1y ago

What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp?

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?

215 comments

Rejecting evidence that is right in front of our eyes because of some kind of religious faith or political beliefs.
- Or rejecting research/statistics/math/science/etc. because of some anecdotal evidence.

Thinking that tailgating the vehicle directly in front of them will make thousands of other vehicles in front of that vehicle magically go faster. And many other reckless car-brain stunts.
- Is this the root pathology behind traffic? Like, I never understood traffic, is there someone at the front refusing to go fast enough or is it the result of some distributed error like this that everyone mis-optimizes for that in aggregate results in traffic?
  
  Based on a game I think that the root issue is that there are multiple bottlenecks, unavoidable for the drivers, like turning or entering/leaving lanes, forcing them to slow down to avoid crashing. Not a biggie if there are only a few cars, as they'll be distant enough from each other to allow one to slow down a bit without the following needing to do the same; but once the road is close to the carrying capacity, that has a chain effect:
  A slows down because it'll turn
  B is too close to A, so it slows down to avoid crashing with A
  C is too close to B, so it slows down to avoid crashing with B
  [...]
  There are solutions for that, such as building some structure to handle those bottlenecks, but they're often spacious and space is precious in a city. Or alternatively you reduce the amount of cars by discouraging people from using them willy-nilly, with a good mass transport system and making cities not so shitty for pedestrians.
  The game in question is OpenTTD. This is easy to test with trains: create some big transport route with multiple trains per rail, then keep adding trains to that route, while watching the time that they take to go from the start to the end. The time will stay roughly constant up to a certain point (the carrying capacity), then each train makes all the others move slower.
  
  It may be helpful to think of it as a stream or a river, and not a collection of individual drivers. We can only control ourselves, not the stream. People working so hard to put themselves and others at risk are maybe shaving a minute or so off of their commute. Just not worth the risk.
  
  Traffic is a numbers game. I've often observed that in free flowing traffic where I live (a tiny city with only about 700k people in the entire metro) that if you take two cars that are a safe following distance apart there will be 5 cars in between. If we put in 6 times as many lanes (already a 3-4 lane freeway each way, so we are talk 20 lanes for my tiny city!) traffic wouldn't go any faster, but they would space out to most maintaining a safe following distance. (if you put in 7 times as many lanes they would get farther apart yet, but still not go faster)
- I just drop a mph every couple seconds until they fuck off. Don't break check, as that's super dangerous for you and everyone around you; don't change lanes to accommodate them (unless you're the source of the bottleneck and camping in the fast lane, in which case GTFO), since transitions are when accidents tend to happen; but you can absolutely slowly annoy a tailgater until they leave your bubble.
  
  If you do this in the left lane and cars are passing you on the right, you in fact are the asshole.
  
  LOL, I also do the passive-aggressive slowdown thing. 99% of the time it works. But then there's that rare psycho that refuses to get off your ass just to....uh....prove a point....by slowing themselves down? There was a post on schmeddit several years ago where a guy came to a complete stop in the middle of nowehere with the tailgator just sitting 1" from his bumper.
- My favorite are the red light racers who have to pass me while I'm going the speed limit and zoom to the next stop light... Just so they can wait at a red light longer than I do.
  
  A friend of mine calls that "racing to stop".
  
  You get off the line to get across the intersection so that everyone queued behind you can get across before the light turns red again.
  I'm amazed that so many people fail to realise that there is a solid time penalty for dawdling off the line.
  
  Sadly it works out for them overall. It only takes a few times of getting to the next light as it turns yellow and they are way ahead while you are sitting there at a red light. Sure sometimes you get to see them when it doesn't work out, but when it works out they are long gone.
  Timing traffic lights is a hard problem.
- Or constantly inching forward at a red light as if you moving the extra 5 feet will make any significant difference in the time it takes for you to get where you’re going.
  
  That actually has purpose, sometimes. Some lights are triggered by a sensor in the road. If I feel like the light has been red longer than it should be I'll inch up in case my car didn't trigger the sensor. Same happens in reverse, cars will be stopped too far back to trigger it so everyone sits until either they move up or the programmed cycle kicks in.
  The above said. You aren't wrong. Plenty of people do that where there aren't sensors, they also stick their nose way too far out, especially in the left turn lane.
- We saw on mythbusters that tailgating is really good for fuel economy so we’re all just amateur scientists collecting data.
  
