I suspect a lot of people have difficulty recognizing that what they believe about the world may not be representative of how the world actually behaves. I certainly do, frequently.
Like with politics, people think they need to go vote and march and stuff to effect change, but if you’re willing to accept the idea that there are limits to your ability to perceive the world and your perceptions are misleading, you can pretty reliably go and see that isn’t true.
You can also decipher deeper realities like you can basically put whatever you want on flat bread, or that you dadskf;'akse’wfaegqrwt;'lj’a fuck my brain. I’m asd I’m not sure what I was trying to say.
Lol everyone here getting it while everyone on Reddit was like “Oh you cut a hole in the wall you’re not so smart I could cut a hole in the wall, too!”
Nothing is possible until someone realises a particular possibility and then, after that point, not only does it become a possibility for everyone else but it seems as though it was always completely obvious.
I’m not sure if there’s a name for this particular phenomenon but I like to think of it in terms of naive responses to contemporary art or, in short, Contemporary Art Syndrome; when people encounter contemporary art they tend to have the reaction “But I could have made that!” and the obvious response to this is “Yeah, but did you?”
(Putting aside the fact that there’s actually [apparently] a high degree of technical skill required for, say, a Barnett Newman painting for argument’s sake.)
Sites on the net claim the physicist Ernest Rutherford said the following but Wikiquote says it’s unsourced.
I think that way about evolution sometimes. It’s blitheringly obvious when you consider the two points
Both are easily observable in the natural world. The first one can be seen with babies “oh you have your mother’s eyes” while also the baby not literally being the mom. The second one is used by walking where we cross a large distance one step at a time.
And all you need is those two principles to come to the conclusion that the small yet inheritable differences between offspring will add up over a long period of time. The question to be asked isn’t if it will happen but rather just what traits it happens to.
And yet, it took humanity (and for many people still they refuse) millennial to grasp it. I’m looking at the process as so simple only from the lens of someone born after it was figured out.
Yeah, this is a great example. Darwin is such a cool figure in the history of science in part because–in contrast to other “Great Man” figures like Newton or Einstein–he didn’t really come up with any novel methodological tools or earthshaking new ideas about the structure of reality. Everything Darwin said in The Origin of Species was out there already, and much of it had already even been proposed by other people (including his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin). His contribution was just systematizing all that stuff, providing a unified narrative, and explicitly thinking through the immediate consequences of a pile of things that was already known. People already knew (very roughly) about heritability of traits (though the mechanism would prove elusive for a long time after Darwin). They also already knew about environmental selection and competition for resources, and knew (or at least strongly suspected by that point) that the Earth was very, very old. If you just put all those facts next to each other, the consequence–that descent with modification can and does explain the diversity of life we see all around us–almost just pops out by itself, and once you start thinking that way lots of other stuff in biology suddenly clicks into place within the explanatory framework. There’s that famous quote from Theodosius Dobzhansky that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution,” and while that’s a bit of an exaggeration, it’s very close to being true. Evolution is the paradigm case of an explanatory theory: it’s obvious in retrospect in large part because so much of what was before just a “pile of sundry facts” suddenly makes perfect sense as soon as you start looking at it through that explanatory lens. It always makes me wonder what else we’re missing that might seem just as glaringly obvious to people a century from now.
For what it’s worth, I think Marx’s work is in pretty much the same boat: it’s a theory whose power comes from providing a framework for making sense of a bunch of bits and pieces of data about the world that, in the absence of the theory, don’t seem to quite fit together. That there are problems in the details of how the originators of each theory first expressed it (which there are in both cases) doesn’t really matter much, because the insight is a way of looking at the world more than it is the precise articulation of this or that mechanism or phenomenon.
Ah that’s perfect! Thanks for sharing this.
Along those same lines, I’m always bothered when in movies, there’s a seemingly unstoppable evil that the people can’t kill, then a little girl spills some water on one of the beasts, and it works. Word spreads and there’s a montage of people in the US, France, India, China etc spilling water on the creatures and winning. Like, motherfucker they are organic beings! There are hundreds of ways to kill them!
Also, the “we tried something once, and did a bad job at it, so we won’t try it again” movie trope.
The phrases I’d associate it with are obvious in retrospect or hindsight being 20/20.
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eh, picking a lock is still better because it doesn’t wake people up, and allows you to get away without the crime being noticed for a while
I agree that ramming a door down is stupid when you can just break through a window