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What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 11 months ago by TheBananaKing to c/asklemmy

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You ever see a dog that's got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it's never going to make the connection.

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.

Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I had a number of thoughts, and realized that the common factor in my examples is this: Large numbers. Like, really large numbers. I read on Lemmy yesterday that parrots can count to 17, and I'm not convinced that humans can do much better. Maybe close to 1,000 at the far outer limit, but that's really it.

Lots of humans deny evolution, saying that there's no way that we evolved from the same ancestors as other primates, but we think that the pharaohs in Egypt ruled a really, really long time ago. So while we can see changes pile up down the generations even in our lifetimes, we have a hard time extrapolating that to such timescales as 12 million years since the last common primate ancestor. Our little primate brains can't even begin to conceive of it, much less the ~180,000,000 years of the Age of Dinosaurs.

Lots of humans deny climate change and pollution, saying that there's no way our small consumption can affect a planet so big. We just have no intuitive understanding of how eating a hamburger, or burning a gallon of gasoline to get to work, scales to 8 billion of us.

And let's not even get into wealth inequality, except to say that surveys regularly find that humans can't even begin to conceive of the magnitude of the wealth gap.

[–] royal_starfish 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well technically we can group things and do maths and we also have scientific notation, so there's also that

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Aye, really makes you appreciate just how important language and writing are to our society. Imagine what the parrots could accomplish with their base-17 number system, if they could write!