[NNagain] A good question - do you know how a toilet works?
David Lang
david at lang.hm
Wed Oct 4 15:14:17 EDT 2023
Unfortunantly, these days dissent from the manufactured concensus is being made
illegal, not just unpopular, that path is being badly strained.
David Lang
On Wed, 4 Oct 2023, Dave Taht via Nnagain wrote:
> I like to think, that as we defeated cholera, and designed water and septic
> systems that just work, that engineers and scientists had successfully
> informed policymakers of the right things to do - not always right, the
> first time!
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Adam Mastroianni <experimentalhistory at substack.com>
> Date: Tue, Oct 3, 2023 at 1:57 PM
> Subject: On the importance of staring directly into the sun
> To: <dave.taht at gmail.com>
>
>
> It's also important to poke the heart of a dead pigeon
>
>
>
>
>
>
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> for more
> On the importance of staring directly into the sun
> <https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=656797&post_id=137606009&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1h2yoq&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4OTE1NzkxNCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTM3NjA2MDA5LCJpYXQiOjE2OTYzNjY2NTgsImV4cCI6MTY5ODk1ODY1OCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTY1Njc5NyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.unlKa16mqL5osnqC-DNfUY2oW34rYPuTJ07uWmDmac4>It's
> also important to poke the heart of a dead pigeon
>
> Adam Mastroianni
> <https://substack.com/redirect/f68d877d-e8aa-4706-88b4-48f88443e45d?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> Oct 3
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>
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> Listen to post · 22:53
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> Photo
> cred: my dad
>
> There's something very weird about the timeline of scientific discoveries
> <https://substack.com/redirect/f4751026-7628-4fca-93aa-2b742761d8ec?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> .
>
> For the first few thousand years, it’s mostly math. Maybe a bunch of math
> nerds hijacked the list, but it's pretty obvious that humans figured out a
> lot of math before they figured out much else. The Greeks had the
> beginnings of trigonometry by ~120 BCE
> <https://substack.com/redirect/d3a2ac46-c078-4314-830e-166482b86ccb?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.
> Chinese mathematicians figured out the fourth digit of pi by the year 250
> <https://substack.com/redirect/67256e6c-0a90-432e-9e6a-bb8da8f511ce?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.
> In India, Brahmagupta
> <https://substack.com/redirect/763e427d-25d4-4208-9ff2-76165f8cb991?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> devised a way to “interpolate new values of the sine function” in 665, and
> by this point we're already at mathematics that I no longer understand.
>
> Meanwhile, we didn't discover things that seem way more obvious until
> literally a thousand years later. It's not until the 1620s, for instance,
> that English physician William Harvey
> <https://substack.com/redirect/6073f655-8b16-4d4a-84bf-65850374f115?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> figured out how blood circulates through animal bodies by, among other
> things, spitting on his finger and poking the heart of a dead pigeon. We
> didn't really understand heredity until Gregor Mendel
> <https://substack.com/redirect/39f12d29-f01c-474e-889c-ba34c7e2aa40?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> started gardening in the mid-1800s, we didn't grasp the basics of learning
> until Ivan Pavlov
> <https://substack.com/redirect/f2955724-35ff-4ab7-adc8-30221186ebe1?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> started feeding his dogs in the early 1900s, and we didn't realize the
> importance of running randomized-controlled trials until 1948
> <https://substack.com/redirect/768bb3ce-a378-43a0-8eb0-54103b5b8427?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> .
>
> Oh, and for 13 centuries, people thought that rotting meat turns into
> maggots, until Francesco Redi
> <https://substack.com/redirect/2184723f-13e2-4c46-9805-6b122d833fce?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> did this:
> <https://substack.com/redirect/85e8013b-2d53-4fb7-bae3-67e00af16a8d?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> Nobody
> thought to do this until 1668. Image credit: Amitchell125
> <https://substack.com/redirect/cef8ff4d-3783-4bbf-9ad1-81e9d3026bea?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
>
> What took us so long? How did all this low-hanging fruit go unplucked for
> centuries? Our ancestors weren't stupid—they were absolutely nailing it in
> math, racking up centuries of top-notch numbers stuff, even while they were
> like , “I hope my meat doesn't rot and turn into maggots.”
>
> A very straightforward theory of how science works is “we discover things
> in order from easiest to hardest.” But what makes something hard to
> discover? I don't mean *impossible *to discover—you can't see the rings of
> Saturn without a telescope, for example. I mean cases where it seems like
> we have everything we need to make a discovery, and yet we take centuries
> to make it. Why does *that* happen?
>
> I think I have an answer, but we must unfortunately look for it in the
> toilet.
> *HOW DOES A TOILET WORK*
>
> Here's one of my favorite psychology studies of all time
> <https://substack.com/redirect/4a3c3b5c-a6e9-4f73-b425-3db86a3997d7?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.
> You bring people into the lab, and you ask them, “Do you know how a toilet
> works?” And they say “Uhh yes, I'm not an idiot.” And then you go “Okay,
> could you please write down, step by step, how a toilet works.” And then
> you ask them to explain something that requires knowledge of toilets, like
> “How does pressing the lever on the side of the toilet cause the bowl to
> empty and then refill again to a certain level?”
>
> What participants learn in this study is that, to their horror, they don't
> really know how a toilet works, at least not nearly as well as they thought
> they did. This isn't specific to toilets—you can get it with everything
> from spray bottles to helicopters.
>
> Here's one from me: I realized recently that I don’t know how things dry. I
> know *that *things dry, of course—I’m not an idiot! But *why *do they dry?
> If you leave a wet towel hanging in the bathroom, eventually it won’t be
> wet anymore. Where does the water go? Into the air, I assume, but I thought
> liquid water is only supposed to become gas when it gets hot enough.
> This trustworthy-seeming
> website
> <https://substack.com/redirect/5fded803-44f0-4646-8470-7834ad41395c?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> informs me it's because temperature is only the *average *amount of energy
> in a volume of water, and individual water molecules can have way more or
> less energy than that because they're all moving around randomly, and so by
> chance some are going to pick up enough energy to slip their bonds and
> rocket off into the air.¹
>
> Psychologists have a name for this tendency to think we understand things
> better than we do: the “illusion of explanatory depth.” We call it an
> illusion because we live inside a proto-paradigm
> <https://substack.com/redirect/045df2b0-74e4-4069-b614-4ace308b1f26?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> where we catch people making mistakes and go “aha! a bias!” and then
> publish a paper on it. (...he said, having recently published a paper
> called “The Illusion of Moral Decline
> <https://substack.com/redirect/45193b72-9123-4d92-b502-5dd33a364719?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>”.)
> But this particular illusion is a feature, not a bug. In fact, we can't
> live without it.
>
> Think of it this way: for most of human history, we didn't know why things
> fall down. People trip, cups spill, buildings topple, and nobody had any
> good explanations for this, or at least not any true ones. If you didn't
> have an illusion of explanatory depth, you'd spend your days dumbfounded:
> “Why do things fall?? Why do you return to earth when you jump?? What's up
> with clouds—they don't seem to fall at all!! Why do some things fall when
> in water and some things don't?? Why can birds rise by flapping their
> wings, but I can't rise by flapping my arms??”
>
> You can't live your life if you're always getting stuck on mysteries like
> this. You'd get so mesmerized by the inexplicability of your porridge
> falling into your bowl and bubbles rising in your water that you'd forget
> to eat or drink and you'd die. That's why we *need *the illusion of
> explanatory depth: most things have to feel like they make sense, even if
> they don't, so that we can get on with the business of living.
>
> And indeed, people born before the discovery of gravity understood this
> whole falling business exactly as well as they needed in order to survive.
> They knew that they'd fall and die if they walked off a cliff, that the
> things they throw in the air will fall down on people's heads, and that
> houses tip over if they aren't built properly. Maybe they thought they
> understood it better than they actually did, but for their purposes, they
> understood it perfectly well.
>
> In fact, I humbly submit that, despite all our progress, the average human
> today understands the things-falling-down problem only a tiny bit better
> than the earliest humans did. Take me as a test case: if you asked me why
> things fall down, I'd go, smugly, “Gravity!” But that's not an explanation.
> I could go a little deeper: “Well, everything with mass exerts an invisible
> force on other things, which pulls those things closer. More mass, more
> force.” But why do things have this invisible force? How do they exert it?
