I don't think I agree with step 3 in the second script (step 4 in the third script). I think that would create a bias against understanding the intricacies of arguments that you agree with, which I'm not comfortable with. Maybe you could just restate it as "If you aren't sure that you agree with the statement, continue reading" or something to that effect.

I don't think it is so much magical thinking or superstition as it is that emotions tend to get aligned with beliefs, but it takes time. And to realign your emotions you need to "deprogram" the now-unconscious memories causing the fear. Just how often do you get the opportunity to face the fear of ghosts that you caught from ghost stories and horror movies when you were younger?

I watched too much Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and so on myself - despite being more at home in the dark than anyone else I have ever met, I still have a visceral feeling that something is about to jump out at me whenever I'm out at night.

Of course, this reinforces (or is reinforced by, depending on how you approach it) the evolutionary fear of the dark, mostly inspired by night hunting predators.

And this still leaves the problem of the popularity of horror movies.

There's a heuristic at work here which isn't completely unreasonable.

I buy $15 items on a daily basis. If I form a habit of ignoring a $5 savings on such purchases, I'll be wasting a significant fraction of my income. I buy $125 items rarely enough that I can give myself permission to splurge and avoid the drive across town.

The percentage does matter -- it's a proxy for the rate at which the savings add up.

It's also a proxy for the importance of the savings relative to other considerations, which are often proportional to the value of what you're buying. If you were about to sign the papers on a $20000 car purchase, would you walk away at the last minute if you found out that an identical car was available from another dealer for $19995? Would you try to explicitly weigh the $5 against intangibles such as your level of trust in the first dealer compared to the second, or would you be right to regard the $5 as a distraction and ignore it?

Concussions are a clear all round negative to brain function. The drugs in question appear to provide some clearly demonstrated benefits. I do not agree that Annoyances analogy is appropriate.

No.

The analogy with a trip to India is not a bad one. You can read all you like about India, but it won't be the same as actually going to Mumbai and experiencing it first-hand. Presumably nobody would claim to be an expert on India without visiting it, seeing as it isn't that hard, and while it is not without risks the experience is worth it.

I wonder if there's some selection bias inherent in the studies presented here. Assuming that it has been established that older scientists are more willing to accept new controversial hypotheses than younger scientists, has it also been established that they differentially accept good new controversial hypotheses? What I see here is that they tended to embrace the big paradigm shifts relatively early, but it doesn't say anything about older scientists' tendencies to embrace controversial hypotheses that ended up later being discredited. Specifically, Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C megadosing later in life springs to mind.

Excellent post - it makes me wish that the system gave out a limited number of super-votes, like 1 for every 20 karma, so that I could vote this up twice.

I hope you don't mind, but I did a quick edit to insert "a choice of" before "two drugs to test", because that wasn't clear on my first reading. (Feel free to revert if you prefer your original wording.) Also edited the self-deception tag to self_deception per previous standard.