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?

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.

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.

SwingingTheLamp,

I had a number of thoughts, and realized that the common factor in my examples is this: Large numbers. Like, really large numbers. I read on Lemmy yesterday that parrots can count to 17, and I’m not convinced that humans can do much better. Maybe close to 1,000 at the far outer limit, but that’s really it.

Lots of humans deny evolution, saying that there’s no way that we evolved from the same ancestors as other primates, but we think that the pharaohs in Egypt ruled a really, really long time ago. So while we can see changes pile up down the generations even in our lifetimes, we have a hard time extrapolating that to such timescales as 12 million years since the last common primate ancestor. Our little primate brains can’t even begin to conceive of it, much less the ~180,000,000 years of the Age of Dinosaurs.

Lots of humans deny climate change and pollution, saying that there’s no way our small consumption can affect a planet so big. We just have no intuitive understanding of how eating a hamburger, or burning a gallon of gasoline to get to work, scales to 8 billion of us.

And let’s not even get into wealth inequality, except to say that surveys regularly find that humans can’t even begin to conceive of the magnitude of the wealth gap.

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.

Tronn4,

Breathing without choking on spit

Norgur,

The simplest thing humans fail to grasp? Things are finite without regard for your ability to grasp the numbers behind those things.

MxM111,
@MxM111@kbin.social avatar

Any figure rotating in 4D around random axis.

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

The zipper merge.

Nemo,

That why someone behaves a certain way is only important inasmuch as it determines whether they’ll keep behaving that way.

Examples:

  • Criminals don’t need to be punished but rehabilitated; because blame and guilt aren’t important; recidivism is.
  • Your lover might have all sorts of reasons they love you, and some of those may seem very romantic and some might seem as unromantic as can be. But as long as they will keep living you, that’s what’s important.
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.

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