(April 5, 2019 at 12:21 pm)Acrobat Wrote:(April 5, 2019 at 12:17 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: For one thing, despite all of our cognitive biases, we've managed to make them work, using some method or other.
What real cognitive biases did we have to work against to invent computers? Did we have to work against cognitive biases to invent the wheel, or figure out how to make a fire?
We directly perceived that round things roll and flammable things burn. We also directly perceived that the sky is a dome, the moon probably not that much higher than the mountaintops, and the earth a disk that you could see once on a mountaintop. The method we used to make wheels and fire was observation tested by trial and error. After all, not all round things make good wheels, and not all flammable things are easy to set on fire. That's not even getting into the best tools for making them. We used a method to figure out how to make those things, different primarily in complexity from how we figured out that our world is roughly an oblate spheroid, the moon is hundreds of thousands of miles higher than the highest mountains, and how to make computers. The knowledge didn't spring from our brows fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.