I would be very interested if anyone has good examples of this phenomenon.
There are a few “triads” mentioned in the intellectual hipster article, but the only one that really seems to me like a good example of this phenomenon is the “don’t care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don’t give aid to Africa” triad.
Well, the “dumb” (and uneducated) explanation of airfoil lift is that wings push air downwards.
The slightly less dumb people get exposed to bits and pieces of products of thought of very very smart people, which they completely don’t understand and absolutely can’t use for reasoning. But they want to be smart. So they come up with explanation that air on top of the wing must match up with the air on the bottom, but path is longer, so it must go faster, and so with bernoulli effect, there’s lift. Reduced from dumbly talking in dumbspeech to incoherently babbling in smartspeech.
The actually smart people’s explanation is that wings push air downwards (and also pull it downwards).
The reasoning tools made by real smart people for real smart people are a memetic hazard to semi smart slightly educated people, but not so much to uneducated people, in much same way how power tools made for adults are a huge hazard to children that can open the cabinet, but not infants. If we meet super smart aliens, and they just dump knowledge, results on the really smart people might well be exactly the same.
I would be very interested if anyone has good examples of this phenomenon.
There are a few “triads” mentioned in the intellectual hipster article, but the only one that really seems to me like a good example of this phenomenon is the “don’t care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don’t give aid to Africa” triad.
Well, the “dumb” (and uneducated) explanation of airfoil lift is that wings push air downwards.
The slightly less dumb people get exposed to bits and pieces of products of thought of very very smart people, which they completely don’t understand and absolutely can’t use for reasoning. But they want to be smart. So they come up with explanation that air on top of the wing must match up with the air on the bottom, but path is longer, so it must go faster, and so with bernoulli effect, there’s lift. Reduced from dumbly talking in dumbspeech to incoherently babbling in smartspeech.
The actually smart people’s explanation is that wings push air downwards (and also pull it downwards).
The reasoning tools made by real smart people for real smart people are a memetic hazard to semi smart slightly educated people, but not so much to uneducated people, in much same way how power tools made for adults are a huge hazard to children that can open the cabinet, but not infants. If we meet super smart aliens, and they just dump knowledge, results on the really smart people might well be exactly the same.