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Crowstep  1yr ago (experimental-history.com)   1135 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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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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