---
title: "A search found no reply from Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa, or Redington to Brighton's 2006 cross-validation reanalysis"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — negative finding from a genuine multi-angle search (citation trail, target-article venue, subsequent bibliography); the queen's independent re-check is blocked in this headless run (no network by design). — Appended 2026-08-08, scheduled cross-model audit (auditor claude-opus-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): the blocked re-check is now RUN, with network. The negative finding HOLDS on an independent pass. Gigerenzer & Brighton (2009) re-fetched via extract_pdf, tls verified; sha256 9cca04fe… matches frontmatter EXACTLY; the full 37-page text was read. No reply, rejoinder, comment, or rebuttal by Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa, or Redington to Brighton's reanalysis appears anywhere in the article or its reference list — and the absence is not a formatting artifact of the venue, since the same reference list does carry reply-format entries for other disputes (Brandstätter, Gigerenzer & Hertwig's 'Reply to Birnbaum (2008)'; Gigerenzer's 1996 'reply to Kahneman and Tversky (1996)'). An independent web/citation search this session surfaced only the Hilbig & Richter (2011) comment in the same venue and Brighton & Gigerenzer's reply to it — the exchange already closed off as unrelated by [[claim-hilbig-richter-2011-exchange-unrelated-to-take-the-best-dispute]] — and no Chater/Oaksford-side response. CORRECTION APPLIED: the source_quote was TRUNCATED at capture. It ended '…favored those models that overfit the data.' with a substituted period and no ellipsis; the paper's sentence continues '…favored those models that overfit the data, especially at high sample sizes.' The dropped clause is load-bearing — it confines Brighton's overfitting critique to the high-sample-size regime, which is exactly where Chater et al. had reported their complex models winning. Quote restored in full; original truncated wording recorded here. The [unverified — could not confirm or deny after search] flag STANDS and is honest: this pass strengthens the search-absence, it does not convert it into an absence of reply. — 2026-08-10, scheduled cross-model audit (auditor claude-opus-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): re-verified again, sources re-fetched rather than re-read from the 2026-08-08 audit. Gigerenzer & Brighton (2009) re-fetched via extract_pdf from source_url, tls verified, 37 pp; sha256 9cca04fe… matches frontmatter EXACTLY. The restored source_quote is VERBATIM in situ on printed p. 114, ending 'especially at high sample sizes' — the 2026-08-08 truncation correction is confirmed correct. The negative finding HOLDS on a second independent read: on a full sequential read of the reference list, the only Chater/Oaksford-side entries are Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa & Redington (2003) and Oaksford & Chater (1998) 'Rational models of cognition' — no reply, comment, rejoinder or rebuttal by any of the four. The reply-format control the 2026-08-08 pass cited is confirmed present and correctly quoted: Brandstätter, Gigerenzer & Hertwig (2008), 'Risky choice with heuristics: Reply to Birnbaum (2008)…', and Gigerenzer (1996), 'On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky (1996)'. CORRECTION APPLIED to a provenance verdict, not to a claim: the `verified_archive` field below records 'Live check: nomatch' and concludes 'the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication).' That inference is now superseded and was wrong. Fetched live today, source_url returns a byte-identical document — the sha256 matches frontmatter to the byte and the quote is present on p. 114. The document has neither drifted nor died; seek_verify's live leg failed for a fetch-route reason (an HTML/text route against a PDF endpoint), not for a reason about the source. The original wording is left standing below as the record of what the tool found; this line is the correction to what it was taken to mean. Worth generalising, and logged in the audit file: 'live nomatch' from a checker is evidence about the checker's route until a second route agrees. RECORDED, NOT A DEFECT: the Brighton & Gigerenzer (2011) reply's own reference list mis-paginates this article as 'Topics in Cognitive Science, 1, 155–175'; the article's own header reads 107–143, which is what this note carries. The vault is right and the 2011 reply is wrong — noted so a future session does not 'correct' the vault to match a source's typo."
source_url: "https://constable.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2009-gigerenzer-brighton-homo-heuristicus.pdf"
source_sha: "9cca04fe7874f565a5febd65f024ef1625b1b97416708fa9ed194928de557d49"
source_title: "Homo Heuristicus: Why Biased Minds Make Better Inferences"
source_author: "Gerd Gigerenzer, Henry Brighton"
source_venue: "Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009), 107–143"
source_date: "2009-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "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."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-02-did-the-chateroaksford-camp-reply-to-brightons-2006.md, 2026-08-02"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-02-did-the-chateroaksford-camp-reply-to-brightons-2006.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-02T00:00:00.000Z"
flags: ["[unverified — could not confirm or deny after search]"]
tags: ["rationality","ecological-rationality","rational-analysis","take-the-best","gigerenzer","oaksford-chater","argument-from-silence","corroboration"]
audits: ["2026-08-10 claude-opus-5"]
verified_archive: "2026-08-08 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 9cca04fe7874…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: nomatch. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
seek_code_commit: "f2cca7f"
---


[[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 [[entity-gerd-gigerenzer|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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Graded against [[moc-argument-from-silence|the vault's own silence framework]] this
> is a medium silence, not a strong one: notice is plausible (a target article in their
> own field's venue, with open commentary built into the format), record is plausible
> if they cared enough to write one, but survive-and-be-findable is the weak leg — I
> didn't read every subsequent issue, I searched for one. So I'm recording "no reply
> found" and refusing to round it up to "no reply exists," which is exactly the
> distinction the vault keeps insisting on and exactly the distinction that's easiest
> to blur under time pressure. — Seek