5 ms·
Human instincts only apply to the systems that they're "evolved" to handle (or the systems we can readily observe and learn from). Think about big systems. The
by wisty 4y ago
Human instincts only apply to the systems that they're "evolved" to handle (or the systems we can readily observe and learn from).
Think about big systems. The moon is a ginormous rock that's so big it is visible from thousands of km away, but it just hangs in the sky because it's moving so fast it can cheat gravity, but we can barely even see it move. Or think about how a star can somehow explode because it starts running out of fuel (and our sun is just yellow hot - you can do that with a blow torch, but it's powered by a nuclear explosion - I guess it's got quite a bit of surface area?). And little things are even weirder, consider how fast the proteins in your cells bounce around. Then there's quantum - our gut intuition is so out of its comfort zone it's basically meaningless.
- myth_drannon 4y agoRight, something along the lines of Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality
- dietrichepp 4y agoI used to work at camp. You didn’t need to tell kids about fire; they could figure it out. Don’t touch the fire. Flashlights were too complicated. It’s night, a kid turns on their flashlight, points it in their eyes, says “ow” and can’t see where they’re walking until their eyes readjust. Flashlights are beyond our instinctual understanding of how the world works.
- QuercusMax 4y agoMaybe this is just because the kids had prior experience with fire (touch it = ouch), but no experience with flashlights?
- ocimbote 4y agoYes. If we learned something about fire, it's to teach the youngest ones to stay away from it. Nothing more. An unattended and untaught kid will try it, at least because it's nothing like they've seen before.
- dekhn 4y agoit's funny you mention flashlights. NO matter how many times I tell people not to point their flashlight at people's eyes, it happens (by accident) over and over. It bothers me a lot because I am very good at getting my eyes dark-adapted and as soon as somebody flashes me, I lose about 10 minutes of dark vision.
- causality0 4y agoThe sun being classified as a yellow dwarf does not mean it's "only yellow hot". You can observe that by going outdoors and holding up a white piece of paper and noting it is not yellow in sunlight. powered by a nuclear explosion Not quite accurate. The nuclear fusion going on inside the sun's core is not an explosion. In a nuclear explosion, a significant fraction of the fuel in a given area is consumed in an instant. The sun's core on the other hand only fuses its fuel extremely slowly. Pound for pound, the sun's core generates less heat energy than mammalian muscle tissue. It's just that there's so much of it that the heat energy is extremely well insulated.
- kridsdale1 4y agoThe sun is the color it is because its surface is 5500 Kelvin, which we have defined as white. The sun is cooler than most visible stars, so it can be called yellow by comparison.
- stametseater 4y agoThe sun appears slightly yellow because the atmosphere scatters blue light more than the rest. The result is the sky looks blue, the sun is slightly yellowish, and the cumulative light (both directly from the sun and diffuse light from the sky) is white. Outside the atmosphere, our sun appears proper white.
- causality0 4y agoThe sun is cooler than most visible stars, so it can be called yellow by comparison. Incorrect. The out of atmosphere color temperature of Sol is ~5900K. The average color temperature of the Milky Way is 4700-5000K. https://www.news.pitt.edu/milkywaycolor https://www.news.pitt.edu/milkywaycolor
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoPerhaps our gut is right and our conceptual models are wrong