ChrisHallquist comments on Do people think Less Wrong rationality is parochial? - Less Wrong
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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.