Candidate 1: “If a trillion trillion trillion people each flip a hundred coins, someone’s going to get all heads.” (“If a trillion people each flip a billion coins” might be a stronger meme, though extremely inaccurate.)
Candidate 2: “Knowing the right answer is better than being the first to argue for it.”
Those are catchy! Of course none of those is an explanation that most people can use—the inferential distance is pretty big—but they’d make great sound-bite segues to a slightly longer explanation.
If you just hit someone with a zinger like that, it’ll feel to them that you’re just scoring points, and they might get annoyed; but if you use it as the start of a discussion, that’s likely to be perceived as more respectful.
I like 1 and 3 but I’m dubious about 2. I am not convinced that it is true in the case of most humans. I’d like it to be but most people live sufficiently in a social reality that actually being right is not all that important.
Candidate 1: “If a trillion trillion trillion people each flip a hundred coins, someone’s going to get all heads.” (“If a trillion people each flip a billion coins” might be a stronger meme, though extremely inaccurate.)
Candidate 2: “Knowing the right answer is better than being the first to argue for it.”
Candidate 3: “If it moves, you can test it.”
Those are catchy! Of course none of those is an explanation that most people can use—the inferential distance is pretty big—but they’d make great sound-bite segues to a slightly longer explanation.
If you just hit someone with a zinger like that, it’ll feel to them that you’re just scoring points, and they might get annoyed; but if you use it as the start of a discussion, that’s likely to be perceived as more respectful.
I like 1 and 3 but I’m dubious about 2. I am not convinced that it is true in the case of most humans. I’d like it to be but most people live sufficiently in a social reality that actually being right is not all that important.
“Learning the right answer is better than having come up with the wrong one”?