- Rethinking categories and provisional conclusions;
- XKCD on holes;
- A new Atlantic column on The Wonder of Everyday Life;
- A Star Talk video about the limits of human intelligence.
Rethinking again the categories of posts I do here, while working on a new set of overview pages to supplement or replace my decade-old Provisional Conclusions. I tend to collect links about reality illiteracy (e.g. flat-earthers) and tribalistic morality (conservative yearning to retreat to a simpler past), but also about modernity and secularism, and about reality.
Let’s do a couple three on the last theme. But I only have a few minutes…
Here’s one that explores the idea of scale. A key component of ‘reality illiteracy’ is that humans evolved in an ancient environment where, over hundreds of thousands of years, human nature developed intuitions at local scales. We’re intuitive about distances of a few miles or down to an inch; we’re intuitive about time scales from moments to a generation. But the real world is vastly greater, in all dimensions, as humans have been able to deduce from the evidence of the physical world around us.
Here’s an example. We think of things as deep, or high, without really being aware of relative depth or height.
XKCD, from a couple days ago: Holes
