Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I don't mean to pick on my "natural diet" answerers too much, because they're answering in a way that makes sense in a world where you're treated like you must've gotten kicked in the head if you suggest that sharks not eating people is some great mystery

A subskill of this process is noticing when an explanation doesn't contain new information, e.g. "the gods did it." Another is simulating a lack of familiarity with the world such that you can make predictions from explanation even after seeing the answer at the back of the book

If you're a smart person who values being smart, it's critical that you notice that "because of evolutionary processes" isn't all that different from "because of the gods" if that's where your thinking terminates

Smart people who value being smart can be very bad at noticing confusion in part because being good at it sometimes makes you look very naive and childlike, and can therefore threaten the social goods you're accustomed to getting for intelligence

Peter Thiel helped make noticing confusion trendy by pointing out that certain secrets hiding in plain sight can translate to big money. Unfortunately, people can get very frustrated looking for high-value secrets if they have no practice looking for low-value secrets

Because secret-seeking can look weird and foolish, people are usually only willing to look for secrets with cash value. But the people who find these are mostly weirdos, people who are constitutionally incapable of being well-adjusted adults and gave up trying a long time ago

Getting over one's ego and admitting confusion does have benefits. As to the sharks, my marine biologist friend told me that we don't have enough fat, the way that seals and fish do. However, when sharks run out of food supply and get hungry, they WILL eat humans !!

Wouldn't that mean that overweight people are more likely to be eaten by shark? ... Well, I guess that depends on whether sharks are able to infer the fat content of individual humans or not.