  At highway speeds, tailgating 10 ft behind a 53 ft tractor-trailer will net you about a 39% boost in fuel economy. And further your fuel usage will drop by 100% after the trailer flattens your hood from a sudden stop maneuver!

Scope.
Imagine we both live in the US. I show you an article about an immigrant raping someone, and you say something like "well that's just one guy." I show you another, and another, and another. I show you a thousand. I show you ten thousand. Either you eventually admit that immigrants are predominantly rapists, or you look increasingly, ridiculously, obviously, wrong. And stubborn. And irrational.
But you are not wrong. I am wrong.
Because there are 331 million people in the United States, I can find an inexhaustible supply of immigrant-rapist stories.
Now take that inability to grasp large distances, large quantities, long periods of time, and apply it to everything. This is why young earth creationists exist- because a billion years is literally unimaginable. This is why people play the lottery- because you're saying there's a chance, right? This is why we don't react emotionally upon hearing of a genocide, or learning that 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.
We are not equipped to function at the scale that we are currently working at, as a species. We have been haphazardly constructed by evolutionary pressures to operate in small bands and villages, and we do not have the appropriate intuitions for any scope larger than that.
- To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.
  I study biochemistry and I'll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That's basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always "true", so to speak, but it's only relevant when you're at the nano scale
  I suppose what I'm saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I'm suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.
  
  Great to know that "fucky" is an officially accepted sciency term.
  
  Emergence is a hell of a thing
  
  In some cases that's probably true. I'm not sure it applies to things like war, time, etc.

Probability. If something has a 50% chance of occuring, that does not mean it will happen every second time, and our brain has a very hard time rationalizing that. For example, we assume its near impossible to flip heads on a coin three times in a row when really, the probability is 12.5% - not that low. Another example would be something with a 95% chance of success - we naturally round up and assume thats basically garenteed success, but theres still a very decent chance of failure, esspecially on repeat attempts. Our brains are just not wired to handle randomness well, which is part of why gambling is so addicting and why games like X-Com have to rig the odds in the players favour to avoid pissing them off.
- And that past random events have no influence on future ones.
  If a coin landed on one side ten times in a row, it's still a 50% chance on the next throw. Something a lot of people have trouble with.
  
  No, but you see, the chance you get the same side twice is... (HH, HT, TH, TT) 50%, shit
  When we add another toss, you get only two possibilities of always same side, and 6 that are not.
  So which is it? The coin itself may always have 50/50, but the universe which tosses in a series doesn't?
- This is my answer as well.
  We have developed intuition around things like naive physics - you can catch a thrown frisbee without doing calculus in your head - but it’s really, really hard to think through statistical questions in an intuitive way.
  It’s one reason I’m extremely skeptical about the utility of informed consent in medicine. A physician can tell a patient’s family that if they don’t do the procedure then the patient will definitely die, but if they do it there’s a 20% chance of complication A and a 5% chance of complication B. The right thing to do is plan on the complications happening and having a realistic idea of what that will entail. But people, especially under stress, really aren’t able to deal with that kind of thing as easily as they can deal with catching a ball thrown to them.
- RPG games like Fortnite use an algorithm which tricks people into believing their skills are improving.
  When you hit a pixel, it doesn't automatically score a hit like Space Invaders, it runs an algorithm based on the time you have been playing the game to determine the amount of damage you cause. The more you play, the more "accurate" you become.
  
  This kind of thing definitly exist, usually part of adaptative difficulty where for exemple you get an invisible buff after dying so you feel like you are improving.
  But I fail to see that in fortnite since it's a multiplayer game, only your skill and luck influence the outcome, not playtime. Fortnite isn't an RPG either (As far as I know), so I guess you meant an other game ?
  
  Sounds like the conspiracy BS I read in the call of duty subs on Reddit

That you cannot extract billions of years worth of stored energy from the earth (like oil and coal), release it, and expect there to be no consequences.
Humans aren’t much better than dogs taking a shit on the lawn in our little finite planetary backyard and kicking a few tufts of grass over it. Dumping stuff into the ocean or waterways. Can’t see it! Must be gone, right? Burying toxic chemicals. Can’t see it! Same with CO2.
Shit’s still there. Keep shitting everywhere and there’s no way you’re gonna avoid stepping in it eventually.

