Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I call this "noticing confusion" (by way of @ESYudkowsky) and it's probably sufficient to be a singular hallmark of interesting people. The superpower comes from playing with what anomalies suggest about the explanations that fail to predict themhttps://twitter.com/paulg/status/1147505767039287296 …

To notice strangeness is to intuitively detect bad explanations. Strangeness is a function of surprise, and surprise is a function of ignorance

Yesterday I asked "why don't sharks eat people?" This is the kind of question that an 8-year-old might ask, so it seems cute now. But all the obvious answers are non-answers. "We're not a part of their natural diet." Really? Where do they learn that, shark school?

If we assume hungry sharks bite into something and then continue or cease eating based on whether it tastes good or bad, "we taste bad" contains no more information than that provided in the question

Wouldn't that whole line of speculation be immediately shut down by the observation that if every shark had to learn first-hand to not eat humans by chomping on one themselves, we'd see a hell of a lot more shark bites than we do?