I think the prompting program you mention would have to prompt emotions, not thoughts, to spur thinking and creativity. My thinking is most intense when feeling certain ways.
Hm, when I feel positive and ambitious , my thoughts flow. If I feel negative, I may feel my thoughts are just over-thinkative rambling.
Like listening to certain music creates certain emotions (rhythmic EDM puts me in a zone for example, or love songs make me think across bigger timelines). Imagine an AI emotion prompter that could stimulate your ambitions or thinking, or maybe even read your current emotions. Feeling unconnected and slow on thoughts? An inspirational message with the face of your grandma suddenly appears and says the right loving words. Or the face of a famous coach motivates you with the right words. And such.
Farmers have noted that the less domesticated breeds of cattle (such as Scottish highland cattle) are much better at "taking care of themselves" and "getting out of trouble" than the more domesticated breeds (such as typical US breeds). A conventional breed, when it gets stuck somehow, will stand still and moo until the farmer comes around, figures out how to fix the problem, and if the cow needs to move in some direction to fix the problem, the farmer will hit it on the other side with a shovel. Bos taurus has outsourced its thinking to Homo sapiens. But of course, H. sapiens is a lot better at thinking than B. taurus, and an individual cow is sufficiently valuable to its owner that the human will be strongly motivated to preserve and protect the cow -- it is adaptive for B. taurus to take the outsourcing deal. (And indeed, at only the cost of having 90% of its progeny *eaten* by humans, B. taurus has enslaved H. sapiens to convert vast swaths of land to grow food for cattle, and eliminate competitor and predator species. Perhaps 1/4 of the biomass of land mammals is B. taurus.)
Likely the same thing has happened with humans, especially in industrial culture. You ask "Don't most people who think independently perceive all the noise their minds produce?" Probably many do, and so have given up thinking independently. After all, what are the chances that you'll think of an action that is more adaptive than what a careful application of the conventional wisdom would provide?
So there's likely to be an evolutionary pressure against novel thinking, leading to some sort of stable polymorphism. Further complication comes from the fact that a lot of benefits of novelty are likely externalized, possibly across society as a whole.
Perhaps we can identify specific episodes of history where novel thinking has been adaptive, and where the existing humans did not operate well.
"This is why they complain--they don't _want_ to have brains. Those lead to thoughts, and thoughts cause only suffering. Thus, by asking them to think, you are inflicting the torments of the damned on the previously blissfully ignorant." -- John Rowat, in alt.tech-support.recovery
Cattle have outsourced their thinking to humans - and humans have outsourced their thinking to past generations and someone-up-there. What an analogy!
It reminds me of Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success. The essence of that book was more or less that people follow traditions without knowing why and that is a great recipe for human well-being. It's a bit depressive, but probably there is a lot of truth in it.
I've got this quote in my commonplace book: 'My governing principle with research is that none of this is a coincidence. If Einstein did something in Germany on the same day that Charlie Chaplin broke his toe in Hollywood, I think, "Aha! Not a coincidence."' -- Paranoid fantasy author Tim Powers
> I had a strong feeling that the way the cards hung on the wall must mean something important.
What did you think it meant? Did you think it meant something about you, was the angle important, or something else?
> OK, psychology inherently is about seeing the difference between the normal and the pathological.
I would say that actually psychology took a while to see that intelligence and creative ideas *don't* always link, partly because statistically they do tend to go together, but also because psychologists are self-selected for the kind of personality that is both smarter *and* more original than average.
The kind of person who is intelligent but uncreative is more likely to be found within (I'm guessing) the top brass of the military, and (here I know from both research and personal experience) the hard sciences. My colleagues in grad school were generally amazed that I could draw or make music, and when I told them I was designing a language, they assumed it was some alternative to Python or C. I made a map of Egypt in the Middle Kingdom and my advisor said it was amazing; I miss my grad school advisor.
> I guess that psychology's lack of concepts describing thinking stems from its general lack of interest in thinking.
No x 6. This means are five studies PLUS me telling you no. (I'd bet in fact there are more like fifty studies, but it's Friday I'm too inebriated at the moment to even imagine finding fifty studies, also Anders doesn't care and you're too bored with them to read one, so let's just agree that the number of *no* is six.)
>>What did you think it meant? Did you think it meant something about you, was the angle important, or something else?
I couldn't tell why the cards were important. I somehow linked their different slopes to the supernatural world I had invented with creepy creatures I imagined were moving around the room in the dark. One vague hypothesis was that they had somehow arranged the cards for some purpose I didn't understand.
But I was never sure. Mostly I just had a strong feeling that the way the cards hung was very much worthy of investigation. An investigation I quietly carried out in the evenings, without much result. It didn't help my investigation that I never asked anybody else about the issue. From that age, I have memories of being able to think better than I could talk. I could tell myself the cards must be important, but I had too few concepts to express it to someone else. (Thinking about it, less verbal people might be caught in such states of mind also as adults.)
>>you're too bored with them to read one
That, or I'm too stupid to read them effortlessly. Don't psychologists these days write books for people like me? (I'm reading The Pattern Seekers by Simon Baron-Cohen right now and it is very interesting. So far, it actually is about thinking!)
Oh sheesh, I'll write you a post someday that's all about thinking. Then you'll read it and say it was disappointing.
But I'll definitely tell you that your explanation for the slant on your name card was just about the coolest thing possible. It reminds me of being like 5 years old and wondering if my father was telling me that hell was for unbelievers because hell was for unbelievers, or if the aliens had just created the entire scenario wondering if I would make decisions by thinking things through on my own, or by trusting what people told me. Forty years later, they have their answer, but I don't know what in the world they were doing with your name card, though.
>>Oh sheesh, I'll write you a post someday that's all about thinking. Then you'll read it and say it was disappointing.
Let's disappoint each other! I guess my basic problem is that philosophy interests me more than psychology. I want to get to the core of definitions. Scientists most often don't play with concept the way I would have wished. Mostly the few of them who write books sometimes do.
Ah, so you had aliens walking around? I just had wordless, black creatures. One kind was called darkness dog and they lived under my bed. Another kind was a shadow of a human creature called a Sella (nonsensical name implying it was of feminine nature). I guess superstition becomes different for children who are actually taught to be superstitious.
On problem solving, I like this octopus experiment: I'm not finding the reference I want, but basically, after some well controlled experiments, the researchers determined that about one third of naive octopi, when presented with a jar containing a crab - managed to unscrew the lid and get the crab. The remainder never were able to figure this out on their own. However, all octopi, when allowed to watch a successful jar opening by another octopus, when presented with a jar in a limited time window, could successfully copy the behavior.
This is may be a simplification of that special "something" you are trying to get at. Put another way, there are probably certain classes of problems that only certain people can solve. And no matter how bright, others will not be able to solve the problems without help.
I don't know what you want to call it, but it's there. Feynman noted this type of person as someone with "puzzle drive".
It is interesting if octopi, who are unsocial animals with short lifespans, still are highly able to learn from others. Most other intelligent animals are social and long-lived, like apes and dolphins: They all use their big brains to learn from others in their group.
Interestingly, a zookeeper told me that orangutans are the most technically intelligent apes, while chimpanzees are more socially intelligent. In other words the orangutans, who lack social bonds except that between mother and child, have more of a "puzzle drive" than chimpanzees.
In general I believe animal intelligence could tell us a lot about human intelligence. Last winter I tried to learn everything about dolphin cognition and social life. That was not very easy: While almost all ape books on the market are for adults, most dolphin books are for children. Presumably because dolphins are cute and apes are scary. But maybe also because rather little is known about dolphins. While humans can follow apes in the jungle, they can't follow dolphins in the ocean as easily.
Maybe octopi could become my next obsession. Since they are unlike other intelligent animals in social organization, they could give clues about the raw nature of intelligence.
Hmm - a possible connection between how social a creature is and how capable of solving one-off problems they are. Interesting. It even makes a kind of "just so" sense. Also, according to my reading trying to locate that elusive source, cuttlefish are even "better" at learning tasks than octopi, but I'm not sure about their one-off abilities.
I usually think about thoughts like frogs that jump planlessly here and there (that's why I chose light green to symbolize thoughts - green like frogs). I have to admit chess is a more sophisticated metaphor.
Richard Feynman seems like an interesting person. So much talked about in his lifetime, so little talked about now. I'm going to try to get hold of his bestseller books from the 1980s. I think reading bestsellers from past decades is a goal in itself, because it says something about what people were thinking about and talking about by that time.
