RichardKennaway comments on Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute - Less Wrong

46 Post author: lukeprog 10 July 2012 11:20PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 20 July 2012 11:17:14AM 6 points [-]

But, the thing is, context informs us

None of that fog obscures the basic fact that the number of feminist female bank tellers cannot possibly be greater than the number of female bank tellers. The world is complex, but that does not mean that there are no simple truths about it. This is one of them.

People have thought up all manner of ways of exonerating people from the conjunction fallacy, but if you go back to Eliezer's two posts about it, you will find some details of the experiments that have been conducted. His conclusion:

The conjunction fallacy is probably the single most questioned bias ever introduced, which means that it now ranks among the best replicated. The conventional interpretation has been nearly absolutely nailed down. Questioning, in science, calls forth answers.

The conjunction error is an error, and people do make it.