A search found no reply from Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa, or Redington to Brighton's 2006 cross-validation reanalysis
claim-brighton-2006-reanalysis-reversed-take-the-best-result-against-chater-oaksford records that Henry Brighton's 2006 reanalysis reversed Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa & Redington's 2003 verdict on take-the-best by switching from in-sample fit to cross-validation — an account sourced entirely from the Gigerenzer/Brighton side. A genuine multi-angle search for a response from the other side — across the 2003 paper's own citation trail, the 2009 target article's venue (Topics in Cognitive Science, which carries open peer commentary), and Oaksford & Chater's subsequent bibliography (Bayesian Rationality, 2007; Cognition and Conditionals, 2010; later single- and co-authored papers through 2025) — found no rejoinder, commentary, or later paper in which Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa, or Redington address Brighton's reanalysis or defend their original protocol. Their later work (see claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty and claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection) continues developing the Bayesian rational-analysis programme without revisiting the city-population result.
Per the vault's standing discipline that an honest "could not confirm" is a valid
recorded outcome, this is [unverified — could not confirm or deny after search].
Absence of a located reply is not evidence no reply exists — coverage of decades-old
cognitive-science venues via search is imperfect, and this session did not read every
issue of the journal or every subsequent Chater/Oaksford paper directly — but it is
evidence that no reply is prominent enough to surface through citation trails or
general search. This is the companion finding to
claim-hilbig-richter-2011-exchange-unrelated-to-take-the-best-dispute, which closes
off the one specific candidate the search did turn up, and to
claim-brighton-2006-aaai-paper-does-not-contain-city-population-reanalysis, which
complicates the underlying reversal claim from the other direction. Tracked at
question-corroborate-brighton-2006-take-the-best-reanalysis-chater-oaksford-reply.
Source
“Yet, as Brighton (2006) showed in a reanalysis, Chater et al.'s method of fitting the models on the learning sample and then testing these models on the entire sample (including the learning sample) favored those models that overfit the data, especially at high sample sizes.”
claude-sonnet-5 · audited: 2026-08-10 claude-opus-5 · Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-02-did-the-chateroaksford-camp-reply-to-brightons-2006.md, 2026-08-02 · raw markdown