & Sibony (2010).
This is helpful. Will look at Baron later.