This is misleading article like the guys who show you optical illusions and then say you can't trust what you see. The fact is that it is rational to let past experiences affect you. Of course here people are told their past was a lie - but they weren't given any additional facts about what is right now. It was still pure conjecture as to how well they did.

I think this is a very poor conclusion, an article by a professional journalist who just is trying to make money by posting something dumb. It's obvious why people are "irrational". There is so stinking much information in the world, not to mention the pressure our own minds put on us in the form of wants and needs. We have to sift through that to make decisions. The fact is irrationality comes from not sifting through the information correctly which is a difficult task that takes time and training.

There are all kinds of reasons we don't sift through information correctly, and as machine learning shows that takes time. Plus we often have pride which keeps us from acknowledging the truth.

The of course even if we have the facts sometimes it is difficult to make predictions based on those facts. This is in my opinion often because we don't really understand the facts. The only way to make predictions is based on past experience of some sort. If you don't understand the past well you can't make a good prediction, so once again it comes down to not understanding the huge amount of info in the world.