Hey Pandas, What Astonishes You When You Think About It Too Much? (Closed)

Not confusing stuff like the stock market, but stuff that seems like it's simple and makes sense, but when you sit and think about it you wind up confusing yourself.

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Reading and letters, easily.

Why? A few things.

One, the gigantic variety of letter shapes that are totally intelligible if you know them. Look at Omniglot [https://www.omniglot.com/writing/index.htm] for a moment. (Another giant collection can be found at Wikipedia's list of writing system and Google's collection of Noto fonts at https://fonts.google.com/noto/fonts] You telling me "ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ", " ތާނަ", "მხედრული", "မြန်မာ ", "සිංහල", "தமிழ்", "മനഷയ", "ಎಲಮನ", "ⰂⰲⰠⱐ" "འགབམ", "ᬅᬓ᭄ᬱ", and more are all intelligible things to people who can read it?

Two, and more importantly, humans are exquisitely suited to read. Here's an experiment that you can do on yourself. Give someone some colored pencils and ask them to write color words (eg orange, black, yellow). The catch is, they can't match up - orange can't be written with the orange pencil, for instance. Now have them hand it to you. Try to say the names of the colors. It's hard, right? Because your brain *reads faster than it processes colors*. This is called the Stroop test. [Google Scholar link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15913436778695240337&hl=en&as_sdt=0,39. Yeah, it's been cited by 26,610+ people - more if you count 'downstream' citations, ie papers citing papers that cite Stroop, one assumes]. You can't turn off your reading while still being able to see. You can't stop reading. Humans are perfectly made for reading. We have fine-grained control of our hands, allowing us to produce letterforms. Our visual resolution is good. And we can craft a writing system that plays to our needs. If we focused on scents, maybe we'd communicate via scratch-and-sniff.

But what makes reading EVEN COOLER is that WE NEED TO BE TAUGHT. This thing that, once learned, we CANNOT TURN OFF without closing our eyes, that we process FASTER THAN COLORS, is not inherently wired in our brains. People don't need to know how to read. Most of our species' time was spent with no reading. This thing we are astoundingly good at, that you would thing we would be evolutionarily hardwired to do, like breathing, given how good we are -- WE SPENT MOST OF OUR TIME NOT KNOWING HOW TO DO. We're NOT hardwired to read and write. This was, seemingly, an *ACCIDENTAL BYPRODUCT*.

ALSO, writing seems like a genuinely new innovation by humans. Language is pretty precedented in animals. Humans might be extreme, but the building blocks are there. But we seem to have created writing. We didn't expand on something other animals did. We MADE writing.

And, you know, reading lets us read stuff from languages no one has spoken in thousands of years. And lets mass collaboration occur. And...But the idea that this thing, that we weren't made to do, didn't do for most of our life, need to be taught, we're so good at that we process it faster than colors, which we don't need to be taught, and cannot turn it off without closing our eyes is *CRAZY*. We seem perfectly suited for writing and reading. (Makes you wonder what other things we would be so seemingly perfectly suited for we haven't discovered or created yet. There's so much space for innovation, there are probably things as perfectly suited for us as reading no one's figured out yet.)

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Evagating Beewolf (she/they)

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How beautiful this amazing planet truly is. I mean, think about all that had to happen for you to be sitting here and reading this post. From your parents and their parents, all the way to the first life and the formation on the earth. All these beautiful species on this planet, from the tiniest nanobes to the largest fungi. Life is so beautiful, and so is yours. Your life is beautiful. You are beautiful. and please dont ever forget this

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6points

Sooploosh MacSchnibble

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I have a photo of the Andromeda galaxy. In it, two other galaxies are prominent. Billions of stars, billions of planets, possibly trillions or quadrillions of life forms. Maybe some of them have an equivalent of the internet, even of BP - but first, they'll have to master fire, then electricity, and that may have to happen by accident. Even at warp 9.9, we'll never get to meet them.

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4points

Apatheist Account2

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I have many such things, but one of them is the "butterfly effect" - how one tiny act or seemingly random decision can completely change the course of my (or someone else's) life.
For example, I often think about it when I stop the traffic to cross the street. Maybe I saved this driver from a tragic accident by delaying them on traffic lights for a minute. It's really astonishing to think how much can one seemingly random act change.

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4points

Luke Branwen

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That the voyager spacecraft is outside our solar system.... the fact that something launched in my lifetime is now flying through the void between systems is freaking mind boggling.....

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4points

K- THULU

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buildings. u can look at a building and be like oh that's tiny! but you go inside and its actully huge. like, how does a box have all this stuff and room!?

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3points

Pandamonium Pandas Pandie

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I was bewildered to find out that developing an addiction is not a disease (as I was taught in med school), but a normal reaction of a healthy brain.

A substance in excess - such as alcohol let's say - takes you of the normal vigilant state. Your brain knows, from ancient times, that if you are not awake and vigilant, you are in danger. So it fights fiercely to cancel the effect of the alcohol, by releasing strong anti-alcohol substances. The more times you get drunk, the better your brain learns how to cancel alcohol's effect. That's why alcoholics can drink 12 beer cans and feel nothing, while you get drunk after just 1 or 2.

And the best thing - the same mechanism that led you to addiction can get you out of it. Our brain is amazing :)

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3points

Alexia

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2 Things-
1- The Universe! The universe is everything. It encompasses all life and galaxies. It is the entirety of existence. Does it have edges? Because scientists say that the universe is always expanding. How do we know? Are we close to the edge? What is it expanding into?? How can we measure this expansion? Because we can't send something to the edge of the universe if we don't know WHERE IT IS. How do we know if it's really expanding? What if we're all just shrinking rapidly at the same rate? If that's the case, where's the point that we barely exist anymore?
2- The colour of darkness. Not when you have all the lights off, but when you close your eyes in that room. You cant see ANYTHING. There's nothing at all. But when you strain your eyes to see the colour, it doesn't do anything. What colour is it? Because as soon as you start thinking about it, its incomprehensible. Maybe this is extra prominent for me since I have aphantasia, but I think it's pretty universal.

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Blaze Onyx

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How easy it is to convince people of the weirdest stuff. If you think about it, it's as simple as a) repeating it over and over and/or b) easing people into it step by step. Seems to work for everything, from fashion items that you didn't like at first but finally bought anyways because you kept seeing them - up to the strangest conspiracy theories out there. I mean, people don't usually accept squabble about lizard people right after being exposed to it the first time. But if it starts with something else, something more plausible, and then something slightly more out there, and so on... in the end, a certain percentage of people will absolutely be convinced of the really outrageous stuff. And they will be willing to fight over it.

It does seem to be that simple. In an attenuated way, I've observed the mechanism on myself several times.

And I have no idea how humanity can be protected by this, stewing in our echo chambers fuelled by media and social media.

Our descendants will scratch their heads in the future, how we could bring ourselves on the brink of civil war, basically over click rates and ad revenues.

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Final score:

2points

Saint_Zipcodus

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#10

Precision. Every generation of machine is made by a machine that is less precise.
Take a set of stone arrowhead made thousands of years ago. They needed to be as alike as possible so that the arrows would fly predictably, yet the differences are visible to the eye. That was the best they could do.

Now today. You can commission a company in Germany to make a set of rods to a given dimension, and a company in Japan to make a plate with holes to receive them, and the rods will fit into the holes, interchangeably, precisely enough that the air can't escape round the sides.

How did we get from there to here?

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2points

Heffalump

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#11

How the Universe exists at all. How did so much come from essentially nothing? No invoking a creator deity - where did he/she/whatever come from? If it's turtles all the way down, then all the way down to where?

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Final score:

1point