> Why does it make things come closer? I understand that *someone *could
> probably answer those questions, but *I *cannot. To me, they're just some
> arbitrary rules of the great board game of life, much like they were to all
> of my ancestors.
> *SMACK ME IN THE FACE AND TELL ME I KNOW NOTHING*
>
> Okay, so an illusion of explanatory depth is extremely important to staying
> alive. It does, unfortunately, have a downside: it fools you into thinking
> the universe isn't full of mysteries.
>
> This, I think, explains the curious course of our scientific discovery. You
> might think that we discover things in order from *most *intuitive to *least
> *intuitive. No, thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, it often goes
> the opposite way: we discover the *least *obvious things first, because
> those are things that *we* *realize we don't understand*.
>
> That would fit with our incredible ancient progress in mathematics, because
> math is *not *obvious. Here's an example: could you please tell me the
> volume of this figure?
> <https://substack.com/redirect/a8475427-8254-4f43-8b2e-4d5b7cc08bac?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> Image
> cred: Stumps
> <https://substack.com/redirect/193885f7-f76e-40f2-af4a-95e35d621c0f?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
>
> Unless you're a math whiz, I assume the answer does not spring to mind.
> Maybe you get a sense of , “I think I learned how to do this in high
> school, I bet I could get it if I thought for a little bit.” Or maybe, like
> me, you just get a sense of despair. Either way, there's no illusion of
> explanatory depth here; this problem absolutely smacks you in the face with
> the realization that you don't know the answer, and it would at least take
> some work to figure out. And that's exactly what you need to discover
> something—to realize that you don't know it yet. Perhaps that's why the
> ancient Egyptians nailed this one ~4,000 years ago
> <https://substack.com/redirect/09a52770-0337-485a-b66a-afa37333a383?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> !
>
> I'm sure that progress in math still requires intuition and insight.
> (Indeed, the mathematician Henri Poincaré reports that he came up with Fuschian
> groups
> <https://substack.com/redirect/ff0d8033-9bef-471f-ba0b-456fd5e887bb?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>—whatever
> those are—suddenly and almost magically while he was getting on a bus
> <https://substack.com/redirect/fe5ea8e1-facb-4df0-9658-51e4c8bf52fb?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.)
> But math, perhaps more so than any other intellectual pursuit, emits very
> strongly what we might call *ignorance signals*, signs that there's
> something you don't know. Maybe it's all the numbers and symbols, the funny
> shapes, the level of abstraction, the amount of stuff you have to hold in
> working memory, the heaviness you feel in your head when doing mental
> math—whatever it is, it seems to have helped us do a lot of good math very
> early in our intellectual history.
>
> Other subjects, however, emit fewer ignorance signals. Compare this
> mathematical discovery from the second century
> <https://substack.com/redirect/0e413d10-e653-4444-b0f1-a7b23a85fca7?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> :
> <https://substack.com/redirect/7ca2a86d-3cfd-4db2-bb96-8fa9b155ab0c?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
>
> With this physics discovery from 1586
> <https://substack.com/redirect/b4a9e087-fae0-4334-921b-1f8f9b66be76?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> :
> <https://substack.com/redirect/eb80f88e-4fc2-4bbf-9c5d-59560986c708?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> Image
> cred: Theresa Knott
> <https://substack.com/redirect/62a4e364-837b-4783-8b06-0f28b2b5cd48?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.
> (The sizes of the spheres represents their masses, not their volumes.)
>
> The first one is a method
> <https://substack.com/redirect/1831f557-8226-4841-b96e-047d47f9b95a?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> of evaluating polynomials, and I don't even know what it means to evaluate
> a polynomial (“Hey, nice polynomial you got there”?) The second one is an
> experiment showing that heavier things and lighter things fall at the same
> rate, which seems like the most obvious experiment in the world. So why did
> we only discover it 12 centuries later?
>
> The answer, I believe, is that we had an illusion of explanatory depth for
> weight but not for polynomials. It makes perfect intuitive sense that
> heavier things should fall faster—after all, it's harder to hold them up!
