"I wonder what it would be like to have anyone in the world, even a single person, who you could absolutely trust. Or what it would be like for there to be anyone in the world, even a single person, whom you had to tell all your thoughts, without possibility of concealment."

I think Christians have been wondering the same thing for a couple thousand years. Radical honesty and Crocker's Rules aren't exactly new concepts, are they?

Consider Ephesians 4: Speak the truth, but do so in love considering the feelings of others. There's an obnoxious way to be truthful, and a much more fruitful way to be truthful.

"Speak the truth in love" "each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body." "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen."

Can some of the anchoring effect can be explained by the use of a kind of implicit confidence interval?

Suppose that I (subconsciously) have an estimate of 20% for the proportion of UN countries that are African. Further suppose that I think a 95% confidence interval ranges from 10% to 30%.

If I start at a high anchor, I will adjust downwards until I'm within the 95% CI, i.e., 30%. If I start at a low anchor, I adjust upwards until I'm within the 95% CI, i.e., 10%. In my head, I may consider 10% and 30% as not statistically different from one another.

I'm not talking about exact statistical inference, but I wonder if this process is part of what's going on in the subject's head.

I have tried a classroom bargaining experiment, where I give random "valuations" to students. I then assign random ownership (so that half the class become sellers). Without knowing what the item is (it's just "some good"), the initial offerers tend to have a disadvantage because they use their own valuations as anchors.

When I change the setup by telling them that "it's a used Toyota," the final bargained prices tend to more closely (but not perfectly) split the surplus.

I'm reminded of a story that my father tells about being in the army and learning to shoot. After missing the target, the instructor told them to use "bold sight adjustments" because shooters tend to be too timid in adjusting their aims. The phrase "bold sight adjustments" became part of our family vocabulary.

I love this: "studies show we communicate much more ambiguously than we think we do." :D

I also agree with this: "reawaken the delight in a world full of mysteries, which has been sapped by the notion that they are already understood, and therefore, no longer important."

But, I would add that there are mysteries that are understood, and mysteries that are not understood. So, if I'm going to spend my time discovering answers to mysteries, I'm going to choose the less-understood variety, so that I can get published, or the well-understood ones that are practical at the time (how does this #$%! toilet work again?). I, also, have limited time during any given day.

(That doesn't stop me from spending the odd day trying to re-discover why the units for joules should be able to be expressed as distance-squared-mass units; I'm not a physicist.)

I completely disagree with your portrayal of curiosity and curiosity-stoppers. Our curiosity generally has to do with our familiarity (or lack of it!) when encountering a phenomenon.

If I saw you cast a bizarre light that hovered over your book on the train, "Science!" would surely NOT diminish my curiosity, b/c I'd never seen anything like it ever. When I see David Blain (sp?) perform, I am amazed (and curious) about how he does "street magic." Do I think it's magic? Of course not. In fact, I presume that there is a rational scientific explanation to it. But, that does not make me less curious. In fact, I'm curious to know the explanation.

Conversely, when I walk into someone else's house and they flip on a light, I do not stop to be sure that their lights work the same as mine (even though I have no experience with their lights), because the phenomenon is not new to me. I've been a good Bayesian and simply applied my experience with thousands of light switches to this new light switch.

Curiosity is a function of (1) our familiarity with the phenomenon, and (2) the intensity (or magnitude) of the phenomenon (is that a little flame coming from your fingertips or a 100' flare?). It has little to do with Science! or Magic! as curiosity-stoppers.

I'm pretty ignorant on this, but I always thought that the phrase related to complex outcomes that result from surprisingly simple systems, so that the complexity is "emergent".

One example is chaos. One can have chaotic non-linear dynamic systems and non-chaotic non-linear dynamic systems.

But, again, I could have misunderstood.