patrissimo comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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Ok. I confess that this one more than any of the others makes me seriously worry about how good my theory of mind is. How do they think their heating systems work?
Couldn't it just be an erroneous application of (an intuited version of) Newton's law of cooling, which says that heat transfer is linearly proportional to heat difference? They assume that the thermostat temperature is setting the temperature of the heating element, and then apply their intuited Newton's Law.
Seems pretty rational to me.
For example, this absolutely works with say, an electric stove.