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That question seems to be a bit of a gotcha; I'd wager a third or more of random people asked that question would blurt out that they would walk to the car wash before engaging their brains.
Also that's not what Gell-mann amnesia is. I swear I see the concept used everywhere for everything nowadays, when the original formulation is literally just "journalists are shit".
There is no world in which 1/3 of random people asked "to wash your car, do you walk to the car wash, or drive to the car wash" with "walk" unless at least 1/3 of the people you pick have never even heard of the English language, let alone speak it. Even the mentally handicapped would get it right, assuming they were capable of saying the words "walk" and "wash"
Well yeah, if you reword the question to something much simpler then only a Lizardman constant are getting it wrong. But that wasn't the question.
If you give people time to think about this, few will make a mistake, but in a more immediate setting this is a classic system1/system2 type
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Are you seriously going to say that's not an applicable concept here? That "text on a screen in a confident voice" is so far from that definition that it's not the same thing?
Yes, it's not an applicable concept. For one thing, LLMs have proven their mastery of a host of different concepts already to an extremely high level, so the question of whether you can trust them is kind of moot.
It also doesn't work with singular entities. The reason gellman amnesia was a thing is that newspapers and media organisations made claims to competence, hiring specialists in each field. That a science journalist then makes a bunch of mistakes should rationally lead you to question the qualifications of the "specialists" in each field. Nowadays people see a blog about medicine or something, find a few math errors, then rush to declare Gellman amnesia. But the blog never claimed to be a mathematics expert! Gellman amnesia is not "If there are mistakes, the whole thing is worthless".
This kind of reasoning error in LLMs is in the same category.
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