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gjm comments on Stupid Questions September 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: polymathwannabe 02 September 2015 06:26PM

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Comment author: gjm 08 September 2015 09:28:05AM 0 points [-]

That's a very interesting idea. I'm pretty sure it's too sophisticated to be consciously part of the reasoning of more than a tiny fraction of car buyers, so if it's an important part of the explanation it must be (as you suggest) unconscious -- presumably as a result of some general-purpose unconscious tendency to over-penalize risks of that general sort. This suggests some interesting psychology experiments; I wonder whether they've been done.