NancyLebovitz comments on The things we know that we know ain't so - Less Wrong

16 Post author: PhilGoetz 11 January 2010 09:59PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 12 January 2010 02:15:58PM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure how a reliable updating process would work. You can't keep checking everything you thought you knew in case expert opinion has changed on some of it.

Updates have to use the same channels as new information, and are competing with it.

I'd settle for a reliable method for suspecting that people have just made things up ( maximum heart rate as a simple calculation, that people generally should drink a lot more water than they want, people only use 10% of their brains, Eskimos have a huge number of words for snow, Victorian women had ribs removed to make more extreme corsets possible), but I'm not sure that even that exists.

Comment author: CaptainOblivious2 13 January 2010 01:33:18AM 3 points [-]

Common sense works surprisingly well in some cases: even as a child I didn't believe the "10% of your brain" thing... think about it: the only way they could know this is if someone had 90% of their brain removed and wasn't affected... and that doesn't seem nearly as likely as people wanting to believe that everyone has vast untapped potential.

And let's not even get started on how/why evolution would provide us with 10x the brainpower we need... is there any precedent for that in evolution? Can cheetas run 10x faster than they normally do just by trying a little harder? Can seals hold their breath 10x longer than normal?