Is it even hard? JFDI, or as we might say here, shut up and do the impossible. Is "efficient" a tendentious word? Taboo it. Is discussion being confused by mixing normative and positive concepts? DDTT.

The quote smells like rationalising to me.

The next sentence is

It's not like belief in UFOs killed your pet hamster when you were a kid or something and you've had a terrible hatred of it ever since.

Skeptics will tell you that yes, it did. Belief that the Sun needs human sacrifices to rise in the morning killed their beloved big brother, and they've had a terrible hatred of it ever since. And they must slay all of its allies, everything that keeps people from noticing that Newton's laws have murder-free sunrise covered. Even belief in the Easter bunny, because the mistakes you make to believe in it are the same. That seems like a pretty good reason to be concerned with it.

Are you looking for Bayesian statistics in general or these specifics examples? My Bayesian statistics textbook recommendation is here.

"At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

-Milton Friedman story

"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics." – Roger Bacon

In yet another attempt to show how this is not irrational, here goes:

There are every year about 100,000 new math theorems produced. To learn each of these theorems would require learning them at a rate of about 1 every minute when sleeping is taken into account. This is excluding all of the theorems needed to understand those theorems. Further this is just math and doesn't included every other field of human endeavor as well as on the job knowledge.

It should be clear from the above that is physically impossible to have all the knowledge in the world, let alone the problem of being able to remember it all. There are no "heros" and it is impossible to have such "heros". This is more then about gains in specialization (which are great and the only reason we can have this discussion in the first place) but the bounds of learning.

Now, going back to my earlier response on specialization and gains from trade there arises the question of does it make sense to try and have answers to every problem?

There is a reason that specialization works well, people become better at doing what they are currently doing. So even assuming one were able to "know" everything they would still not be as good at doing any particular task as someone that had specialized in that task. I may know how to read a recipe and how to make bread but I am not going to be a master bread maker and make amazingly good bread unless I practice making bread for some amount of time.

So assume for a minute that you have specialized in mayan epigraphy and someone brings you an Egyptian hieroglyph, as they are both ancient writing systems so they must have some common skill sets, is it rational to say "I have no idea and I am going to drop working on finding the meaning of all of these other glyphs that I am working on deciphering to figure out what most likely any master level Egyptologist knows off of the top of their head " or to say "I have no idea, here is the number to my colleague that specializes in reading Egyptian hieroglyphs"? in the one you have filled in a blank in your knowledge, but at a cost to adding new knowledge to the world, while in the other the blank remains but you continue working on what you are paid to do. What appears to be advocated here is the first response which has a huge opportunity cost for extremely low reward.

This was really interesting, while I got a decent primer in behavioural economics at university, neuroeconomics was still too cutting edge.

How foolish of him to think something like reasonableness would matter in the Hitch-hiker's Guide universe.

Of course, in context, they are in fact orbiting the lost planet of Magrathea.

When confronting something which may be either a windmill or an evil giant, what question should you be asking?

There are some who ask, "If we do nothing, and that is an evil giant, can we afford to be wrong?" These people consider themselves to be brave and vigilant.

Some ask "If we attack it wrongly, can we afford to pay to replace a windmill?" These people consider themselves cautious and pragmatic.

Still others ask, "With the cost of being wrong so high in either case, shouldn't we always definitively answer the 'windmill vs. giant' question before we act?" And those people consider themselves objective and wise.

But only a tiny few will ask, "Isn't the fact that we're giving equal consideration to the existence of evil giants and windmills a warning sign of insanity in ourselves?"

It's hard to find out what these people consider themselves, because they never get invited to parties.

-- PartiallyClips, "Windmill"