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What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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You ever see a dog that's got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it's never going to make the connection.

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.

Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It would have been something like 2005 or so. It may have been a known fact at the time, but they mentioned specifically that they were caught by surprise by the phenomenon. I didn’t fault them for it - the whole project was kind of a mess. I’m a biologist and I wasn’t aware of that, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me, either.

That’s weird though. You’d think they would have had multiple botanists on the design team who could have pointed that out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I'm sure it was just that no one realized it would scale to trees, since that hadn't been done before. As far as I know you don't have to do anything special in that regard with small seed-grown plants in a green house, only cuttings that root from stems, and so have weaker roots at first and stalks that were previously branches. I'm sorry I sounded critical, I was just curious.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Also there's that documentary where the group that organized it was kind of cult adjacent. They weren't scientists first. Still very interesting and impressive they did what they did.