I think I'm somewhat apophenic myself. I think there's a high correlation between that and autism.
I do believe in the high usefulness of IQ. There definitely does need a certain level of IQ to make new connections. But just because one can make new connections doesn't mean they're good ones. The average person who believes "trans women are women" is likely higher-IQ than the average person that doesn't. This is because IQ helps people believe in very abstract ideas, and gender ideology is a very abstract idea. One needs to have a brain wired for abstract thinking to believe gender ideology, hence its popularity with academics and not with common folk.
I think that only the person, or the people, who made up the idea that trans women are women are intellectually creative. They moved the concept of "woman" from the biological realm into the social realm. The others who repeat the mantra are only copycats. Mostly fairly high IQ copycats, because it takes some processor capacity to grasp concepts like "biological" and "social".
I think lower IQ people make up theories of their own all the time. Not theories about hyper advanced systems they teach at university, but about questions like why electricity prices are so high. For that reason I assume that they are as creative as high IQ people, in the areas they know about.
I speculated that autism makes it easier for people to detect patterns because people who are a bit autistic are not as affected by social constraints when they think.
But I think it is an interesting track. Not feeling social pressure to conform should free brainpower to the world as such. Probably there are other ways to free oneself from other people's influence that does not include any autistic traits too.
Many autistic people have a problem to see the whole picture and focus too much on details. But far from all of them. Being a pattern-seer and a bit autistic could be a strike of luck.
> I think there's a high correlation between that and autism.
Eh, more likely a relationship between apophenia and schizo-spectrum disorders than autism; see:
Andersen, B. P. (2022). Autistic-like traits and positive schizotypy as diametric specializations of the predictive mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1653-1672. https://osf.io/79bnd/download
Then again, making the claim that apophenia relates to autism *does* show you might be apophenic. (Congratulations?)
It is a very interesting question. Autism and schizophrenia are sometimes said to be psychological opposites. And still they seem to coexist a bit.
I think it was a mistake by psychology to fit in high functioning autism/Asperger syndrome under a general autism umbrella. Basically, autism is social stupidity. Some autists are social idiots, others are merely a bit socially stupid. During the last decade or two, increasing numbers of people who are merely socially stupid have been diagnosed with autism. That makes it a different disorder. Studies of "autism" from the 20th century are mostly of very limited use to explain the kind of disorder called "autism" today.
I'm not enough into genetics to understand the research into the genetic causes of autism. But I know as much that there are both heritable genes that contributes to autism and de novo mutations, and that de novo mutations often cause more severe forms of autism. That means that autism is in fact two very different conditions: One heritable, potentially adaptive and one accidental. Calling both "autism" is like calling both Down syndrome and moderate learning difficulties "stupidity". Such sweeping labels make meaningful research difficult.
Hm. Maybe astrology and such could be called "social apophenia"? The only value in it is social. Like religion. Technically worthless, but often highly socially useful.
I don't really get what you mean by high IQ apophenia. Do you have a more detailed explanation?
there's a separate phenomenon in rationalist circles where high iq people can refute all of the available and stated reasons for a certain practice to exist, which leads them to believe the practice is flawed and can be abandoned
but they did not consider the complete set of reasons that the practice exists, and they don't understand why it is Good Actually
I think the prompting program you mention would have to prompt emotions, not thoughts, to spur thinking and creativity. My thinking is most intense when feeling certain ways.
Interesting, tell me more! What kind of feeling spurs thinking, in your experience?
Hm, when I feel positive and ambitious , my thoughts flow. If I feel negative, I may feel my thoughts are just over-thinkative rambling.
Like listening to certain music creates certain emotions (rhythmic EDM puts me in a zone for example, or love songs make me think across bigger timelines). Imagine an AI emotion prompter that could stimulate your ambitions or thinking, or maybe even read your current emotions. Feeling unconnected and slow on thoughts? An inspirational message with the face of your grandma suddenly appears and says the right loving words. Or the face of a famous coach motivates you with the right words. And such.
