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?

Smokeydope, (edited )
@Smokeydope@lemmy.world avatar

Reality is equal part abstraction and physicality, energy and information are two sides to a coin we are currently unable to percieve in full. Also, there are some aspects to reality that will never be able to be understood through the lens of science or math, due to their need for falsifyable truths within a working model. Some truths cannot be proven, and some non-physical aspects of reality cannot be directly observed through lenses or interacted with sensors or broken down into particles. The moment we start examining conciousness and psychadelics seriously as a new avenue of understanding reality our collective understanding of the universe in its totality will skyrocket.

Tedesche,

You wear diamond-encrusted glasses, don’t you?

Smokeydope, (edited )
@Smokeydope@lemmy.world avatar

Not sure what or who you are referencing with that, I wish though lol

Tedesche,

…cnn.com/…/121021051717-united-nations-every-woma…

Lennnny,
@Lennnny@lemmy.world avatar

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

intensely_human,

The past and the future do not exist

crawancon,

this one slowed my roll a bit

shandrakor,

Welcome to the eternal now! You’ve been here all along!

RememberTheApollo_, (edited )

That you cannot extract billions of years worth of stored energy from the earth (like oil and coal), release it, and expect there to be no consequences.

Humans aren’t much better than dogs taking a shit on the lawn in our little finite planetary backyard and kicking a few tufts of grass over it. Dumping stuff into the ocean or waterways. Can’t see it! Must be gone, right? Burying toxic chemicals. Can’t see it! Same with CO2.

Shit’s still there. Keep shitting everywhere and there’s no way you’re gonna avoid stepping in it eventually.

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%

JubilantJaguar,

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others

“Obviously”, hmm? The balance of expert opinion is in fact that dog breeds do not vary in intelligence. Which makes sense given that dog populations have significantly fewer millennia of genetic divergence than human populations, and these days nobody much claims that some human breeds are smarter than others.

Falling into your own trap!

But otherwise a decent question.

Anticorp,

thesmartcanine.com/…/smartest-dog-breeds-list/

I_Has_A_Hat,

Are you trying to claim that an average Shih Tzu and an average Border Collie have the same intelligence?

Anticorp,

They clearly don’t, and this has been evaluated scientifically by leading dog psychologists and is well documented. Idk what OP is on about.

thesmartcanine.com/…/smartest-dog-breeds-list/

JubilantJaguar,

You sound very certain that they are. Perhaps you should be the one who provides evidence?

As I understand it, in dogs most differences are between individuals, like in any other species. What can be said about breeds is that differences concern the application of their intelligence rather than how bluntly “smart” they are. For instance, labradors are a bit better at understanding social cues, and collies at acting on certain commands.

A recent study went into this. One point it made:

We did not find breed differences in tasks measuring logical reasoning or short-term memory

This makes sense. Dogs were domesticated more recently than the human lineage split between, say Aboriginal Australians and southern Africans. Would you be happy about making IQ statements for that case? If not, why exactly would it be different?

Intelligence is a pretty ill-defined measure, verging on pseudo-science in lots of case. Personally I think it is all but useless and that we would be better talking about easily measurable traits instead.

deo, (edited )

Yeah, i think working dogs and highly social breeds seem smarter, but that’s just because they have been trained and/or bred for aptitude in tasks we humans deem important. If my metrics of intelligence included being an annoying little shit, I’d think chihuahuas were the smartest breed.

blackstampede, (edited )

Scope.

Imagine we both live in the US. I show you an article about an immigrant raping someone, and you say something like “well that’s just one guy.” I show you another, and another, and another. I show you a thousand. I show you ten thousand. Either you eventually admit that immigrants are predominantly rapists, or you look increasingly, ridiculously, obviously, wrong. And stubborn. And irrational.

But you are not wrong. I am wrong.

Because there are 331 million people in the United States, I can find an inexhaustible supply of immigrant-rapist stories.

Now take that inability to grasp large distances, large quantities, long periods of time, and apply it to everything. This is why young earth creationists exist- because a billion years is literally unimaginable. This is why people play the lottery- because you’re saying there’s a chance, right? This is why we don’t react emotionally upon hearing of a genocide, or learning that 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.

We are not equipped to function at the scale that we are currently working at, as a species. We have been haphazardly constructed by evolutionary pressures to operate in small bands and villages, and we do not have the appropriate intuitions for any scope larger than that.

AnarchistArtificer,

To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.

I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale

I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.

otter,

Great to know that “fucky” is an officially accepted sciency term.

blackstampede,

In some cases that’s probably true. I’m not sure it applies to things like war, time, etc.

GnomeKat,
@GnomeKat@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Emergence is a hell of a thing

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…

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!

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.

ZosoRocks3,

Things that take place over too long a period of time. Like heart disease, injustice, climate change, diabetes, addiction etc. We’re evolved to prioritise short term pleasure over long term benefits, hence that cigarette, drink, line, burger is so difficult to say no to.

teichflamme,

I think uncertainty plays a big role here.

You could bump a line and smoke a pack a day and get to 90.

You could do nothing harmful and die at 30.

Even if you make it to 90 avoiding lots of fun, was it worth it or would you rather trade 20 years for more fun?

At the end of the day it is a matter of personal risk tolerance towards an impossible to quantify risk.

otter,

As someone who treated their 20s like that, I strongly suggest at least dabbling in restraint along the way. Hell, shibari counts.

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.

weeeeum,

Gambling. Everyone knows the house always wins and the exact probability of winning any specific lottery but people can’t grasp this. I don’t know how people look at these massive luxurious casinos and think they win against this company with an unfathomably profitable business model by taking money from people who think they can win.

jimmy_spider,

I think the logic there is not that they constantly win against the casino, but more that they only need to get lucky once or twice. They just see that some people, sometimes win and there is no reason that they would not be the winners. Not sure I’m being clear about it but I hope you get my point.

weeeeum,

It makes it more understandable but I also think of it as “what is going to make ME win versus all of the thousand other poor souls here”

CheeseNoodle, (edited )

I play the lottery a few times a year for the following reasons:
-Permission to dream about what I would buy if I won for a few days
-Justification for bitching about not winning the lottery

bluGill,

Instead of buying a ticket I just search the sidewalk for the winning ticket (that someone else lost) while I'm otherwise doing my normal activities. My odds are winning are nearly the same as someone who buys a ticket, so I can dream just as much - but I can spend the money on something else.

moody,

First, someone has to have bought the winning ticket. Then, that same person needs to have lost the winning ticket. Next, that person has to have lost that ticket near where you are. And finally, you have to find that lost ticket.

So while both situations are very very far from certainty, and both are approaching zero, one of the two is much, much closer to zero than the other.

YoorWeb,

Lottery: tax for dreams.

tobiah,

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

middlemanSI,

turn signals

ZoopZeZoop,

Heavy groceries do not go on top of eggs, fruit, etc. Cold groceries together. Dry groceries together. If there’s a bunch of bags inside of a bag, use those before the bag that’s holding the other bags.

Wtf, Publix baggers? I get you don’t get paid 6-digit salaries, but this is not heart surgery.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • asklemmy@lemmy.world
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #