Oh, one other thought I had when reading this post: It seems to me that, when trying to come up with good explanations, people reliably don’t consider ones that don’t fit nicely into working memory. (Some would even say that the very definition of a good explanation is compressing a hypothesis to fit into fewer working memory slots.) But I notice that here it lead to people actually not considering true hypotheses (that more than three meta levels are being used). Perhaps this is merely another point in favour of the ‘use external working memory’ argument, but I can’t help but feel there is some more specific heuristic it recommends about the class of questions where we’re likely to make this mistake.
Oh, one other thought I had when reading this post: It seems to me that, when trying to come up with good explanations, people reliably don’t consider ones that don’t fit nicely into working memory. (Some would even say that the very definition of a good explanation is compressing a hypothesis to fit into fewer working memory slots.) But I notice that here it lead to people actually not considering true hypotheses (that more than three meta levels are being used). Perhaps this is merely another point in favour of the ‘use external working memory’ argument, but I can’t help but feel there is some more specific heuristic it recommends about the class of questions where we’re likely to make this mistake.