Farmers have noted that the less domesticated breeds of cattle (such as Scottish highland cattle) are much better at "taking care of themselves" and "getting out of trouble" than the more domesticated breeds (such as typical US breeds). A conventional breed, when it gets stuck somehow, will stand still and moo until the farmer comes around, figures out how to fix the problem, and if the cow needs to move in some direction to fix the problem, the farmer will hit it on the other side with a shovel. Bos taurus has outsourced its thinking to Homo sapiens. But of course, H. sapiens is a lot better at thinking than B. taurus, and an individual cow is sufficiently valuable to its owner that the human will be strongly motivated to preserve and protect the cow -- it is adaptive for B. taurus to take the outsourcing deal. (And indeed, at only the cost of having 90% of its progeny *eaten* by humans, B. taurus has enslaved H. sapiens to convert vast swaths of land to grow food for cattle, and eliminate competitor and predator species. Perhaps 1/4 of the biomass of land mammals is B. taurus.)
Likely the same thing has happened with humans, especially in industrial culture. You ask "Don't most people who think independently perceive all the noise their minds produce?" Probably many do, and so have given up thinking independently. After all, what are the chances that you'll think of an action that is more adaptive than what a careful application of the conventional wisdom would provide?
So there's likely to be an evolutionary pressure against novel thinking, leading to some sort of stable polymorphism. Further complication comes from the fact that a lot of benefits of novelty are likely externalized, possibly across society as a whole.
Perhaps we can identify specific episodes of history where novel thinking has been adaptive, and where the existing humans did not operate well.
"This is why they complain--they don't _want_ to have brains. Those lead to thoughts, and thoughts cause only suffering. Thus, by asking them to think, you are inflicting the torments of the damned on the previously blissfully ignorant." -- John Rowat, in alt.tech-support.recovery
Cattle have outsourced their thinking to humans - and humans have outsourced their thinking to past generations and someone-up-there. What an analogy!
It reminds me of Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success. The essence of that book was more or less that people follow traditions without knowing why and that is a great recipe for human well-being. It's a bit depressive, but probably there is a lot of truth in it.
I've got this quote in my commonplace book: 'My governing principle with research is that none of this is a coincidence. If Einstein did something in Germany on the same day that Charlie Chaplin broke his toe in Hollywood, I think, "Aha! Not a coincidence."' -- Paranoid fantasy author Tim Powers
> I had a strong feeling that the way the cards hung on the wall must mean something important.
What did you think it meant? Did you think it meant something about you, was the angle important, or something else?
> OK, psychology inherently is about seeing the difference between the normal and the pathological.
I would say that actually psychology took a while to see that intelligence and creative ideas *don't* always link, partly because statistically they do tend to go together, but also because psychologists are self-selected for the kind of personality that is both smarter *and* more original than average.
The kind of person who is intelligent but uncreative is more likely to be found within (I'm guessing) the top brass of the military, and (here I know from both research and personal experience) the hard sciences. My colleagues in grad school were generally amazed that I could draw or make music, and when I told them I was designing a language, they assumed it was some alternative to Python or C. I made a map of Egypt in the Middle Kingdom and my advisor said it was amazing; I miss my grad school advisor.
> I guess that psychology's lack of concepts describing thinking stems from its general lack of interest in thinking.
No x 6. This means are five studies PLUS me telling you no. (I'd bet in fact there are more like fifty studies, but it's Friday I'm too inebriated at the moment to even imagine finding fifty studies, also Anders doesn't care and you're too bored with them to read one, so let's just agree that the number of *no* is six.)
>>What did you think it meant? Did you think it meant something about you, was the angle important, or something else?
I couldn't tell why the cards were important. I somehow linked their different slopes to the supernatural world I had invented with creepy creatures I imagined were moving around the room in the dark. One vague hypothesis was that they had somehow arranged the cards for some purpose I didn't understand.
But I was never sure. Mostly I just had a strong feeling that the way the cards hung was very much worthy of investigation. An investigation I quietly carried out in the evenings, without much result. It didn't help my investigation that I never asked anybody else about the issue. From that age, I have memories of being able to think better than I could talk. I could tell myself the cards must be important, but I had too few concepts to express it to someone else. (Thinking about it, less verbal people might be caught in such states of mind also as adults.)
>>you're too bored with them to read one
That, or I'm too stupid to read them effortlessly. Don't psychologists these days write books for people like me? (I'm reading The Pattern Seekers by Simon Baron-Cohen right now and it is very interesting. So far, it actually is about thinking!)
