Why the universe wasn't full of mysteries, but now it is

 Psychologists have a name for this tendency to think we understand things better than we do: the «illusion of explanatory depth». [...] 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!!

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. [...] 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. -- On the importance of staring directly into the sun Adam Mastroianni

Stilts everywhere

It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. This is impossible. -- Science and Hypothesis, Henri Poincaré

Coping

There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. -- Robert A. Heinlein

Where the buck stops

Nothing can be soundly understood

If daylight itself needs proof.

-- Imām al-Ḥaddād (trans. Moṣṭafā al-Badawī), "The Sublime Treasures: Answers to Sufi Questions"

Unmixing the unmixable

What is more important in determining an (individual) organism's phenotype, its genes or its environment? Any developmental biologist knows that this is a meaningless question. Every aspect of an organism's phenotype is the joint product of its genes and its environment. To ask which is more important is like asking, Which is more important in determining the area of a rectangle, the length or the width? Which is more important in causing a car to run, the engine or the gasoline? Genes allow the environment to influence the development of phenotypes. -- Tooby and Cosmides

Analogy Rot

It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name 'common sense', our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. -- E. W. Dijkstra