Many people, including myself, are too dumb to understand that other people don’t value the same thing in us that we value in others.
You see them try and become what they like, in order to try to appeal to others. “Well I wish I got more attention, so I’m going to give tons and tons of attention to others”. “I wish someone would make a grand romantic gesture to me, so I’m going to do that to someone else”. That kind of thing.
This is sometimes called “fundamental attribution error” although I think that concept covers a bit more ground.
- This is not the fundental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is seeing an action from a person and assuming it is a fundamental attribute of them. Literally in the name. E.g. you seem someone being rude in public so you assume they are a rude person. Meanwhile if you are rude in public you chalk it up to being in a bad mood as a result of something that happened to you, not because you are a rude person.
  
  It's really similar to the fundamental attribution error, though, as you can see if phrased this way: "I value $foo by a certain amount because I'm a human being, thus other human beings value $foo as much as I do".
- This is the most charitable interpretation of why guys send dick pics
  
  I think it’s exactly why they do it

Humans totally ignore that they are part of nature. Most think that reduced biodiversity won't include them.
- Most of us also ignore that 'the world' is a model in our heads that we've created with our senses. Some may make better models than others. But what does 'better' mean? Stubbing your toe less, getting sick less? Sherlock Holmes?
  Also 'the world' is very complex and constantly changing. You're either revising that model or, at some point, you're living in the past.
- In a lot of ways we aren't though. The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time in a built environment of some type.
  Even when we're in the "outdoors", most of us spend most of our time on manmade tracks or paths.
  We engage with nature on our terms in a way that is very unique.
  
  Deer mostly travel on trails they built themselves. They also change their environment greatly (the act of eating thins the trees)
- I kind of feel the opposite. Most people I know is wary of "destroying nature".
  I think meh. It is just getting streamlined. We are getting for the next phase of human civilization. We are more like an organism with white blood cells and well separated and controlled compartments of bacteria filled sacks. It is bound to get more homogenous.
  Higher civilization means the meaning of biodiversity will change domains.

Capitalism isn't purpose and purpose doesn't exist.
- I wouldn't say they are too dumb to realize this necessarily, people are just misled by endless propaganda or don't have the time and energy/skills to really contemplate things properly.

I had a number of thoughts, and realized that the common factor in my examples is this: Large numbers. Like, really large numbers. I read on Lemmy yesterday that parrots can count to 17, and I'm not convinced that humans can do much better. Maybe close to 1,000 at the far outer limit, but that's really it.
Lots of humans deny evolution, saying that there's no way that we evolved from the same ancestors as other primates, but we think that the pharaohs in Egypt ruled a really, really long time ago. So while we can see changes pile up down the generations even in our lifetimes, we have a hard time extrapolating that to such timescales as 12 million years since the last common primate ancestor. Our little primate brains can't even begin to conceive of it, much less the ~180,000,000 years of the Age of Dinosaurs.
Lots of humans deny climate change and pollution, saying that there's no way our small consumption can affect a planet so big. We just have no intuitive understanding of how eating a hamburger, or burning a gallon of gasoline to get to work, scales to 8 billion of us.
And let's not even get into wealth inequality, except to say that surveys regularly find that humans can't even begin to conceive of the magnitude of the wealth gap.
- Well technically we can group things and do maths and we also have scientific notation, so there's also that
  
  Aye, really makes you appreciate just how important language and writing are to our society. Imagine what the parrots could accomplish with their base-17 number system, if they could write!

Earth is the only planet that we’re adapted to live on. Nowhere else will be as forgiving of our mistakes.
- I suspect that colonizing Mars (or wherever else) will turn out to be much more than just an engineering problem. If we get things like food, water, atmosphere, and even gravity right, I think we’ll still find an endless list of requirements that we didn’t know were requirements… and some mystery problems that don’t seem to have any cause at all. Those problems will be because of factors we never thought of, or don’t even know how to detect.
  There could also be surpluses/deficiencies in our diet or environment that will take years (or perhaps generations) to show up. Again, that would be because of unanticipated, and maybe unsolvable, problems.
  
