A great post! Thanks. For me, it is the meta issue of how we think about the examples that is most interesting rather than the examples. One contribution I have

A great post! Thanks. For me, it is the meta issue of how we think about the examples that is most interesting rather than the examples. One contribution I have is that we humans are biased toward action as we must be. And biased toward results. These are survival skills. If acting requires me to adopt some belief, I do so - even if that belief is incomplete or even false. And if acting on that belief produces some result it is grows stronger. Long, long ago I had a friend who had an old car and not much much money. The car would often not start on the first try, so he would get out, open the hood and wrap some exposed wires in electrical tape, then get back in the car and it would usually start right up. I offered to replace the exposed wires. I was bewildered to find that the wires were not connected at either end! I had watched the process where wrapping the wires fixed the problems, yet one had to be insane to accept that as the cause. I finally understood that the float on the carburetor was defective (acting like the float in a toilet). The time delay in wrapping the wire allowed the gas in the flooded engine to evaporate enough to start. I replaced the float and that fixed the problem. At least that is what I now tell myself, but perhaps my own belief system is as flawed as wrapping the wires? Perhaps it was not the float but a gasket or that it fixed an interaction between some unknown type of subatomic particles which in the future will be used for near instantaneous space travel? So in answer to the question "Am I stuck in a local maximum" the answer is "always". (edit for clarity)