How could a distinguished professor of biology, a leader of the HGP and advisor to the US President, get something so elementary wrong
Because there are so many things, people are going to get many things wrong.
Though I agree that as soon as someone starts thinking that one of the options is “incomprehensible,” they’re probably not going to think very clearly from there on out.
You have successfully figured out that nobody used the word incomprehensible in the reddit thread :)
I was only attempting to mindread—sorry for poor use of quotes.
Perhaps interestingly, my model here is the reverse of my model for humans failing at hypotheticals: if you ask people to consider the hypothetical where punching kittens is a good idea for some low-probability reason, and ask them what they’d do about it, they can’t do it properly. It’s not in the design specs of their brain. Similarly, if someone encounters the same feeling of finding it hard to think about something, I suspect they conflate that with it being a hypothetical of low probability.
Because there are so many things, people are going to get many things wrong.
Boy, it’s a good thing we have biology undergrad dropouts to correct them! Reasonable default: the distinguished professor is probably right, and the undergrad dropout probably hadn’t thought about the problem hard enough.
Physicists have this problem too (http://xkcd.com/793/), but at least physicists have a track record for insightful, generalizable mathematical models (the Ising model is a good example).
Because there are so many things, people are going to get many things wrong.
Though I agree that as soon as someone starts thinking that one of the options is “incomprehensible,” they’re probably not going to think very clearly from there on out.
I just tried ctrl+F here and at the linked thread—who used the word “incomprehensible” and where?
You have successfully figured out that nobody used the word incomprehensible in the reddit thread :)
I was only attempting to mindread—sorry for poor use of quotes.
Perhaps interestingly, my model here is the reverse of my model for humans failing at hypotheticals: if you ask people to consider the hypothetical where punching kittens is a good idea for some low-probability reason, and ask them what they’d do about it, they can’t do it properly. It’s not in the design specs of their brain. Similarly, if someone encounters the same feeling of finding it hard to think about something, I suspect they conflate that with it being a hypothetical of low probability.
Boy, it’s a good thing we have biology undergrad dropouts to correct them! Reasonable default: the distinguished professor is probably right, and the undergrad dropout probably hadn’t thought about the problem hard enough.
Physicists have this problem too (http://xkcd.com/793/), but at least physicists have a track record for insightful, generalizable mathematical models (the Ising model is a good example).