> Most people never encounter a situation where they have to know whether one
> thing will fall faster than another; if you knock over a full glass and a
> half-full glass, for instance, they'll both be empty glasses rather
> quickly. Plus, some things obviously fall slowly, like feathers and flower
> petals, so there's a precedent for things falling at different speeds. So
> why bother tossing stuff off the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
>
> If that didn't satisfy your curiosity and you also happened to be born
> after 322 BCE, you had an excellent guide for explaining why things fall
> down: Aristotle
> <https://substack.com/redirect/ca8f26e7-0e63-41be-a494-05f57163171f?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.
> According to him, things fall down because the human world is made of four
> elements, each with its natural place: earth at the bottom, then water,
> then air, then fire. Things move in the physical world when they're forced
> out of their natural order—earth in water will sink, air in water will
> rise. This sounds silly to us today, but as the physicist Carlo Rovelli
> explains in this terrific article
> <https://substack.com/redirect/6d2965f0-6b4d-435e-9085-9f5d04c05111?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>,
> Aristotle actually did a great job:
>
> In summary, Aristotle’s physics of motion can be seen, after translation
> into the language of classical physics, to yield a highly non trivial, but
> correct empirical approximation to the actual physical behavior of objects
> in motion in the circumscribed terrestrial domain for which the theory was
> created. [...] The reason Aristotelian physics lasted so long is not
> because it became dogma: it is because it is a very good theory.
>
> So yes, Aristotle's system suggests that heavy things should fall faster
> than lighter things because they have more “natural motion” toward their
> rightful place. This turns out to be wrong. But it was very hard to notice
> why it was wrong because Aristotle's physics mostly made sense otherwise.
> There simply weren't enough ignorance signals to make it seem reasonable to
> check whether heavy things actually fall faster. I mean, if you stepped
> into the Pantheon
> <https://substack.com/redirect/62bbcb41-c167-4f6a-84f3-da82014a7164?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> (built in the second century, a few hundred years after Aristotle) and
> beheld its magnificent architecture that stayed up perfectly well—and still
> does—you probably don't find yourself thinking, “We need a new system of
> physics.”²
>
> Upgrade to paid
> <https://substack.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.fuxaVfvzyfWobRIKs21q-BXaER8pH2tnGHPEt9btmXc?&utm_medium=email&utm_source=subscribe-widget&utm_content=137606009>
> *GO BLIND, GET HIGH, INVENT PSYCHOLOGY*
>
> Which brings us to psychology. No offense to the mathematicians, but most
> of us find people way more interesting than numbers. So why did we spend
> centuries studying numbers, while we've only recently started studying
> people?
>
> Maybe it's because psychology is the domain with the deepest illusion of
> explanatory depth. You open your eyes and see stuff, and although this
> requires lots of complicated calculations and several anatomical miracles,
> it doesn't feel mysterious at all. You hear a song and remember the lyrics
> years later, and this seems totally natural. You and your spouse watch the
> same movie and have different opinions about it, and the explanation seems
> obvious: you're right and they're wrong. It's so easy to accept the wild
> workings of the mind at face value, or to generate ad hoc explanations for
> them, that you might never realize you have no idea how any of this works.
>
> While philosophers have occasionally made these illusions deeper by
> spinning up spurious theories of psychology, I bet most of our illusion of
> explanatory depth for psychology comes preinstalled or is acquired quickly
> through experience. The brain's greatest trick is convincing you that it's
> not doing any tricks at all, blocking your conscious access to most of what
> it does and then giving you a perfectly reasonable account for what's going
> on behind the curtain:
>
> Me: Hey brain, I notice that I can see stuff. How does that work?
>
> Brain: Oh, there are things in the world, and then I peek out through my
> eyes and see them.
>
> Me: Cool, sounds good.
>
> Overcoming this expertly-maintained illusion requires a big push, which is
> perhaps why we didn't do it until a German guy stared directly into the sun.
>
> Most histories of psychology as an experimental science begin with Gustav
> Fechner
> <https://substack.com/redirect/09414944-26e5-467f-9747-205f95ff433c?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> setting up a psychophysical laboratory in the middle of the 1800s. What
> those histories often fail to mention is that Fechner began as a physicist,
> but then he suffered a mental breakdown after going blind because *he
> stared at the sun for too long*.
