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?

benni,

When people want to enter a bus, especially a crowded one, it makes a lot more sense to wait for the people who want to get out of the bus to leave first.

This one is so baffling to me, it’s really changed my view of how stupid some people really are. What do they even expect, that the other passengers magically disappear? It’s really not an abstract problem if the other passengers are trying to leave right in front of you. Trying to enter a bus is also not a rare situation, so you’d expect people to understand this at least after the first few times. Unbelievable.

rosymind,

Same with elevators!

v81,

Worst with trains

Skanky,

Or getting baggage from the baggage claim at the airport

Fly4aShyGuy,
@Fly4aShyGuy@lemmy.one avatar

This one so much. How can people not realize if everyone stood back in a larger halo around the carousel, it would be so easy for everyone to get their bag when it’s up. I usually stand back at a distance, and if people have it completely blocked standing right next to it I grab right around them getting uncomfortably in their personal space.

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.

TheInsane42,
@TheInsane42@lemmy.world avatar

Humans totally ignore that they are part of nature. Most think that reduced biodiversity won’t include them.

kalkulat,
@kalkulat@lemmy.world avatar

Most of us also ignore that ‘the world’ is a model in our heads that we’ve created with our senses. Some may make better models than others. But what does ‘better’ mean? Stubbing your toe less, getting sick less? Sherlock Holmes?

Also ‘the world’ is very complex and constantly changing. You’re either revising that model or, at some point, you’re living in the past.

Bondrewd, (edited )

I kind of feel the opposite. Most people I know is wary of “destroying nature”.

I think meh. It is just getting streamlined. We are getting for the next phase of human civilization. We are more like an organism with white blood cells and well separated and controlled compartments of bacteria filled sacks. It is bound to get more homogenous.

Higher civilization means the meaning of biodiversity will change domains.

Ilovethebomb,

In a lot of ways we aren’t though. The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time in a built environment of some type.

Even when we’re in the “outdoors”, most of us spend most of our time on manmade tracks or paths.

We engage with nature on our terms in a way that is very unique.

bluGill, (edited )

Deer mostly travel on trails they built themselves. They also change their environment greatly (the act of eating thins the trees)

Ilovethebomb,

They don’t drop off tonnes of gravel by helicopter to build a walking track to somewhere though.

bluGill,

That is a difference in degree though.

HubertManne,
@HubertManne@kbin.social avatar

first. my current dog learned to deal with this as a puppy. I was astonished. My last dog I was trying to train the concept her whole life. Never saw a dog be able to handle it before but at this point if my current dog starts to go on the other side of an obstruction I say this way and she immediately corrects. For some reason for all other dogs I find they instinctively want to go the wrong way. So its not even random, they think wrapping more is the way to go. As for humans:

"The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race Is Man’s Inability To Understand the Exponential Function"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY&t=97s

garibaldi_biscuit,

Amazing video, now thirty years old. By now, you would expect this analysis of population, economic & consumption growth would be essential learning in schools. My feeling is that the world today caries on with even greater ignorance of the consequences of this exponential growth than it did back then.

PlzGivHugs,

Probability. If something has a 50% chance of occuring, that does not mean it will happen every second time, and our brain has a very hard time rationalizing that. For example, we assume its near impossible to flip heads on a coin three times in a row when really, the probability is 12.5% - not that low. Another example would be something with a 95% chance of success - we naturally round up and assume thats basically garenteed success, but theres still a very decent chance of failure, esspecially on repeat attempts. Our brains are just not wired to handle randomness well, which is part of why gambling is so addicting and why games like X-Com have to rig the odds in the players favour to avoid pissing them off.

PrinceWith999Enemies,

This is my answer as well.

We have developed intuition around things like naive physics - you can catch a thrown frisbee without doing calculus in your head - but it’s really, really hard to think through statistical questions in an intuitive way.

It’s one reason I’m extremely skeptical about the utility of informed consent in medicine. A physician can tell a patient’s family that if they don’t do the procedure then the patient will definitely die, but if they do it there’s a 20% chance of complication A and a 5% chance of complication B. The right thing to do is plan on the complications happening and having a realistic idea of what that will entail. But people, especially under stress, really aren’t able to deal with that kind of thing as easily as they can deal with catching a ball thrown to them.

jaidyn999,

RPG games like Fortnite use an algorithm which tricks people into believing their skills are improving.

