What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Many people, including myself, are too dumb to understand that other people don’t value the same thing in us that we value in others.
You see them try and become what they like, in order to try to appeal to others. “Well I wish I got more attention, so I’m going to give tons and tons of attention to others”. “I wish someone would make a grand romantic gesture to me, so I’m going to do that to someone else”. That kind of thing.
This is sometimes called “fundamental attribution error” although I think that concept covers a bit more ground.
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.
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.
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.
The zipper merge.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Breathing without choking on spit
I saw a toddler eating a banana and it bit its own thumb and then did an angry cry
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.
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.
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.
Continued drinking or gambling. They cause huge problems, but the individual tries everything to fix it except for stopping.
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"
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.
Infinity. We're simply too dumb to grasp it. Example:
3*(1/3) = 3/3 = 1 3*(1/3) = 3*(0.333...) = 0.999... 0.999... = 1That "..." means "it continues to the infinite". And yet when you show this reasoning to people, they keep "looking" for the last 9, to claim that 0.999... is not the exact same as 1.
And that applies to all humans. You might counter it rationally, you might train yourself to recognise "it's infinite, so theoretically it'll behave in a certain way", but you don't grasp it. I don't, either.
That why someone behaves a certain way is only important inasmuch as it determines whether they'll keep behaving that way.
Examples:
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Criminals don't need to be punished but rehabilitated; because blame and guilt aren't important; recidivism is.
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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.
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The simplest thing humans fail to grasp? Things are finite without regard for your ability to grasp the numbers behind those things.
Any figure rotating in 4D around random axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes
List of things that, at least to some people, don't work they way they'd expect.
I think that the Monty Haul problem is a good example on there.
Choosing life over taste pleasure. We don't need to commodify animals.
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.
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.
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.