>
> He was trying to study afterimages, those glowing spots you get in your
> field of vision when you look at something bright and then look away. If
> you do that too many times, it turns out, you fry your retinas and get
> really depressed for three years
> <https://substack.com/redirect/f04af892-219b-45e3-a5cf-a9c2b73a3f3b?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.
> Fechner was completely blind for a while, and then he underwent treatment
> by moxibustion
> <https://substack.com/redirect/b8df72b6-17fa-47b6-b41b-634a481b38b4?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>,
> which is where you put a weed called mugwort on someone's skin and then set
> it on fire. Besides leaving scars, this treatment somehow ruined his
> digestion, and he almost starved to death before a family friend figured
> out a way of preparing ham in a way that he liked; the friend said the idea
> came to her in a dream.
>
> Fechner eventually recovered, but the experience turned him weird. Maybe it
> was the mugwort, which has psychedelic properties according to this
> seemingly-trustworthy
> website
> <https://substack.com/redirect/b8b2a8a9-436f-40ce-98ac-a0740607788b?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> ³, which would make sense, because when Fechner regained his sight, he
> acted like someone who had been doing a lot of shrooms.⁴ His first
> post-blindness project was a book about the mental life of plants. Then he
> decided to invent a new religion. From the biography
> <https://substack.com/redirect/42b4559e-0e59-4334-af1c-faafa06633b3?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> that appears at the beginning of the English translation of his
> landmark *Elements
> of Psychophysics*:
>
> Fechner's general intent was that his book should be a new gospel. The
> title means practically “a revelation of the word.” Consciousness, Fechner
> argued, is in all and through all. The earth, “our mother,” is a being like
> ourselves but very much more perfect than ourselves. The soul does not die,
> nor can it be exorcised by the priests of materialism when all being is
> conscious.
>
> Fechner wrote seven books on the topic, but they never caught on, so he
> decided he should give his new philosophy a “scientific foundation.” For
> reasons not entirely clear to me now, he thought the most important thing
> to do was set up a laboratory and do things like: show people two lights
> that are almost equally bright and then ask them whether they can tell the
> difference between the lights. I don't know if this ultimately provided
> vindication for Fechner's philosophy, but he did discover
> <https://substack.com/redirect/4c96d4eb-762b-4aec-ac54-9c8d4bb4e63b?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> that the “intensity of our sensation increases as the logarithm of an
> increase in energy,” and thus laid down, for the first time in history, a
> scientific law of psychology.
>
> Fechner's sun-addled realization helped get people to start both a)
> wondering about how the mind works, and b) believing that you could study
> it empirically. He and his friends Ernst Weber
> <https://substack.com/redirect/24da792e-d864-4fcc-8487-15037734c7b7?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> and Wilhelm Wundt
> <https://substack.com/redirect/e3c3ab96-7c1f-4d9a-9110-36d8a6746bd2?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> turned the University of Leipzig into the hot place to be for psychology,
> where they trained most of the prominent psychologists of that generation,
> who in turn trained most of the prominent psychologists of the *next
> *generation.
> A good chunk of experimental psychologists working today are descendants of
> Fechner and his friends, including me.⁵
>
> Which is to say: the field of experimental psychology exists today at least
> in part because a German guy stared at the sun for too long.
>
> What Fechner needed, of course, was not to get his eyeballs cooked, but to
> get his illusion of explanatory depth dispelled. Virtually every human who
> had ever existed before him felt content enough with their knowledge of the
> mind to not bother learning anything more about it. A few people had been
> curious enough to at least advance a few theories, but they didn't think it
> was necessary to gather data. (Immanuel Kant, in fact, had written
> <https://substack.com/redirect/0c4719ea-d498-4f38-9bff-43ceace8679a?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> only 75 years before that gathering data was hopeless; we would never learn
> much more about psychology than we already knew.) We could not make
> progress in psychology until we understood how little we actually
> understood, and perhaps going blind from staring at the sun, lying in bed
> for three years, inhaling some burning mugwort, and inventing a new
> religion makes you realize there are a lot of questions we haven't answered
> yet.
