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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Let's pick some intuitive false facts:

* The lack of inertia is very intuitive. Once you stop pushing something it will get to rest soon. This is extremely intuitive. (Unless you live nearby a frozen lake???)

* The spontaneous generation of small creatures like worms and flies is intuitive. You put some crap and wait a while, and you'll get a few small animals. (Did someone ever believe that elephants were generated spontaneously?)

* Leeches are good for your health. I'm not even sure that this was intuitive, or that it was even a popular cure, but it was used in traditional western medicine. Modern medicine use penicillin, I don't think that using an extract from a mold is intuitively good.

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> lack of inertia.

What? No, im pretty sure that some people knew what friction was and that if theoretically, there was none of it, things would continue to move. Thats intuitive to me.

> Spontaneous generation of animals.

Fair example; ive read this old theory before.

> Leeches Blood letting is still somehow advised as being healthy for certain conditions (too much iron, and "resetting" a percentage of ones blood. That or they just really want people to donate) Plus you even admit that youre not sure about it being 'false' fact brought by intuition, so why even include that?

OP's point is not that intuition is infallible. Not much is infallible (perhaps nothing, if one is atheistic) It's that science has seemed to shunt/reduce/eliminate the intuition of a subsection of the population. It's his opinion (and mine) that this has harmful effects that are worth examining.

>> lack of inertia.

> [...] That's intuitive to me.

It was a popular idea a long time ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia#Early_understanding_of... and after teaching physics I think that inertia is not so intuitive. What did you thought when you were 13 years old and had no formal training in physics?

> OP's point is not that intuition is infallible. [...]

The problem is that if you ask enough people, each one may have a different intuitive idea. Some of them will be slightly different and some of them completely contradictory. Everyone has an intuitive idea of how to manage economy and a country, but not everyone has the same intuition about that.

That's why to do science you can use intuition to design experiments and make theories, but you MUST confirm them with experiments.

Modern medicine also uses leeches.[1] Their saliva is a natural anticoagulant and their sucking promotes oxygenation.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech#Medicinal_use_of_leeches

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