I agree completely. If you didn’t read the references or notice the date, the article seems completely legitimate. It makes a couple weird claims (fictional drugs?), but if you didn’t know the literature they wouldn’t necessarily seem any stranger than the actual things people do (like anchoring their estimate of a car’s value to their social security number). Remember that the absurdity heuristic is not a very good mode of reasoning!
So this means that while people who know Less Wrong can have a little inside joke, people who are new to rationalism and behavioral sciences could easily be fooled.
I ran that one in my head and thought, “that’s got to be about a million times less likely.” And indeed it was, 6 orders of magnitude. To some extent, I may just have gotten lucky… but I think that lurking on Less Wrong for the last couple years may have made me appreciate probabilities at a more intuitive level.
So does this mean Less Wrong actually works?