Oh sheesh, I'll write you a post someday that's all about thinking. Then you'll read it and say it was disappointing.
But I'll definitely tell you that your explanation for the slant on your name card was just about the coolest thing possible. It reminds me of being like 5 years old and wondering if my father was telling me that hell was for unbelievers because hell was for unbelievers, or if the aliens had just created the entire scenario wondering if I would make decisions by thinking things through on my own, or by trusting what people told me. Forty years later, they have their answer, but I don't know what in the world they were doing with your name card, though.
>>Oh sheesh, I'll write you a post someday that's all about thinking. Then you'll read it and say it was disappointing.
Let's disappoint each other! I guess my basic problem is that philosophy interests me more than psychology. I want to get to the core of definitions. Scientists most often don't play with concept the way I would have wished. Mostly the few of them who write books sometimes do.
Ah, so you had aliens walking around? I just had wordless, black creatures. One kind was called darkness dog and they lived under my bed. Another kind was a shadow of a human creature called a Sella (nonsensical name implying it was of feminine nature). I guess superstition becomes different for children who are actually taught to be superstitious.
On problem solving, I like this octopus experiment: I'm not finding the reference I want, but basically, after some well controlled experiments, the researchers determined that about one third of naive octopi, when presented with a jar containing a crab - managed to unscrew the lid and get the crab. The remainder never were able to figure this out on their own. However, all octopi, when allowed to watch a successful jar opening by another octopus, when presented with a jar in a limited time window, could successfully copy the behavior.
This is may be a simplification of that special "something" you are trying to get at. Put another way, there are probably certain classes of problems that only certain people can solve. And no matter how bright, others will not be able to solve the problems without help.
I don't know what you want to call it, but it's there. Feynman noted this type of person as someone with "puzzle drive".
It is interesting if octopi, who are unsocial animals with short lifespans, still are highly able to learn from others. Most other intelligent animals are social and long-lived, like apes and dolphins: They all use their big brains to learn from others in their group.
Interestingly, a zookeeper told me that orangutans are the most technically intelligent apes, while chimpanzees are more socially intelligent. In other words the orangutans, who lack social bonds except that between mother and child, have more of a "puzzle drive" than chimpanzees.
In general I believe animal intelligence could tell us a lot about human intelligence. Last winter I tried to learn everything about dolphin cognition and social life. That was not very easy: While almost all ape books on the market are for adults, most dolphin books are for children. Presumably because dolphins are cute and apes are scary. But maybe also because rather little is known about dolphins. While humans can follow apes in the jungle, they can't follow dolphins in the ocean as easily.
Maybe octopi could become my next obsession. Since they are unlike other intelligent animals in social organization, they could give clues about the raw nature of intelligence.
Hmm - a possible connection between how social a creature is and how capable of solving one-off problems they are. Interesting. It even makes a kind of "just so" sense. Also, according to my reading trying to locate that elusive source, cuttlefish are even "better" at learning tasks than octopi, but I'm not sure about their one-off abilities.
Also human kids seem to compare unfavorably to orangutans when it comes to practical problem solving: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/orangutans-hook-up-tool-based-solutions-quicker-than-human-kids/
Probably the orangutans can afford to think clearer, because they will never have the advantages of cooperation. Humans need to learn cooperation too.
One metaphor I find helpful is rooks and. bishops vs. knights vs. queens.
Rooks and bishops move in straight lines and can move from one end of the board to the other I think this is average intelligence.
Knights can jump over obstacles - this is your creativity / apophenia
Queens can move either diagonally or NSEW but in straight lines, I think this is people of above average intelligence.
In Fairy Chess these is an Amazon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(chess) that can move like a queen or knight, this a high intelligence creative, someone like Richard Feynman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman who was both an artist and a Nobel prize winner.
I usually think about thoughts like frogs that jump planlessly here and there (that's why I chose light green to symbolize thoughts - green like frogs). I have to admit chess is a more sophisticated metaphor.
Richard Feynman seems like an interesting person. So much talked about in his lifetime, so little talked about now. I'm going to try to get hold of his bestseller books from the 1980s. I think reading bestsellers from past decades is a goal in itself, because it says something about what people were thinking about and talking about by that time.
His autobiography (vol 1) "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" is a good read.
