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Douglas_Knight comments on Open thread, 25-31 August 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: jaime2000 25 August 2014 11:14AM

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Comment author: Strilanc 25 August 2014 03:57:42PM 10 points [-]

Is there an existing post on people's tendency to be confused by explanations that don't include a smaller version of what's being explained?

For example, confusion over the fact that "nothing touches" in quantum mechanics seems common. Instead of being satisfied by the fact that the low-level phenomena (repulsive forces and the Pauli exclusion principle) didn't assume the high-level phenomena (intersecting surfaces), people seem to want the low-level phenomena to be an aggregate version of the high-level phenomena. Explaining something without using it is one of the best properties an explanation can have, but people are somehow unsatisfied by such explanations.

Other examples of "but explain(X) doesn't include X!": emotions from biology, particles from waves, computers from solid state physics, life from chemistry.

More controversial examples: free will, identity, [insert basically any other introspective mental concept here].

Examples of the opposite: any axiom/assumption of a theory, billiard balls in Newtonian mechanics, light propagating through the ether, explaining a bar magnet as an aggregation of atom-sized magnets, fluid mechanics using continuous fields instead of particles, love from "God wanted us to have love".

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 27 August 2014 01:01:24AM 1 point [-]

What people complaining about this usually do is link to this video (or better), but I'm not sure it's actually helpful for people who don't get it.