The biases and blind-spots identified by Messrs. Kahneman and Tversky aren't symptoms of stupidity. They're an essential part of our humanity, the inescapable byproducts of a brain that evolution engineered over millions of years.
"... a brain that evolution engineered ..."? That sounds awfully purposeful to me. Also, the kind of thinking that goes into solving the arithmetic problem may not be as pertinent to other problems.
Postscript. Just now - I am in the process of baking a capon - just before walking up the stairs, I thought to check what time I had put the bird in. I glanced at the clock and, just looking at it, figured that 45 minutes from that time would be 3:05. I felt suspicious - knowing my mathematical inadequacies (though I've usually been good at simple arithmetic) - and decided to check a little more systematically. The original computation was precisely correct. Might I have done better in math if I had trusted my intuition?
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