Ask HN: What things are the human mind bad at? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What things are the human mind bad at?

4 pointspizza13 comments

We all possess a mind. If one of us knows something our minds are bad at, and shares it with us, and we all acknowledge that, we might get a little bit closer to better minds. That's free mind.

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Remembering accurately. Maintaining the accuracy over decades.

Extrapolating non-linear behavior outside of our range of experience.

Rejecting a lie that we really want to be true.

I don't think this question can really be answered. The human mind is extremely diverse. Some are great at things others are not.

Some other comments are saying things like retaining and recalling a large amount of data over long periods of time is something the mind is not good at. Yet we have edge cases like the people who compete in memory competition or savants like Rain Man. Even within the 'normal' realm, there can be a lot of variability.

Your question is rather general. The famous book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" discusses common mental errors. Also good is "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making".

I'd say that if there are several pieces of evidence in favor of some theory and several against, it is hard for people to weigh the entirety of the evidence. Instead they will often pick one salient fact and ignore the rest.

The brain is optimized for pattern recognition. Sometimes it sees patterns where there are none.

Sometimes it loves patterns. Our entertainment is often action and consequence. Stories are often a bunch of coincidences that string into a narrative. One classic example is a hero murders a person, gets away with the crime, and in a freak accident the statue of the murdered person falls on him - exposing him as the murderer and providing some justice and catharsis.

We also love the opposite - man works hard in New Technology, and there's a sudden influx of wealth in New Technology and he becomes rich and his rival becomes poor. It may have little to do with the hard work, but humans will look for action and consequence.

Or a modern form - powerful man commits unethical but legal action. Everyone hates them on social media, suddenly man loses election or goes to jail. Trolls associate man's fall to their collective social media prowess.

We like things to be observable. Thus, a few things we don't easily grasp are:

- exponential growth, which is non intuitive when you are used to thinking in a linear fashion

- long-term effects, due to our propensity to focus on the near term

- grasping points of view we are strongly opposed to. This can be overcome with practice though

The mind is really bad at learning while doing. You have to do, then rest and let your subconscious process what you did, then do again etc. Resting is an integral part of learning. Just doing until you are too exhausted to continue is not a good strategy to learn.

This is interesting. Can you please elaborate with an example?

The human mind defaults to the truth, so it's not good at detecting lies. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-default_theory)

The human mind is good at linear estimation, but sucks at other stuff like exponential estimation. (https://youtu.be/UUE34Mbqx2k)

Accounting for its own biases. Our brains are so good at automatically filling in the gaps it can be hard to know what is true and real and what the brain filled in on its own.

Multi-tasking.

But the mind does really well about fooling ourselves.

At keeping Unnecessary thoughts at bay. Mind needs to provide a running commentary of everything under the sun.

Understanding probabilities intuitively

statistics

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