>
> Fechner's intellectual descendants set about answering those questions,
> many of which could have been answered long before, but nobody had thought
> to do so. One of the most influential studies in developmental psychology,
> for example, is about whether babies can recognize faces
> <https://substack.com/redirect/066f242a-4843-4e38-902a-5871422d869c?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>;
> you can replicate it with some cardboard, a mirror, and a baby. Actually,
> while you've got the baby handy, you can also replicate the Little Albert
> experiment
> <https://substack.com/redirect/082d4c67-c312-4367-850a-b0f8bce8bcad?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>—an
> early proof of concept that humans can be classically conditioned—by
> putting on a Santa Claus mask and banging some pots and pans to scare the
> baby, but please don't do this. The original study on “learned helplessness
> <https://substack.com/redirect/a5fa023d-5ca7-4aed-89f6-192829f32de4?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>”
> used an electrified floor to shock dogs; you could conceivably replicate it
> with a more ancient way of torturing a dog, but please don't do this
> either. We didn't need modern technology or advanced mathematics to study
> these topics—in fact, someone living hundreds or even thousands of years
> ago probably could have done a half-decent version of almost every
> study on this
> random list
> <https://substack.com/redirect/eaf86554-a64c-4aa8-9ff6-34d464c587d3?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> of famous psychology experiments. The answers were simply waiting for us to
> go looking for them.
> *PLEASE FEED ME 11 SLICES OF BREAD PER DAY*
>
> It's easy to look back on the history of our discoveries and believe that
> we've moved from an era of mysteries to an era of certainties. No: we've
> always lived in an era of mysteries, and we've always lived in an era of
> undue certainties. We know more than our ancestors did, yes, but far, far
> less than we *think *we know.
>
> So where are our illusions of explanatory depth still the thickest? One is
> in psychology, where I've argued
> <https://substack.com/redirect/045df2b0-74e4-4069-b614-4ace308b1f26?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> that we're stuck doing things in ways that used to work but don't anymore,
> or in ways that never worked at all. Another is probably in dentistry
> <https://substack.com/redirect/d3387110-25a0-4877-a012-46c362135a27?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>,
> where we have pretty bad evidence for almost everything. I'd wager that
> “dark matter” and “dark energy” are going to end up looking silly, but what
> do I know.
>
> The biggest illusions of explanatory depth might be in nutrition and weight
> loss, where lots of people believe things very strongly for no good reason.
> For instance, I grew up staring at this image on the back of my cereal box:
> <https://substack.com/redirect/84541a6b-6be7-4ce1-a8cf-422bf0a0ea35?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
>
> That's right: the government said I should eat *eleven slices of bread per
> day*.⁶
>
> Gulping down half a loaf of Wonderbread every day sounds crazy to many
> people now, but those people also believe many things that will probably
> sound crazy sometime soon. Eat a lot of fat/no don't! Eat a lot of meat/no
> don't! Eat only at certain times/no, eat whenever you want! I was once at a
> dinner where a professor politely refused a plate of potatoes because she
> was “trying to lose weight,” and I had to giggle because I had just read
> <https://substack.com/redirect/cccf2caa-edec-4f9b-a38c-900da8d1a495?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> about a bunch of people who lost weight eating *only *potatoes. At least
> there are few things we all agree on—I mean, nobody thinks you can lose
> weight by eating croissants all day! (Oh, wait
> <https://substack.com/redirect/6313b878-120d-4722-8bb4-5097ba29d644?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> .)⁷
>
> Look: we don't really know what's going on here, which is fine. What's not
> fine is *believing *that we know what's going on, because then we'll never
> do what it takes to actually figure it out. The first step in solving the
> mysteries is believing in the mysteries
> <https://substack.com/redirect/0d59e1ac-652e-4432-aaf1-b38373f866cd?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> .
> *WAKE UP AND SMELL THE MUGWORT*
>
> It's hard to overcome your illusions of explanatory depth, just like it's
> hard to hold your breath for a long time—our urge to make sense of things
> and our urge to breathe are both there for good reason, and our brains
> don't trust us to turn those urges off at will. It takes practice.
>
> Fortunately, we have lots of role models. And now we can better understand
> what made them so successful: their ability to understand how little they
> understood. Francesco Redi, the man behind the rotting meat
> experiment, describes
> it well
> <https://substack.com/redirect/fbbcaf96-280f-4105-b970-c966ecb3b464?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> :
>
> Every day I am becoming more and more certain in my decision of not
> believing anything about nature except what I have seen with my own eyes
> and what has been confirmed by experiments repeated and repeated again; for
> I have seen very clearly that it is most difficult to trace the truth since
> it is so often disguised by untruth, and that many ancient and contemporary
> authors resemble the sheep about which our divine poet [Dante] sings.
