> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…
Statistics and rationality merely work by measuring current events against your previous experiences and inferring the most probable outcome of your possible actions. That means that your previous life experiences and how you have interpreted and classified them are key in what your brain is going to expect from future events and in consequence how you are going to react to them.
In your example you are assuming these people are acting "irrationally" because they aren't taking the "correct" decision by your own judgment. The reality is that likely they are acting based on very different premises from your own, extracted from their own life experiences and those of their ancestors. Given the outcome, they were clearly wrong on their conclusions, but that only means that rationality and statistics are useless if you are basing your reasonings on wrong premises and there is no mechanism to stop you from feeding them the wrong data, not that these seemly absurd actions didn't have a somewhat rational justification.
About cognitive biases, well, your brain makes decisions based on the data it has available, and whenever it is insufficient it can't simply delay decision making until its confidence level is acceptable, hence it needs some heuristics to guarantee it gets a result whenever enough previous experience is lacking.