There are other emotional reactions which should register as confusion but don’t.
Imagine a smart person who sees asphalt being deposited to pave a road. “How disgusting,” they think. “Surely our civilization can think of something better than this.” They spend a few minutes ruminating on various solutions for road construction and maintenance that would obviously be better than asphalt and then get distracted and never think about it again.
They thus manage to never realize that asphalt is a fantastic solution to this problem, that stacks of PhDs have been written on asphalt chemistry and thermal processes, that it’s a highly optimized, cheap, self-healing material, that it’s the most economical solution by leaps and bounds. All they noticed was disgust based purely on error and ignorance.
Any thought of the form “That’s stupid, I can easily see a better way” should qualify as confusion.
Confusion is a sign that a mental model is incoherent, and as a general principle we cannot have incoherent models of facts. But a model can be perfectly coherent without being sound or complete. ”I can easily see a better way” is a sign of a model being incomplete, and should not be categorized as confusion.
There are other emotional reactions which should register as confusion but don’t.
Imagine a smart person who sees asphalt being deposited to pave a road. “How disgusting,” they think. “Surely our civilization can think of something better than this.” They spend a few minutes ruminating on various solutions for road construction and maintenance that would obviously be better than asphalt and then get distracted and never think about it again.
They thus manage to never realize that asphalt is a fantastic solution to this problem, that stacks of PhDs have been written on asphalt chemistry and thermal processes, that it’s a highly optimized, cheap, self-healing material, that it’s the most economical solution by leaps and bounds. All they noticed was disgust based purely on error and ignorance.
Any thought of the form “That’s stupid, I can easily see a better way” should qualify as confusion.
Confusion is a sign that a mental model is incoherent, and as a general principle we cannot have incoherent models of facts. But a model can be perfectly coherent without being sound or complete.
”I can easily see a better way” is a sign of a model being incomplete, and should not be categorized as confusion.