I’m equally irritated when people label an idea invalid until it’s been scientifically confirmed and peer reviewed. Science is often about confirmation, not about creation. Many people are likely to have realized something long before a team of scientists got funded, figured out how to test the idea, analyzed results, wrote papers, published, and officially confirmed it.
The danger here is if we find data that goes against our common sense, we have to really consider that data, not reject it and rely on our common sense only. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. Having a study prove something by no means makes it definitive, but it does provide better evidence and lets us better know if our intuition aligns with reality.
Source: the work of Dan Ariely. His Ted talk is a good introduction.
The higher rated their comment is, the more other people likely intuited the same.
It’s almost a decent measure of how obvious the thing being proven actually was — assuming you could baseline it and compare it to others in a meaningful way.
Some people who started validating their intuitions with real measurements gave us steel ships, cantilever bridges and moon rockets.
These achievements were not a result of majority of people having the same intuition.
Can you expand on that? Who are these many people? Any examples? Lay people who have nothing to do with the field, simply intuiting results without doing the work to carefully rule out external factors? Or people without scientific training performing science without realizing that what they're doing is science ?
Thank you crazygringo2 for saying this.
"Obvious" is my most disliked word. Its reserved for 'expert' people (gatekeepers) who forgot what its like to be a beginner.
"People aren't dumb, its just that the world is a complicated place." -Professor Richard Thaler, thought leader of Behavioral Economics, 2017 Nobel Prize winner
As you can imagine, sometimes this ends up declaring the obviousness of things that are untrue.
For instance, it's obvious to anyone who has walked in a stiff breeze that it is impossible to sail faster than the wind :)
And the GPS analogy also suggested itself to me.
In fact, when the GPS gives me bad advice and I turn the wrong way, I seemed to have learned more from that too...
Personally, I don't get too wound up on people's opinions on psychological studies. They're fun little conversation filler, but psychology isn't a science.[1]
Plus, you make assumptions about what I'm saying is obvious and what the study actually showed. At first when I got a GPS, I even noticed the effect of not knowing where I was, so I even tried to pay attention in case I didn't want to use the GPS later. I noticed that even paying attention, trying to learn, you just don't engage the full set of neurons that you do when you're struggling to do something yourself. I still felt lost in situations where prior to a GPS I would have felt confident in my ability to navigate.
How could the study show that people were trying to learn when they were being told what to do? You can't control for that or see into their heads to see if they're making the same efforts in the same ways.
This study makes the same mistake of tons of psychological studies. It attempts to simplify mental processes or abstract them and then pretend that the simplification or abstraction stands in for some other mental process result.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/27/6422183...
I'm sure folks mean well but it stems from this thinking that science is some kind of truth generator. It simply isn't, its a method of investigating the natural world. Only when enough people independently verify your result, will you get _closer_ to what could be defined as objectively true. And even after verification, there could still be huge gaps in our understanding of a natural phenomenon. There is no guarantee that one group of researchers is going to present a complete picture. It may take many researchers studying the same topic over many decades to reach a scientific consensus. Until then, its simply an idea/ideas - which could be interesting to think about by itself - but its not incontrovertible truth.
And you lack the visceral experience why it’s the right choice.
A kid that grabs a hot stove will never try again. A kid who listens to their mom will.
If you ask for help, you're using someone else's systems, and whether they're right or wrong carries very little weight about how you should be approaching things. You're not producing a system, you're adding an item to a lookup table that you might someday use to build a coherent approach.
'Fire is hot' is a good entry for a lookup table, but you also need to develop a general model of where potential dangers are and that you should approach them with caution. There is no number of entries that equal that system.
No, it isn't obvious at all and your example doesn't even correspond to the paper in any way. [1]
With GPS, it's easy to simply not pay attention. And if you're not even paying equal attention, then you're not even trying to learn. But that's not even what the study's about.
The study is about people actively trying to learn, first of all. It's about the rates of people who are trying to solve something from trial and error, not people trying to memorize a route they research or look up or are told.
But the study is specifically about discovering that choice confirmation bias appears to lead to higher learning rates, which is entirely non-obvious. In layman's terms, why would "assuming I'm right" lead to better learning outcomes? Traditionally, common sense tells us that prejudice or bias leads to worse learning outcomes.
So this is actually a quite interesting, non-obvious result.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0919-5