When you hit a pixel, it doesn’t automatically score a hit like Space Invaders, it runs an algorithm based on the time you have been playing the game to determine the amount of damage you cause. The more you play, the more “accurate” you become.

dotMonkey,

Sounds like the conspiracy BS I read in the call of duty subs on Reddit

ByGourou, (edited )

This kind of thing definitly exist, usually part of adaptative difficulty where for exemple you get an invisible buff after dying so you feel like you are improving.
But I fail to see that in fortnite since it’s a multiplayer game, only your skill and luck influence the outcome, not playtime. Fortnite isn’t an RPG either (As far as I know), so I guess you meant an other game ?

AeroLemming,

It’s not always for the benefit of the players. Gameloft, the makers of the Asphalt mobile racing series, was caught making the AI harder during special timed events that allowed you to win extra/special stuff by beating said AI. This was obviously for the express purpose of manipulating people into playing more and even though I once loved playing Asphalt 8 & 9, I no longer touch any of their games because of how shitty and disingenuous that is.

ByGourou,

I never heard of that since I stopped playing asphalt but that seems like something Gameloft would do. Gameloft really fell off, they used to make good games…

But yeah, it can also be used badly, like making the game really easy after a purchase and then slowly go back to difficult. I don’t think I’ve heard of something like that yet, but it probably exist.

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

And that past random events have no influence on future ones.

If a coin landed on one side ten times in a row, it’s still a 50% chance on the next throw. Something a lot of people have trouble with.

msage,

No, but you see, the chance you get the same side twice is… (HH, HT, TH, TT) 50%, shit

When we add another toss, you get only two possibilities of always same side, and 6 that are not.

So which is it? The coin itself may always have 50/50, but the universe which tosses in a series doesn’t?

CheeseNoodle,

Every combination is equally likely we just ascribe special meaning to certain ones due to overactive pattern recognition. Hx6 is just as likely as any seeminly more random result from 6 consecutive throws there are just more options we don’t ascribe special meaning to.

ink,

Earth is the only planet that we’re adapted to live on. Nowhere else will be as forgiving of our mistakes.

magnetosphere,
@magnetosphere@kbin.social avatar

I suspect that colonizing Mars (or wherever else) will turn out to be much more than just an engineering problem. If we get things like food, water, atmosphere, and even gravity right, I think we’ll still find an endless list of requirements that we didn’t know were requirements… and some mystery problems that don’t seem to have any cause at all. Those problems will be because of factors we never thought of, or don’t even know how to detect.

There could also be surpluses/deficiencies in our diet or environment that will take years (or perhaps generations) to show up. Again, that would be because of unanticipated, and maybe unsolvable, problems.

fsxylo, (edited )

We for sure will need to exercise, because low gravity turns our muscles into mush.

tocopherol,
@tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I could still see people trying to make it work for generations for some reason, many early colonists in the West died before stable states could be founded.

PrinceWith999Enemies,

I remember sitting in on a briefing from the Biosphere folks when they reached out for collaborating institutions. One of the things that stuck with me was that they discovered that trees that were not subject to wind failed to develop a healthy trunk and tended to fall over and die. That’s not something that the researchers had even thought of.

I suspect that there’s going to be a lot of that.

I_Fart_Glitter,

Can I ask what year that was? We’ve known that greenhoused cuttings need an oscillating fan in order be able to hold themselves upright once they start to gain height for the 30 years that I’ve been growing that way. It’s like a little work out for them.

PrinceWith999Enemies,

It would have been something like 2005 or so. It may have been a known fact at the time, but they mentioned specifically that they were caught by surprise by the phenomenon. I didn’t fault them for it - the whole project was kind of a mess. I’m a biologist and I wasn’t aware of that, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me, either.

That’s weird though. You’d think they would have had multiple botanists on the design team who could have pointed that out.

LesserAbe,

Also there’s that documentary where the group that organized it was kind of cult adjacent. They weren’t scientists first. Still very interesting and impressive they did what they did.

I_Fart_Glitter,

I’m sure it was just that no one realized it would scale to trees, since that hadn’t been done before. As far as I know you don’t have to do anything special in that regard with small seed-grown plants in a green house, only cuttings that root from stems, and so have weaker roots at first and stalks that were previously branches. I’m sorry I sounded critical, I was just curious.

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

Interesting! Plus, that’s exactly the sort of weird, unanticipated thing I’m talking about. How do you plan for everything? You can’t.

