I'm with Tomhs. The question has less value as a moral dilemma than as an opportunity to recognize how we think when we "know" the answer. I intentionally did not read the comments last night so I could examine my own thought process, and tried very hard to hold an open mind (my instinct was dust). It's been a useful and interesting experience. Much better than the brain teasers which I can generally get because I'm on hightened alert when reading El's posts. Here being on alert simply allowed me to try to avoid immediately giving in to my bias.

At the risk of revealing my ignorance, at a meeting of Bayesians, who would do the talking? I would attend Eliezer's gathering just to observe and absorb.

Interesting that Senthil brings up this book (http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelings-Intelligence-Gerd-Gigerenzer/dp/0670038636) because Eliezer's recent posts have gotten me thinking whether there are any good rules for when to trust/doubt intuition. Much of the discussion about bias suggests we should question, and often reject, our instincts but at some point this hits diminishing returns and in others (e.g., the planning fallacy) could be a mistake. If Eliezer or any other contributors has thoughts about good rules of thumb for when it's reasonable (safe? better?) to use rules of thumb, I would be eager to hear them.

I would like to re-emphasize Eliezer's point that "I don't know" (not an uneducated guess) is the proper answer to any question where, in fact, a student (or person in general) does not know the right answer, with the addition of "but I will find out." On my exams a (fully) incorrect answer gets zero points while "I don't know but I will find out" gets one-half credit. You still fail if you don't know anything, but at least you are not in an idiot damned school system. Rewarding students for data dumps when they don't know an answer cannot be healthy. Or maybe I'm just biased because my approach makes exam grading significantly easier....