  I remember sitting in on a briefing from the Biosphere folks when they reached out for collaborating institutions. One of the things that stuck with me was that they discovered that trees that were not subject to wind failed to develop a healthy trunk and tended to fall over and die. That’s not something that the researchers had even thought of.
  I suspect that there’s going to be a lot of that.
  
  I could still see people trying to make it work for generations for some reason, many early colonists in the West died before stable states could be founded.
  
  We for sure will need to exercise, because low gravity turns our muscles into mush.
- Holy shit, you're right.
  We're playing permadeath on the easiest level, and failing.

When people want to enter a bus, especially a crowded one, it makes a lot more sense to wait for the people who want to get out of the bus to leave first.
This one is so baffling to me, it's really changed my view of how stupid some people really are. What do they even expect, that the other passengers magically disappear? It's really not an abstract problem if the other passengers are trying to leave right in front of you. Trying to enter a bus is also not a rare situation, so you'd expect people to understand this at least after the first few times. Unbelievable.
- Same with elevators!
  
  Worst with trains

The existence of poverty/hunger/homelessness in a post-scarcity world. if we wanted to eliminate those problems we could, but humans are blocked on how it can be done without hurting their own wealth.
- Under capitalism, food isn't produced to eat but to make profits. When it's not profitable to sell, they will rather dump foods, starving the people rather than to plainly donate. We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates. Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
  
  🍇 😡
- We're not yet in a post scarcity world. We're tantalizing close, but not quite there yet.
  There are three main areas we need to work on.
  First is power generation. We need more, and it needs to be decupled from fossil fuels. Nuclear is the obvious answer for massive amounts of power output without using massive amounts of land, but fossil fuel lobbies have been hamstringing development since the 50s.
  The important thing here isn't just replacing fossil fuels. That would just leave us were we are now. No we need to double or triple world power generation as a start.
  The second area that needs work is connected to the first. Transportation. Not just electric cars, but container ships and trains and everything in-between.
  This is where that added power generation comes in. We need to make it basically free to move things from point A to point B. There are some ways to do this, particularly for container ships. But we need the raw power available before they become viable.
  The final area is automation. We need more. Once people need to be put out of work in massive numbers. We need to decuple work from life.
  That final step is the hardest with the most pitfalls. It will happen. Well, the automation and unemployment will happen. After that we can either spiral into a hell scape or rise above into a post scarcity utopia...
  It really depends on when and how the guillotines come out
  
  You're right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of "we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don't because we're frozen in place by greed" instead of "this is something we could do with infrastructure today". If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we're stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.
- I study a lot of geopolitics and history and I have read of many different aid programs, domestically for citizens or abroad to poverty and war stricken countries.
  Unfortunately it's not as easy as dumping a bunch of money, food or whatever resource into the problem. For example there are cities with tons of homeless shelters but many stay on the streets. There are massive teams of social workers dedicated to helping people in need but many of them refuse their help.
  When it comes to countries sometimes this aid is embezzled and only given to those loyal to the government. Sometimes used to fuel armies to continue conflicts, or just disappear into corruption and resold by crooked politicians to make a profit. Additionally it can hurt local, and in turn, the wider economy. The aid distributed for free kills many local businesses and livelihoods because you can compete with free.
  Especially when you have some stupid company pulling a publicity stunt to send their own products as aid to struggling countries. One example was this brand of shoes that would donate a pair for every pair sold. This "friendly gesture" killed off all local cobblers, shoe manufacturers, shoe stores and prevented anyone from doing so to make a living, not to mention preventing self sufficiency of the country. That's just one example, there are a lot of companies and misguided companies that do exactly this and many economists recommend that these poor countries should refuse this aid.
- Despite it being parroted by the terminally online, we do not live in a post-scarcity world.

Gambling. Everyone knows the house always wins and the exact probability of winning any specific lottery but people can't grasp this. I don't know how people look at these massive luxurious casinos and think they win against this company with an unfathomably profitable business model by taking money from people who think they can win.
- I think the logic there is not that they constantly win against the casino, but more that they only need to get lucky once or twice. They just see that some people, sometimes win and there is no reason that they would not be the winners. Not sure I'm being clear about it but I hope you get my point.
  
