Chater & Oaksford's 1999 retrospective itself performs the 'swap the normative yardstick' move, recasting the Wason selection task as optimal data selection rather than logical falsification

rational-analysisoaksford-chaterwason-selection-taskbayesian-cognitionoptimal-data-selectioncognitive-sciencehistory-of-psychologyprimary-source

In their ten-year retrospective on the rational-analysis program — Chater & Oaksford, "Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition," Trends in Cognitive Sciences (1999), the same paper already in the vault for its Marr "outstanding question" (claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question) and the paper Lieder & Griffiths (2020) cite for the paradigm's name (claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-name-chater-oaksford-1999-as-rational-analysis-source) — the authors run the Wason selection task through the same yardstick-swap the vault catalogues as their signature move.

They first state the classical verdict against the logical reading: "The fact that people do not follow this pattern has been taken as casting doubt on human rationality." They then replace the standard rather than patch it: "Oaksford and Chater's rational analysis draws on the theory of optimal data selection (ODS) from Bayesian statistics, rather than on Popper's falsificationism." The payoff is stated as a dissolution, not a correction of the reasoner: "It resolves the problem of apparent human irrationality, by demonstrating that human performance approximates Bayesian optimal data selection." Logic is cast as the norm that made people look irrational; Bayesian information gain replaces it as the norm, and the apparent irrationality disappears under the new standard.

This is the same shape, on the same task, that claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection records from the 2009 Behavioral and Brain Sciences précis of their 2007 book, and that resource-rational analysis's §5.4 performs twenty-one years later — the move moc-the-yardstick-was-wrong-not-the-reasoner gathers as the family's defining reflex. What this note adds is the date: the 1999 retrospective carries the move in miniature eight years before the book and its précis, so the vault's "swap the yardstick" claims for Oaksford & Chater no longer rest only on the 2009 secondary.