Well said, Lods. As well as the problem with confirmation bias, there’s also the issue of relying on our intuition/gut/common sense to evaluate scientific matters.
Intuition can sometimes mislead even highly-trained people: pilots with many hours of flying under their belts can experience spatial disorientation and conclude their instruments are faulty. Flash Airlines Flight 604 ended up crashing into the Red Sea because the experienced captain continued to bank to the right as he thought he was correcting excessive banking to the left. It’s thought that John F Kennedy Jnr put his Cessna into a death spiral on a calm night for much the same reason.
But intuition can improve with training or education. Unfortunately, many don’t bother trying to improve their intuition, believing that their “common sense” gives them superior judgement to those Ivory Tower academics.
This makes it easy for good marketers to appeal to common sense. Nigel Parkinson, a Tory politician wrote a book 50 odd years ago in which he marketed conservative economic policies by arguing running a government was like running a household, so everyone could just apply common sense. He then suggested that households needed to operate on a balanced budget, so governments running deficits invited disaster. That set the table for guys like Peter Costello to demonise deficits which has poisoned the well for anything but PPP deals (even though we’ve had extremely low interest rates for a long time). The only “good deficits” have been those caused by conservative governments cutting taxes on the rich on the specious basis that the benefits would trickle down (or a rising sea would lift all boats). A recent study of 17 countries over 50 years have disproved this “common sense” policy but has demonstrated that it sure does increase the wealth of the rich and inequality.
There are plenty of examples in science that show the limits of uneducated or undereducated intuition.
One of the most relatable is the Monty Hall problem, loosely based on the game show Let’s Make a Deal:
Those who haven’t studied conditional probability would say that there’s 2 choices remaining and there’s 50% chance of the car being behind either, so there’s no benefit in switching. But it turns out that switching would increase your chances of winning the car. I was told that you can realign your intuition to operate in the conditional universe but I haven’t made that jump. My intuition is still stuck in simple probability mode even though I don’t doubt the mathematical conclusion.
Another example is the Painter’s Paradox aka Gabriel’s Horn aka Toricelli’s Trumpet which involve certain hornlike shapes stretching out to infinity. Oddly enough, despite the rim projecting out forever it has finite volume! Even more bizarrely, even though it has finite volume, it has infinite surface area! This is where the Painter’s Paradox comes in. You could fill such a horn with a finite (though immensely large) amount of paint. But even though it’s sitting in the horn, there’s not enough paint to cover the inside of the horn (cue Twighlight Zone music).
Then you have Quantum Mechanics which requires you to throw out common sense completely. It also requires you to throw out Newtonian Classical Mechanics (as you also need to do where you have speed more than a tenth of the speed of light). An object can’t be in 2 places at the same time, right? No Grasshopper, it can be everywhere at the same time! Quantum Entanglement Internet could see us receiving data simultaneously to its generation at a distant place. Mindblowing ...
None of the above suggests I am one of those gifted individuals who know everything. I’d like to think I have more than average knowledge but I’m more like a trained monkey who can do a limited number of tricks. To go anywhere near being able to debate something as complex as the destruction of the WTC buildings, I’d need to do a load of preparatory work in a variety of areas. And even then, maybe I’d end up being like a budgerigar trying to learn calculus.
Intuition can sometimes mislead even highly-trained people: pilots with many hours of flying under their belts can experience spatial disorientation and conclude their instruments are faulty. Flash Airlines Flight 604 ended up crashing into the Red Sea because the experienced captain continued to bank to the right as he thought he was correcting excessive banking to the left. It’s thought that John F Kennedy Jnr put his Cessna into a death spiral on a calm night for much the same reason.
But intuition can improve with training or education. Unfortunately, many don’t bother trying to improve their intuition, believing that their “common sense” gives them superior judgement to those Ivory Tower academics.
This makes it easy for good marketers to appeal to common sense. Nigel Parkinson, a Tory politician wrote a book 50 odd years ago in which he marketed conservative economic policies by arguing running a government was like running a household, so everyone could just apply common sense. He then suggested that households needed to operate on a balanced budget, so governments running deficits invited disaster. That set the table for guys like Peter Costello to demonise deficits which has poisoned the well for anything but PPP deals (even though we’ve had extremely low interest rates for a long time). The only “good deficits” have been those caused by conservative governments cutting taxes on the rich on the specious basis that the benefits would trickle down (or a rising sea would lift all boats). A recent study of 17 countries over 50 years have disproved this “common sense” policy but has demonstrated that it sure does increase the wealth of the rich and inequality.
There are plenty of examples in science that show the limits of uneducated or undereducated intuition.
One of the most relatable is the Monty Hall problem, loosely based on the game show Let’s Make a Deal:
Quote:Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Those who haven’t studied conditional probability would say that there’s 2 choices remaining and there’s 50% chance of the car being behind either, so there’s no benefit in switching. But it turns out that switching would increase your chances of winning the car. I was told that you can realign your intuition to operate in the conditional universe but I haven’t made that jump. My intuition is still stuck in simple probability mode even though I don’t doubt the mathematical conclusion.
Another example is the Painter’s Paradox aka Gabriel’s Horn aka Toricelli’s Trumpet which involve certain hornlike shapes stretching out to infinity. Oddly enough, despite the rim projecting out forever it has finite volume! Even more bizarrely, even though it has finite volume, it has infinite surface area! This is where the Painter’s Paradox comes in. You could fill such a horn with a finite (though immensely large) amount of paint. But even though it’s sitting in the horn, there’s not enough paint to cover the inside of the horn (cue Twighlight Zone music).
Then you have Quantum Mechanics which requires you to throw out common sense completely. It also requires you to throw out Newtonian Classical Mechanics (as you also need to do where you have speed more than a tenth of the speed of light). An object can’t be in 2 places at the same time, right? No Grasshopper, it can be everywhere at the same time! Quantum Entanglement Internet could see us receiving data simultaneously to its generation at a distant place. Mindblowing ...
None of the above suggests I am one of those gifted individuals who know everything. I’d like to think I have more than average knowledge but I’m more like a trained monkey who can do a limited number of tricks. To go anywhere near being able to debate something as complex as the destruction of the WTC buildings, I’d need to do a load of preparatory work in a variety of areas. And even then, maybe I’d end up being like a budgerigar trying to learn calculus.