It's available for a few bucks used on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041 You can also read it online at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/Surely-youre-joking-mr.-feynman
There is a good sequel "What do you care what others People think?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think-ebook/dp/B004OA6KIS
Thank you! I've got in on my reading pad now, after The Pattern Seekers by Simon Baron Cohen.
I think I'm somewhat apophenic myself. I think there's a high correlation between that and autism.
I do believe in the high usefulness of IQ. There definitely does need a certain level of IQ to make new connections. But just because one can make new connections doesn't mean they're good ones. The average person who believes "trans women are women" is likely higher-IQ than the average person that doesn't. This is because IQ helps people believe in very abstract ideas, and gender ideology is a very abstract idea. One needs to have a brain wired for abstract thinking to believe gender ideology, hence its popularity with academics and not with common folk.
I think that only the person, or the people, who made up the idea that trans women are women are intellectually creative. They moved the concept of "woman" from the biological realm into the social realm. The others who repeat the mantra are only copycats. Mostly fairly high IQ copycats, because it takes some processor capacity to grasp concepts like "biological" and "social".
I think lower IQ people make up theories of their own all the time. Not theories about hyper advanced systems they teach at university, but about questions like why electricity prices are so high. For that reason I assume that they are as creative as high IQ people, in the areas they know about.
I speculated that autism makes it easier for people to detect patterns because people who are a bit autistic are not as affected by social constraints when they think.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-autism-exists
Apple Pie didn't like it : (
But I think it is an interesting track. Not feeling social pressure to conform should free brainpower to the world as such. Probably there are other ways to free oneself from other people's influence that does not include any autistic traits too.
Many autistic people have a problem to see the whole picture and focus too much on details. But far from all of them. Being a pattern-seer and a bit autistic could be a strike of luck.
> I think I'm somewhat apophenic myself.
> I think there's a high correlation between that and autism.
Eh, more likely a relationship between apophenia and schizo-spectrum disorders than autism; see:
Andersen, B. P. (2022). Autistic-like traits and positive schizotypy as diametric specializations of the predictive mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1653-1672. https://osf.io/79bnd/download
Then again, making the claim that apophenia relates to autism *does* show you might be apophenic. (Congratulations?)
Autism and schizophrenia have some overlapping symptoms. Autistic people are up to 3.55 times more likely to also have a schizophrenia diagnosis.
https://www.healthline.com/health/autism-vs-schizophrenia#research
It is a very interesting question. Autism and schizophrenia are sometimes said to be psychological opposites. And still they seem to coexist a bit.
I think it was a mistake by psychology to fit in high functioning autism/Asperger syndrome under a general autism umbrella. Basically, autism is social stupidity. Some autists are social idiots, others are merely a bit socially stupid. During the last decade or two, increasing numbers of people who are merely socially stupid have been diagnosed with autism. That makes it a different disorder. Studies of "autism" from the 20th century are mostly of very limited use to explain the kind of disorder called "autism" today.
I'm not enough into genetics to understand the research into the genetic causes of autism. But I know as much that there are both heritable genes that contributes to autism and de novo mutations, and that de novo mutations often cause more severe forms of autism. That means that autism is in fact two very different conditions: One heritable, potentially adaptive and one accidental. Calling both "autism" is like calling both Down syndrome and moderate learning difficulties "stupidity". Such sweeping labels make meaningful research difficult.
good post! I wonder if you can put together a few categories of apophenia:
-bad apophenia, aka the gambler's fallacy
-incorrect but useful apophenia, like astrology
-high iq apophenia, thinking that something weird is a problem without knowing the context that justifies the weirdness
Hm. Maybe astrology and such could be called "social apophenia"? The only value in it is social. Like religion. Technically worthless, but often highly socially useful.
I don't really get what you mean by high IQ apophenia. Do you have a more detailed explanation?
The canonical example is probably Newton, when he was working on both calculus and alchemy
hmm that example isn't quite right
there's a separate phenomenon in rationalist circles where high iq people can refute all of the available and stated reasons for a certain practice to exist, which leads them to believe the practice is flawed and can be abandoned
but they did not consider the complete set of reasons that the practice exists, and they don't understand why it is Good Actually
not sure if this falls under apophenia or not
That sounds like Chesterton's fence.
Thank you! I will search them out immediately.