  It makes it more understandable but I also think of it as "what is going to make ME win versus all of the thousand other poor souls here"
- I play the lottery a few times a year for the following reasons:
  -Permission to dream about what I would buy if I won for a few days
  -Justification for removed about not winning the lottery
  
  Lottery: tax for dreams.
  
  Instead of buying a ticket I just search the sidewalk for the winning ticket (that someone else lost) while I'm otherwise doing my normal activities. My odds are winning are nearly the same as someone who buys a ticket, so I can dream just as much - but I can spend the money on something else.

Things that take place over too long a period of time. Like heart disease, injustice, climate change, diabetes, addiction etc. We're evolved to prioritise short term pleasure over long term benefits, hence that cigarette, drink, line, burger is so difficult to say no to.
- I think uncertainty plays a big role here.
  You could bump a line and smoke a pack a day and get to 90.
  You could do nothing harmful and die at 30.
  Even if you make it to 90 avoiding lots of fun, was it worth it or would you rather trade 20 years for more fun?
  At the end of the day it is a matter of personal risk tolerance towards an impossible to quantify risk.
  
  As someone who treated their 20s like that, I strongly suggest at least dabbling in restraint along the way. Hell, shibari counts.

The zipper merge.

Yep, it's called math.
I was generally surprised at how many people can't do simple math without a calc, like multiply 7 x 8.
- Check mate. Sucker.
  
  Erm...
  
  Meh, close enough.
- I haven't done any long division since highschool, and now that I'd like to, I can't remember how. 🥺
  
  Good thing search engines exist, eh?
- Of all the multiplication you had to pick 7 x 8. I hate 7 x 8.
  I memorized in 3rd grade or whatever my multiple tables, but I never trust 7 x 8.
  7 x 8 = 56
  1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 5, 6, 9 ?
  No. That's wrong. After 7 comes 8. After 8 comes 5. No, it goes 5, 6, 7, 8.
  If I could visualize it as,
  56 = 7 x 8
  I'd be fine, but I can't see it that way.
  No I have to take it as 7 x 7 (49) + 7 (1 + 6), to get 56.
  Shit. I hope that makes sense to someone.
  
  I memorized in 3rd grade or whatever my multiple tables, but I never trust 7 x 8.
  Lol, that's why I picked it 😂. I hate 7 x 8 as well 😂.
  No I have to take it as 7 x 7 (49) + 7 (1 + 6), to get 56.
  That's how I do it as well 😂, 7 x 7 + 7, I never remebered 56 😂. Or 8 x 8 - 8, either way works for me 😂.

4D baby
- We live in 4D though. The three spacial dimensions (length, width, depth) and time.
  That's why the term "4D chess!" is so comical. 4D chess is just a normal game of chess lol.
  
  When people say "4D" they typically mean four spatial dimensions, in addition to time. You're not being clever, you're misinterpreting the context.
  
  Normal chess is 2D + time

My take:
Most things (especially abstract ones) that exists beyond the scope of the small-hunter-gatherer-tribe setup our brain is developed for: Quantum mechanics, climate change, racism, relativity, spherical earth, ...
What separates us from the dogs is that we've developed abstract analytical tools (language, stories, mathematics, the scientific method,....) that allow us to infer the existence of those things and, eventually try to predict, model and manipulate them.
But we don't "grasp" them as we'd grasp a tangled leash, which is why it is even possible for medically sane people to doubt them.
I'd argue that you can even flip this around into a definition:
If a person with no medical mental deficiencies can honestly deny a fact (as in: without consciously lying), then that fact is either actually wrong, or it falls into the "tangled leash" category.
- idk spherical earth isn't that highbrow to me
  
  Yeah, with the right situation you can just plainly see it.
  This thread has a lot of visualisations of exactly how you can see it, it's actually really viscerally satisfying:
  https://www.metabunk.org/threads/soundly-proving-the-curvature-of-the-earth-at-lake-pontchartrain.8939/
  
  Yes it is indeed easy to grasp in certain areas of the earth.

