This was a fascinating article!

The part I found especially poignant was the house-dwellers who incorrectly tried to correct their spouses, e.g. "no it actually wastes energy to turn down the heat at night".

The general phenomenon seems to exactly parallel the article Medieval Ballistics and Experiement here on Less Wrong, where lucidfox asked how anyone could ever have believed in the Aristotelian impulse theory when it predicts trajectories that look nothing like a parabola -- and then RichardKennaway pointed out that in the presence of air resistance, cannonball trajectories match the Aristotelian model quite closely and look nothing like parabolas.

There really seems to be two modes of thinking here: one which notices that the house gets colder when the outside temperature drops, and concludes that you'd better turn up the thermostat, and one which notes that the thermostat controls a set point, and concludes that the house could not possibly have gotten colder.

It's clear which way of thinking is more rational, but I certainly find myself working in the theory-driven mode a lot, and I think this may be a problem particularly with the kind of people who like Less Wrong (since we are comfortable thinking about elaborate intellectual theories). It's definitely related to Noticing Confusion.