This is just a pet peeve of mine: journalists who obviously didn't double check the facts they speak of.<p>The psychological fallacy that the author speaks of is actually well studied and known as the conjunction fallacy and is not really that related to bayesian inference[1].<p>It is also notable that human decision making shows base rate neglect (not considering conditional probabilities), but when things are presented in terms of frequencies rather than strict probabilities, human decision making follows a bayesian curve[2], thus showing that humans do in fact incorporate bayesian learning and are in fact good at it contrary to what the journalist says.<p>[1]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy</a><p>[2]A. Tversky & D. Kahneman: "The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice", Science, 211, 453-458 (1981).