[Qcombinator]

I'm tempted to file this as another "Humans think oversimplistically, says oversimplistic study". The world is a massively complicated place, and nobody can come close to understanding it all. If your intellectual background tells you that vaccines don't cause autism and somebody comes to you with a study that purports to say they do, is rejecting it "confirmation bias" — or is it in fact the rational thing to do, even if you lack the medical expertise to explain where the study goes wrong?

Of course, your background beliefs are never going to be perfect, so sometimes you will reject the wrong things, but that's not because our reason is "broken" per se, it's an engineering trade-off: we have to take certain shortcuts, make certain assumptions, apply certain guesses, because working everything out in full mathematical detail just isn't possible.

(That said, I'm certainly not claiming that most people are brilliant thinkers — the line "Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking" would come as news to everyone from Aristophanes to Zamyatin.)