Both of these feel intuitively right to me, and lead me to suspect the following: A sufficiently bad model is indistinguishable from no model at all.
Mental models are the basis of human thinking. Take original cargo cultists. They had a really bad model of why cargo was dropped on their island. On the other hand they used that model to do really dumb things.
A while ago I was reading a book about mental models. It investigates how people deal with the question: "You throw a steel ball against the floor and it bounches back. Where does the energy that moves the ball into the air come from?"
The "correct answer" is that the ball contracts when it hits the floor and then expands and that energy then brings the ball back into the air. In the book they called it the phenomenological primitives of springiness.
A lot of students had the idea that somehow the ball transfers energy into the ground and then the ground pushes the ball back. The idea that a steel ball contracts is really hard for them to accept because in their mental model of the world steel balls don't contract.
If you simply tell such a person the correct solution they won't remember. Teaching a new phenomenological primitives is really hard and takes a lot of repetition.
As a programmer the phenomenological primitives of recursion is obvious to me. I had the experience of trying to teach it to a struggling student and had to discover how hard it is too teach it from scratch. People always want to fit new information into their old models of the world.
People black out information that doesn't fit into their models of the world. This can lead to some interesting social engieering results.
A lot of magic tricks are based on faulty mental models by the audience.
Which book was that? Would you recommend it in general?
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.