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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

How can it be that so many people accept this kind of oversimplified thinking as valuable?

Most processes in humans are pretty complex. The processes in between humans at times even more so.

It does not make sense to model these processes with pre-elementary school mathematics. Sure, people will understand the models, but that still leaves them totally incompetent.

In that respect I much prefer religious models rather than pseudoscientific ones. At least there complexity is hoovered up under the concept of "mystery", and we try not to understand that.

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There's multiple kinds of value. As an individual, learning new understandable models can help with developing a useful view of the world and others. Even if that benefit is simply feeling good about "understanding" something - that might still "scratch the itch" of concerns. This understanding might be detached from the material reality of the processes involved, but who cares? With this perspective, they're hardly incompetent if they're getting value from it.

This isn't very far from religion after all. You could consider it a kind of rational spirituality.

The scientific community has its own values, and might rightly reject simplified thinking like this. And that's fine for scientists, but an individual is going to have an easier time accepting stories of pleasure and drives than stories of gene expression and neurotransmitters.

We really lucked out, that Newtonian physics works with the basic math that it does.

The illusion of understanding feels just as good as real understanding in the short term (it releases a lot of tension), and is much easier to achieve. That's what makes it so seductive and dangerous.

Not familiar with his work yet, but there is some room for insight/observations below the threshold of complete explanations. The confidence into these just have to reflect that.

If people don't eat they die. This is an extremely simplified reduction of a highly complex multidimensional process. Yet, it is true.

The reasoning in the article goes way beyond such a simple statement. A simple fact being true does not magically make all related arguments true.

Also, to be overly pedantic, people don't die immediately after not eating for an hour, people also die anyway even with food, and some people live for quite a while on intravenous fluids.

honestly, I don't really understand the point about the difference between the two. I didn't make it all the way through the article, but even on the surface it didn't seem like it made much sense.

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