>
> Unfortunately, the illusion of explanatory depth takes many shapes. Our
> ancestors believed that the Bible or Aristotle had everything figured out.
> We got over that, but now some people believe that science itself has
> everything figured out. We've done all the easy stuff, this line of
> thinking goes, and so it's only the hardest discoveries that remain.
>
> Oh, how I hate this idea!
> <https://substack.com/redirect/509e4755-f57e-4469-9bae-9ccba6cf0c02?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> It's just the illusion of explanatory depth dressed in a lab coat. And this
> incarnation is the worst of all. If you think you know how a toilet works
> when you actually don't, whatever—you still know enough to go #2 without
> embarrassing yourself. But if you think you know how science works when you
> actually don't, you're sunk—you literally can't do it if you think it's
> impossible.
>
> Somewhere out there is our modern-day version of the rotting meat
> experiment. There are ideas that are simply too obvious to see, obscured by
> our theories that seem to make more sense than they actually do. Wherever
> our convictions are strong and our evidence is weak, there is a
> breakthrough waiting to happen. And then hundreds of years from now, our
> descendants will look back and say, “I can't believe it took them so long!”
>
> So wake up and smell the mugwort! It's a new day and the sun is shining—*time
> to go stare directly at it!*
>
> Experimental History lives to dispel illusions of explanatory depth, and
> can do so only with your support
>
> Upgrade to paid
> <https://substack.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.fuxaVfvzyfWobRIKs21q-BXaER8pH2tnGHPEt9btmXc?&utm_medium=email&utm_source=subscribe-widget-preamble&utm_content=137606009>
> 1
>
> I accept this explanation in the same way I begrudgingly accept the long
> list of arbitrary rules that precedes every new, complicated board game.
> “Settlements and cities may only be placed at the corner of the terrain
> hex—never along the edges.” Okay, fine. “When placing a greenery tile, you
> increase the oxygen level, if possible, and also your TR. If you can’t
> raise the oxygen level you don’t get the increase in TR either.” Got it.
> “Water molecules can randomly gain enough energy to evaporate.” Sure,
> whatever!
> 2
>
> Thomas Kuhn writes
> <https://substack.com/redirect/2d0416de-431a-47c2-ad87-8d2d390c8950?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> beautifully about this. He's trying to figure out why people had followed
> Aristotle's system of physics for so long when it seems so dumb, and then
> finally it clicks for him that Aristotle's system makes a lot of sense from
> the *inside*:
>
> I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's *Physics* open in
> front of me and with a four-colored pencil in my hand. Looking up, I gazed
> abstractedly out the window of my room—the visual image is one I still
> retain. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new
> way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once
> Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never
> dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said,
> and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed
> egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and
> generally successful tradition.
>
> 3
>
> It also, apparently, cures farts.
> 4
>
> Drugs show up curiously often
> <https://substack.com/redirect/05d220e5-ab85-4f79-8ce2-e3d43e1fc775?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> in the history of scientific breakthroughs.
> 5
>
> Fechner
> <https://substack.com/redirect/09414944-26e5-467f-9747-205f95ff433c?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> Lotze
> <https://substack.com/redirect/d8e0b4ab-00a7-4933-91e4-e1958c216398?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> Stumpf
> <https://substack.com/redirect/178b4688-03af-49c5-96a3-0231e4474e3c?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> Langfield
> <https://substack.com/redirect/bf9b2f84-f00f-4bb5-b877-ada0f41bdafb?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> Allport
> <https://substack.com/redirect/5748c233-b293-4beb-be81-9d181c7adad0?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> Bruner
> <https://substack.com/redirect/2a6ff206-22ac-48be-ab45-9c3bdb879707?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> Jones
> <https://substack.com/redirect/64575fbc-7847-4e36-9b32-8efab28f5711?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> Gilbert
> <https://substack.com/redirect/0ea4996e-fcaf-4441-b035-b5b9fcfc0181?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> -> me
> 6
>
> This was, in fact, merely a passing phase in federal dietary guidelines
> <https://substack.com/redirect/745d1697-d6de-4b3b-a124-35593b4a90be?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>,
> which began by specifying five
> <https://substack.com/redirect/bfd18b45-205f-4c70-918b-81b8bcac7eba?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> food groups, which then became seven food groups, then four, then six, then
> up to five, then back to four, then six again, then five with seven
> subgroups, and most recently six with 10 subgroups.
