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Crowstep  1yr ago (experimental-history.com)   1131 thread views

On the Importance of Staring Directly into the Sun

experimental-history.com

Submission statement: Adam Mastroianni examines why scientific discovery seemingly avoided low-hanging fruit for so long.

For example, why did the Ancient Egyptians know how to calculate the volume of a truncated pyramid 4,000 years ago, but medieval European thought that meat transformed into maggots until 1668? Why were ancient people able to make significant mathematical discoveries, while still demonstrating ignorance about basic real-life processes?

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I’ll rephrase the toilet illustration in general: people tend to mistake knowledge of interface for knowledge of function.

I know how to drive my car. I know the four main liquids to feed it, because the under-hood interface is designed to be serviced by me. I know the anatomy of internal combustion engines about as well as I know the anatomy of my own heart. But I couldn’t fix it with all the tools in a well-stocked commercial garage. I am not a power-user or a mechanic.

This leads me to my first conclusion: that discoveries of function are probably discovered by people who are not familiarized with an interface. Japan could miniaturize all of the electronics that America invented, because they were more focused on understanding function than familiarity with form. I, as a person born with autism, do not have a natural social interface, so my discoveries in philosophy and psychology are based more on observation and manipulation of function then on once-described and redescribed and propounded ideas which have propagated over the eras.

In other words, my hypothesis is that the naïve may be better at discovering new things than the expert.

For a start, the "Galileo dropped two different weights off the side of a tower" is one of those urban myths. It's a story that he did it, but it's not confirmed he did it in reality apart from a thought experiment. Galileo was good at bigging himself up and claiming to have discovered or done things others had done first:

Between 1589 and 1592, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (then professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa) is said to have dropped two spheres of the same volume but different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass, according to a biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, composed in 1654 and published in 1717. The basic premise had already been demonstrated by Italian experimenters a few decades earlier.

The experiment was done on the Moon, where there is no atmosphere to provide resistance and friction, ands showed that things fall at the same rate.

A lot of this article is special pleading: wow, why did it take 12 centuries to discover this? (because people could see with their own freakin' eyes that a feather fell slower than a lead ball); why did they think rotten meat turned into maggots? (because they saw maggots hatching out of rotten meat). That is, it makes people of the past out to be dumber, or at least more credulous, with no attempt at explaining why they thought what they thought, apart from "all is explained by my One Weird Concept".

Funny I didn't get that from this blog post at all. Maybe I should re-read it but my impression was that the writer is suggesting a human tendency to accept we know more than we do, irrespective of when (i.e. in the past or now).

You might think that we discover things in order from most intuitive to least intuitive. No, thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, it often goes the opposite way: we discover the least obvious things first, because those are things that we realize we don't understand.

seems to be the most important part and takes too long to get to this claim

I am appreciating idea of abstracts more and more.

I loved this article and believe that the preamble to the paragraph that you quote, was the correct length.

This issue is that our notions of "intuitive" are rather vague. We don't have specific words to single out the particular nuance of "intuitive" at issue. The author is forced to give examples to ground his use of the word "intuitive". The quoted paragraph appears intuitively obvious, but only in the context that was skillfully prepared for it.

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