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SarahC comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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I think you're underestimating the average person.
I might well be. Given the value of empiricism-type virtues, anyone want to go test it (by creating an operationalized notion of what it is to understand the heuristics, and then finding randomly choosing several people independently from e.g. your local grocery store and testing it on them), and let us know the results?
Jasen Murray and Marcello and I tried this the other day concerning what portion of native English speaking American adults know what a "sphere" is ("a ball" or "orange-shaped" count; "a circle" doesn't), and found that of the five we sampled, three knew and two didn't.
I once taught middle- and high-school teachers who wanted to get certified to teach math. I was a TA for a class in geometry (basically 8th or 9th grade Euclidean geometry.) I had an incredibly hard time explaining to them that "draw a circle with center point A" means that A goes in the middle of the circle, instead of on the boundary. As I recall, it took more than a week of daily problem sessions before they got that.
Of course, I may have been a bad teacher. But I was trying.
I find that very surprising; I thought of using "circle" to refer to just the boundary and not the interior as being primarily a mathematical usage... though I suppose not to the same extent as it is with "sphere".