How to build a Temporal Flux Compressor for FTL travel. It's really easy if you know how, but we just can't figure it out!

Impulse control and the general idea of delaying minor pleasures now that will have significant benefits later, or even just not doing things that kinda feel good in the moment but will make you miserable in the near future. As a species we're pretty terrible at those kinds of judgments.
The meme of the guy poking a stick into his bike wheel in one frame and lying in a crumpled pile in the next is timeless for exactly that reason. Same with shocked Pikachu.
- I was going to say long-term thinking. We're just not wired to consider long-term consequences for the things we do. We continually get duped by promises of lower taxes without considering the damage it will cause for decades to come.
- This was my thought too, delayed gratification. Lot's of people make short term decisions that have negative long-term effects on their mental, physical, or financial health. And humanity does it as well, such as pollution or using fossil fuels when we know it's going to cause problems in the future.

Gambling has been mentioned already, but I think it's also the statistics of gambling that gets lost on people. If something has a 1 in 30 chance of a payout, it doesn't mean that in 30 tries there will be at least one payout, it means that there is a thirty percent (I don't know the percentage accuracy right now) chance of that single attempt to payout. When I worked in a liquor store and sold scratch off tickets, people would look at the odds on the back and buy so many thinking this way.
- Yup. There's no number of scratchers you can buy that gives you a 100% chance of winning. Sure, your chances go up the more you buy, but it never reaches 100%.
  The formula is: 1 - (1-p)^N where p is the chance of winning and N is the number of scratchers you buy. Basically, you have to NOT win for N scratchers, so we multiply (since this is an AND condition, ie: you must lose scratcher A and scratcher B and scratcher C, etc) the chance of not winning (1-p) by itself for the number of scratchers bought. That's the overall chance of not winning, so we subtract that from 1 to get the chance of winning. You could instead use the chance of winning directly, but the formula is much longer (until you simplify the equation, which would give you the same answer as above) since you'd need to add (in this case we are using OR conditions) the chances of winning 1 scratcher or 2 scratchers or 3 scratchers, etc.
  1 in 30 is a 3.33% chance of winning (a 96.67% chance of not winning, for those still following along). If you buy 30 scratchers, your chance of winning is only 63.83%. For 300, it's 99.9962%. The chance will never reach 100% because you have a number between 0 and 1 raised to the power of a positive number in the formula. The chance of winning at least 1 of N scratchers can only be 100% if the chance of winning a single scratcher is already 100%, and they don't sell those.
  However! There are rules dictating the distribution of winning scratchers in a roll. It's obviously not 1 every 30 exactly, but it's also not perfectly random (which could lead to long strings of losing scratchers or long strings of winning scratchers). That's why sometimes you'll have to wait in line behind someone while they make the gas station attendant open a whole new roll because they want to buy 100 contiguous scratchers and there were only 99 left in the old roll.
  Turns out, humans don't think true randomness "feels" random. There's actually a game design trick where you tell the player odds that are lower than reality because the true odds "feel" lower than the reported number. Pokemon did not use this trick, so Hyper Beam (reported accuracy of 90%) feels unfair, since you remember more strongly all the times it missed when you really, really needed it to hit vs. all the times it hit.
  
  If you buy all the scratchers you will win, you probably wouldn't net a positive amount, but you would win.
- 1 in 30 payout would be like ~3%

Breathing without choking on spit

Exponentials
- Add logarithms to that
  And calculus
  And (a+b)²=a²+2ab+b²

Objective reality that conflicts with our biases and preconceived ideas. We are really, really bad at handling that in a healthy manner, and WAY too good at denial and self-delusion.

I think if there was such a thing, truly and not simply an exaggeration, nobody would be able to answer the question because we couldn't even grasp the concept we don't understand.

I saw a toddler eating a banana and it bit its own thumb and then did an angry cry

turn signals
- Heavy groceries do not go on top of eggs, fruit, etc. Cold groceries together. Dry groceries together. If there's a bunch of bags inside of a bag, use those before the bag that's holding the other bags.
  Wtf, Publix baggers? I get you don't get paid 6-digit salaries, but this is not heart surgery.

Continued drinking or gambling. They cause huge problems, but the individual tries everything to fix it except for stopping.