> 7
>
> “All you have to do is burn more calories than you consume,” is perhaps the
> most smugly dispensed piece of dieting advice, but it's true only in the
> most useless sense, like “all you have to do to make your car run is to fix
> your car.” For more, see these three
> <https://substack.com/redirect/c7e3a9e4-0acb-44bf-8903-d858e583f869?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> great
> <https://substack.com/redirect/b01592c2-5892-49a9-bade-3e8205d94ce1?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> posts
> <https://substack.com/redirect/0fd4d725-8d50-46d1-b0f9-da52f9f76e05?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> from fellow bloggers ExFatLoss and SMTM.
>
> *Thanks for reading! If you like Experimental History, the best way to
> support it is to take out a paid subscription. That also gives you access
> to every post, like last week’s I sent Paul Bloom an email
> <https://substack.com/redirect/885d2662-84b2-4a4a-a6d5-cb36e1c5c5ab?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>
> and my crash course in negotiation
> <https://substack.com/redirect/f3ee601f-08dc-48db-96b4-b8f3a09b2b20?j=eyJ1IjoiMWgyeW9xIn0.G28iMBQa64LkLY6j_SGl9AzF0Jkf1chpPVPp2b3P03c>.*
>
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> Comment
> <https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=656797&post_id=137606009&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&isFreemail=true&comments=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4OTE1NzkxNCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTM3NjA2MDA5LCJpYXQiOjE2OTYzNjY2NTgsImV4cCI6MTY5ODk1ODY1OCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTY1Njc5NyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.unlKa16mqL5osnqC-DNfUY2oW34rYPuTJ07uWmDmac4&r=1h2yoq&utm_campaign=email-half-magic-comments&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email>
> Restack
> <https://substack.com/redirect/2/eyJlIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZXhwZXJpbWVudGFsLWhpc3RvcnkuY29tL3Avb24tdGhlLWltcG9ydGFuY2Utb2Ytc3RhcmluZy1kaXJlY3RseT91dG1fc291cmNlPXN1YnN0YWNrJnV0bV9tZWRpdW09ZW1haWwmYWN0aW9uPXJlc3RhY2stY29tbWVudCZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249ZW1haWwtcmVzdGFjay1jb21tZW50JnI9MWgyeW9xIiwicCI6MTM3NjA2MDA5LCJzIjo2NTY3OTcsImYiOnRydWUsInUiOjg5MTU3OTE0LCJpYXQiOjE2OTYzNjY2NTgsImV4cCI6MTY5ODk1ODY1OCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTAiLCJzdWIiOiJsaW5rLXJlZGlyZWN0In0.iEB17q-LcZZ3JQgw0A2bHvoK_x6jgJcLh1-ALXCgxdI?&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email>
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> © 2023 Adam Mastroianni
> New York, NY
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> Start writing]
> <https://substack.com/redirect/2/eyJlIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9zdWJzdGFjay5jb20vc2lnbnVwP3V0bV9zb3VyY2U9c3Vic3RhY2smdXRtX21lZGl1bT1lbWFpbCZ1dG1fY29udGVudD1mb290ZXImdXRtX2NhbXBhaWduPWF1dG9maWxsZWQtZm9vdGVyJmZyZWVTaWdudXBFbWFpbD1kYXZlLnRhaHRAZ21haWwuY29tJnI9MWgyeW9xIiwicCI6MTM3NjA2MDA5LCJzIjo2NTY3OTcsImYiOnRydWUsInUiOjg5MTU3OTE0LCJpYXQiOjE2OTYzNjY2NTgsImV4cCI6MTY5ODk1ODY1OCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTAiLCJzdWIiOiJsaW5rLXJlZGlyZWN0In0.x34pe_HvnlgJwO7W71ojaMSLf365xvmvrwihrJcfp1E?>
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