The first human colonists (who are just ordinary people) won’t be the rich. They’ll be desperate people who are sold a dream of the future and treated as human lab rats.

Wes_Dev,

Holy shit, you’re right.

We’re playing permadeath on the easiest level, and failing.

Tronn4,

Breathing without choking on spit

shinigamiookamiryuu,

If my experiences are anything to go by, my vocabulary and way of speaking. Or really a lot of people’s.

This is something I don’t get. These people, when given a mathematical equation, treat the whole equation as a whole puzzle and use all its pieces to solve it. But if you say something that’s simply too wordy or where the words are “too thesaurus-like” (often to fix the first thing), they don’t “add it up” and they dump on you with Jimmy Neutron memes. I (while not being Marxist myself) remember one of my first experiences in the fediverse was talking about Marxist concepts to people who identified as Marxists and wondering from their confused reaction if they knew what Marxism entailed.

pimento64, (edited )

my way of speaking

Yeah that sounds about right, considering this word salad of a comment.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

Where do you draw the line between “word salad” and “non-word-salad”?

tocopherol, (edited )
@tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

For a better response to writing, an exercise an instructor had my class do was to look at a list of example sentences and remove every word that wasn’t essential. I don’t think your writing is so difficult to interpret but a more plain style can be helpful for some. Most people aren’t trying to ‘add it up’ in conversation like it’s math, it should be quick and intuitive. The way we read our own writing is different than how others will emphasize or pace it which can cause misinterpretation as well.

I feel like I see a lot of arguments online that are really just people misinterpreting each other repeatedly.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

I’ve gotten complaints either way. If I want something I say to be short, that requires me to use what many consider oddly specific words. When people read them, they complain I’m a walking thesaurus. Then I might try the reverse to please people, where I deconstruct those oddly specific words until I get a long sentence. And the same crowd has then often complained my messages are unrealistically long. Either way, especially as a writer, what I say comes from a mind that gravitates towards the analogous and the compatible, i.e. my way of communicating is made to branch out.

Bunnylux,
@Bunnylux@lemmy.world avatar

“I can’t speak clearly or concisely. This is other people’s fault.” -You

shinigamiookamiryuu,

Point to where I said it was anyone’s fault.

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

0x4E4F,

Yep, it’s called math.

I was generally surprised at how many people can’t do simple math without a calc, like multiply 7 x 8.

books,

Check mate. Sucker.

Bunnylux,
@Bunnylux@lemmy.world avatar

Erm…

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

Meh, close enough.

spittingimage,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

I haven’t done any long division since highschool, and now that I’d like to, I can’t remember how. 🥺

rbesfe,

Good thing search engines exist, eh?

spittingimage,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

Are you suggesting that I lift a finger to help myself? Why, I never!

MimicJar,
@MimicJar@lemmy.world avatar

Of all the multiplication you had to pick 7 x 8. I hate 7 x 8.

I memorized in 3rd grade or whatever my multiple tables, but I never trust 7 x 8.

7 x 8 = 56

1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 5, 6, 9 ?

No. That’s wrong. After 7 comes 8. After 8 comes 5. No, it goes 5, 6, 7, 8.

If I could visualize it as,

56 = 7 x 8

I’d be fine, but I can’t see it that way.

No I have to take it as 7 x 7 (49) + 7 (1 + 6), to get 56.

Shit. I hope that makes sense to someone.

0x4E4F, (edited )

I memorized in 3rd grade or whatever my multiple tables, but I never trust 7 x 8.

Lol, that’s why I picked it 😂. I hate 7 x 8 as well 😂.

No I have to take it as 7 x 7 (49) + 7 (1 + 6), to get 56.

That’s how I do it as well 😂, 7 x 7 + 7, I never remebered 56 😂. Or 8 x 8 - 8, either way works for me 😂.

the_q,

Capitalism isn’t purpose and purpose doesn’t exist.

tocopherol,
@tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I wouldn’t say they are too dumb to realize this necessarily, people are just misled by endless propaganda or don’t have the time and energy/skills to really contemplate things properly.

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.

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

    Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1191936 bytes) in /var/www/kbin/kbin/vendor/symfony/http-kernel/Profiler/FileProfilerStorage.php on line 174

    Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 266240 bytes) in /var/www/kbin/kbin/vendor/symfony/monolog-bridge/Processor/DebugProcessor.php on line 81