What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp?

You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection.

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.

Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?

Semi-Hemi-Demigod,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

The zipper merge.

ganksy,
@ganksy@lemmy.world avatar

4D baby

Sterile_Technique,
@Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world avatar

We live in 4D though. The three spacial dimensions (length, width, depth) and time.

That’s why the term “4D chess!” is so comical. 4D chess is just a normal game of chess lol.

owenfromcanada,
@owenfromcanada@lemmy.world avatar

When people say “4D” they typically mean four spatial dimensions, in addition to time. You’re not being clever, you’re misinterpreting the context.

KrokanteBamischijf,

We’re not even quite sure yet that time is actually different from space. All research seems to suggest they are sides of the same coin.

Depending on how you look at it, considering time a separate dimension at all just seems silly.

Then again, this is just some more context for your context.

owenfromcanada,
@owenfromcanada@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, I’m not arguing that time can be considered a fourth dimension, or the relationship between time and space.

But the comment about 4D being hard to comprehend was referring to the idea of a fourth spatial dimension (as we could comprehend such a thing). Obviously, we don’t have a hard time comprehending time (at least superficially), so the comment about it being “comical” is pedantic and has strong “AKSHUALLY” energy.

bfg9k,
@bfg9k@lemmy.world avatar

youtu.be/xIarrG9ZO4I

bAZtARd,

Normal chess is 2D + time

foyrkopp,

My take:

Most things (especially abstract ones) that exists beyond the scope of the small-hunter-gatherer-tribe setup our brain is developed for: Quantum mechanics, climate change, racism, relativity, spherical earth, …

What separates us from the dogs is that we’ve developed abstract analytical tools (language, stories, mathematics, the scientific method,…) that allow us to infer the existence of those things and, eventually try to predict, model and manipulate them.

But we don’t “grasp” them as we’d grasp a tangled leash, which is why it is even possible for medically sane people to doubt them.

I’d argue that you can even flip this around into a definition:

If a person with no medical mental deficiencies can honestly deny a fact (as in: without consciously lying), then that fact is either actually wrong, or it falls into the “tangled leash” category.

HerbalGamer,
@HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works avatar

idk spherical earth isn’t that highbrow to me

hexabs,

Yes it is indeed easy to grasp in certain areas of the earth.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Yeah, with the right situation you can just plainly see it.

This thread has a lot of visualisations of exactly how you can see it, it’s actually really viscerally satisfying:

metabunk.org/…/soundly-proving-the-curvature-of-t…

dmention7,

Impulse control and the general idea of delaying minor pleasures now that will have significant benefits later, or even just not doing things that kinda feel good in the moment but will make you miserable in the near future. As a species we’re pretty terrible at those kinds of judgments.

The meme of the guy poking a stick into his bike wheel in one frame and lying in a crumpled pile in the next is timeless for exactly that reason. Same with shocked Pikachu.

Gigan,
@Gigan@lemmy.world avatar

This was my thought too, delayed gratification. Lot’s of people make short term decisions that have negative long-term effects on their mental, physical, or financial health. And humanity does it as well, such as pollution or using fossil fuels when we know it’s going to cause problems in the future.

Ep1cFac3pa1m,
@Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world avatar

I was going to say long-term thinking. We’re just not wired to consider long-term consequences for the things we do. We continually get duped by promises of lower taxes without considering the damage it will cause for decades to come.

psion1369,

Gambling has been mentioned already, but I think it’s also the statistics of gambling that gets lost on people. If something has a 1 in 30 chance of a payout, it doesn’t mean that in 30 tries there will be at least one payout, it means that there is a thirty percent (I don’t know the percentage accuracy right now) chance of that single attempt to payout. When I worked in a liquor store and sold scratch off tickets, people would look at the odds on the back and buy so many thinking this way.

deo,

Yup. There’s no number of scratchers you can buy that gives you a 100% chance of winning. Sure, your chances go up the more you buy, but it never reaches 100%.

