Archie Cochrane’s skeptical defenses folded because Cochrane found the specialist’s story as intuitively compelling as the specialist did. But another mental process was likely at work, as well. Formally, it’s called attribute substitution, but I call it bait and switch: when faced with a hard question, we often surreptitiously replace it with an easy one. “Should I worry about the shadow in the long grass?” is a hard question. Without more data, it may be unanswerable. So we substitute an easier question: “Can I easily recall a lion attacking someone from the long grass?” That question
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