Everybody else is saying things that some humans are too dumb to grasp. I'll give you an example that virtually all humans are too dumb to grasp.
How are our decisions affected by conflicts of interests? The last time I looked into this, the research in this area said that humans virtually always underestimate the effect that a conflict of interests has on them, by a lot. Many people don't even see the conflict of interests. People who recognize the conflict of interests believe that because they are aware of the conflict of interests, they can mitigate the effects completely. They are wrong.
Humans get entangled by conflicts of interests just like dogs get entangled by their leashes. Just like dogs, many times, humans don't realize that they're caught. Just like dogs, even if you show a human the problem, they cannot understand. But even worse than dogs getting tangled by their leashes, humans believe they can understand what to do when they're caught up, but it turns out that they're wrong.

first. my current dog learned to deal with this as a puppy. I was astonished. My last dog I was trying to train the concept her whole life. Never saw a dog be able to handle it before but at this point if my current dog starts to go on the other side of an obstruction I say this way and she immediately corrects. For some reason for all other dogs I find they instinctively want to go the wrong way. So its not even random, they think wrapping more is the way to go. As for humans:
"The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race Is Man’s Inability To Understand the Exponential Function"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY&t=97s
- Amazing video, now thirty years old. By now, you would expect this analysis of population, economic & consumption growth would be essential learning in schools. My feeling is that the world today caries on with even greater ignorance of the consequences of this exponential growth than it did back then.

This is a paradoxical question with no possible answer. If we're to dumb to grasp it, how could we possibly know that it is in fact simple? Quantum mechanics may well be "the simplest thing" for an alien race, yet none of us would think our inability to fully comprehend it is a sign of stupidity.

The past and the future do not exist
- Welcome to the eternal now! You've been here all along!
- this one slowed my roll a bit

Infinity. We're simply too dumb to grasp it. Example:
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3*(1/3) = 3/3 = 1 3*(1/3) = 3*(0.333...) = 0.999... 0.999... = 1
That "..." means "it continues to the infinite". And yet when you show this reasoning to people, they keep "looking" for the last 9, to claim that 0.999... is not the exact same as 1.
And that applies to all humans. You might counter it rationally, you might train yourself to recognise "it's infinite, so theoretically it'll behave in a certain way", but you don't grasp it. I don't, either.
- My "easier" way to think of this one:
  1 - 0.999... = 0
  That is, if you subtract 0.999... from 1, what is the result? It's an infinitely small value, which can only logically be expressed by 0.
  
  Is it not 0 . ...1 ?
- Why would it be the same as 1, wouldn’t it always be 0.9 unless you round up at some point.
  
  There's lots of proofs for this but this is the simplest one.
  .333... = 1/3
  .333... • 3 = .999...
  1/3 • 3 = 1
  Therefore .999... = 1
  
  No, because that "some point" will never happen. There is no last nine to round up, because if there were a last nine, they wouldn't be infinitely many.
  There are many different proofs of this online, more or less rigorous.
  
  Because it isn't 0.9; it's 0.999... with the ellipsis saying "repeat this to the infinite" being part of the number. And you don't need to round it up to get 0.999... = 1, since the 9 keeps going on and on, so their difference is infinitesimally small = zero.
  Another thing showing that they're the same number is that there is no number between them. For example:
  0.9 (no ellipsis) and 1 are different because 0.95 is between them
  0.95 and 1 are different because 0.97 is between them
  there's no number between 0.999... (with ellipsis) and 1, so they are the same. inb4 no "last nine" because it's infinite.
  
  One way to tell if two numbers are equal is to show there’s no real number between them. Try to formulate a number that’s between 0.999… and 1. You can’t do that.
  
  In the real world when you see .9 you often should round it. You rarely have as much precision as presenting - .5 should generally be seen as 1 unless you have reason to believe the measurement is that precise.
  