The formula is: 1 - (1-p)^N where p is the chance of winning and N is the number of scratchers you buy. Basically, you have to NOT win for N scratchers, so we multiply (since this is an AND condition, ie: you must lose scratcher A and scratcher B and scratcher C, etc) the chance of not winning (1-p) by itself for the number of scratchers bought. That’s the overall chance of not winning, so we subtract that from 1 to get the chance of winning. You could instead use the chance of winning directly, but the formula is much longer (until you simplify the equation, which would give you the same answer as above) since you’d need to add (in this case we are using OR conditions) the chances of winning 1 scratcher or 2 scratchers or 3 scratchers, etc.

1 in 30 is a 3.33% chance of winning (a 96.67% chance of not winning, for those still following along). If you buy 30 scratchers, your chance of winning is only 63.83%. For 300, it’s 99.9962%. The chance will never reach 100% because you have a number between 0 and 1 raised to the power of a positive number in the formula. The chance of winning at least 1 of N scratchers can only be 100% if the chance of winning a single scratcher is already 100%, and they don’t sell those.

However! There are rules dictating the distribution of winning scratchers in a roll. It’s obviously not 1 every 30 exactly, but it’s also not perfectly random (which could lead to long strings of losing scratchers or long strings of winning scratchers). That’s why sometimes you’ll have to wait in line behind someone while they make the gas station attendant open a whole new roll because they want to buy 100 contiguous scratchers and there were only 99 left in the old roll.

Turns out, humans don’t think true randomness “feels” random. There’s actually a game design trick where you tell the player odds that are lower than reality because the true odds “feel” lower than the reported number. Pokemon did not use this trick, so Hyper Beam (reported accuracy of 90%) feels unfair, since you remember more strongly all the times it missed when you really, really needed it to hit vs. all the times it hit.

ryathal,

If you buy all the scratchers you will win, you probably wouldn’t net a positive amount, but you would win.

otter,

Ah, yes, bask in the "technically correct"ness. 🤌🏼

Fedizen,

1 in 30 payout would be like ~3%

shrugal,

How to build a Temporal Flux Compressor for FTL travel. It’s really easy if you know how, but we just can’t figure it out!

Tronn4,

Breathing without choking on spit

logicbomb,

Everybody else is saying things that some humans are too dumb to grasp. I’ll give you an example that virtually all humans are too dumb to grasp.

How are our decisions affected by conflicts of interests? The last time I looked into this, the research in this area said that humans virtually always underestimate the effect that a conflict of interests has on them, by a lot. Many people don’t even see the conflict of interests. People who recognize the conflict of interests believe that because they are aware of the conflict of interests, they can mitigate the effects completely. They are wrong.

Humans get entangled by conflicts of interests just like dogs get entangled by their leashes. Just like dogs, many times, humans don’t realize that they’re caught. Just like dogs, even if you show a human the problem, they cannot understand. But even worse than dogs getting tangled by their leashes, humans believe they can understand what to do when they’re caught up, but it turns out that they’re wrong.

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I think if there was such a thing, truly and not simply an exaggeration, nobody would be able to answer the question because we couldn’t even grasp the concept we don’t understand.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Exponentials

royal_starfish,

Add logarithms to that

And calculus

And (a+b)²=a²+2ab+b²

magnetosphere, (edited )
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

Objective reality that conflicts with our biases and preconceived ideas. We are really, really bad at handling that in a healthy manner, and WAY too good at denial and self-delusion.

Lennnny,
@Lennnny@lemmy.world avatar

I saw a toddler eating a banana and it bit its own thumb and then did an angry cry

Gabu, (edited )

This is a paradoxical question with no possible answer. If we’re to dumb to grasp it, how could we possibly know that it is in fact simple? Quantum mechanics may well be “the simplest thing” for an alien race, yet none of us would think our inability to fully comprehend it is a sign of stupidity.

tobiah,

Continued drinking or gambling. They cause huge problems, but the individual tries everything to fix it except for stopping.

wafflez, (edited )

Choosing life over taste pleasure. We don’t need to commodify animals.

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