Rixie comments on "Science" as Curiosity-Stopper - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 September 2007 08:04PM

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Comment author: Rixie 25 July 2013 11:29:07AM 1 point [-]

Maybe humans do this because if we know that someone else knows the answer to the question, it's not our problem anymore, we can safely ignore it and work on other things. Maybe if there were an elephant trainer standing next to the elephant in your living room (maybe not your living room, otherwise you'd be worried about property damage and such) holding an elephant leash and saying "Don't worry, I got this," you'd be content to walk on by if you'd seen green elephants before and had something else that you needed to be doing.

I suppose that in the "ancestral environment", if someone else already knows how to solve the problem, you can safely ignore it.