  .333... Is a third. That's just a quirk of base 10. If you go to a different number system you won't run into that particular issue.
  The most common other base people know of is binary. Base 2. So in binary the fraction would be 1/11 and then 1/11(binary)=1/3(base 10).
  I remember talk back in the day that base 12 is good for most common human problems. Some people were interested in trying to get people to switch to that.
  1/3 of 12 is 4.
  So 4/12=1/3=3.33333.../10
  .333... Is just the cursive way of writing 1/3.
  I still don't "grasp" infinity. I'd recon you'd need an infinite mind to grasp infinity.
- Actually infinity is easy to understand.
  If you were to walk in a straight line, you would never get to the end of the earth - it is infinite.
  Its finitism that is impossible to understand.
  3*(1/3) = 3/3 = 1 3*(1/3) = 3*(0.333...) = 0.999... 0.999... = 1
  This a problem of the number base you're using, not infinity. One third is a finite number which cannot be expressed in base 10.
- 0.999… means the value of the limit of a sequence {0.9, 0.99, 0.999, …} as number of 9s (or length of a sequence) goes to infinity, and the limit is very clearly 1 in my mind.

Unintended consequences. People like to propose grand schemes that will "fix everything", but refuse to accept that there are downsides to that grand scheme.
- Oh boy, that's going to offend all the communists.
- In the same vein, refusing to consider something that will have a small positive effect, or a partial solution, because it won't fix everything.

That why someone behaves a certain way is only important inasmuch as it determines whether they'll keep behaving that way.
Examples:
Criminals don't need to be punished but rehabilitated; because blame and guilt aren't important; recidivism is.
Your lover might have all sorts of reasons they love you, and some of those may seem very romantic and some might seem as unromantic as can be. But as long as they will keep living you, that's what's important.

The simplest thing humans fail to grasp? Things are finite without regard for your ability to grasp the numbers behind those things.

Any figure rotating in 4D around random axis.

Choosing life over taste pleasure. We don't need to commodify animals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes
List of things that, at least to some people, don't work they way they'd expect.
I think that the Monty Haul problem is a good example on there.
- Intentionally blank page: Many documents contain pages on which the text "This page intentionally left blank" is printed, thereby making the page not blank
  Thats not a paradox. The pages are blank in terms of the topic of the book, and the note is to inform you that it’s not a mistake.
  
  It's not particularly confusing, but there are a whole class of paradoxes that rely on the same mechanism -- the truth of a statement is being altered by the existence of the statement, because it is self-referential in some way.
  I think that the Berry paradox is the first one of these that I ran into, and it's a little more confusing to most, I think.

Statistics and large numbers.
- I studied statistics and the Law of Large Numbers is honestly mind boggling. I mean, I understand that it's true and I've studied the proof, but it's still enormously counterintuitive. It's not surprising that anyone who isn't familiar with it (which is the vast majority of people) to have no understanding of this phenomenon at all.

Reality is equal part abstraction and physicality, energy and information are two sides to a coin we are currently unable to percieve in full. Also, there are some aspects to reality that will never be able to be understood through the lens of science or math, due to their need for falsifyable truths within a working model. Some truths cannot be proven, and some non-physical aspects of reality cannot be directly observed through lenses or interacted with sensors or broken down into particles. The moment we start examining conciousness and psychadelics seriously as a new avenue of understanding reality our collective understanding of the universe in its totality will skyrocket.
- You wear diamond-encrusted glasses, don’t you?
  
  Not sure what or who you are referencing with that, I wish though lol

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others
"Obviously", hmm? The balance of expert opinion is in fact that dog breeds do not vary in intelligence. Which makes sense given that dog populations have significantly fewer millennia of genetic divergence than human populations, and these days nobody much claims that some human breeds are smarter than others.
Falling into your own trap!
But otherwise a decent question.
- https://thesmartcanine.com/dog-breeds/smartest-dog-breeds-list/

If my experiences are anything to go by, my vocabulary and way of speaking. Or really a lot of people's.
This is something I don't get. These people, when given a mathematical equation, treat the whole equation as a whole puzzle and use all its pieces to solve it. But if you say something that's simply too wordy or where the words are "too thesaurus-like" (often to fix the first thing), they don't "add it up" and they dump on you with Jimmy Neutron memes. I (while not being Marxist myself) remember one of my first experiences in the fediverse was talking about Marxist concepts to people who identified as Marxists and wondering from their confused reaction if they knew what Marxism entailed.
- "I can't speak clearly or concisely. This is other people's fault." -You
  
  Point to where I said it was anyone's fault.

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