Still Disgruntled, but Life Must Go On, and the Whole Concept of Something Being "Counter-intuitive"

Sleep and and a few meds like Klonopin have helped me deal with my present torment.

As it often does, when I cannot deal with something any longer, I say the hell with it and my mind goes somewhere else.

I bring this up because some stupid whippersnapper said to me, not too long ago, " well, I guess you've seen a lot of changes in your time." 

Silly boy, ( callow youth)-- Age may not bring wisdom, but yes, of course it brings experience. Which you may or may not learn from, or it may take you a long time to learn from....

When I was young, one word that people liked was "epiphany."

It is not a fashionable concept today. An epiphany is simply suddenly having-- like a flash feeling-- of a dawning knowledge of how something complex all fits together, for instance. A sudden high point, burst of knowledge, like " Oh, wait a second, I GET IT." When you never had "gotten it" before.

What has changed most? Science. And pseudo science and the conflict between them. Both have advanced a lot.

One good example of this is the phrase "counter-intuitive," which nobody ever heard of when I was young, no matter how bright they were.

The concept arose because of problems in dealing with phenomenon in nature that went against intuition, gut feeling, or even what you would call common sense.

Such as: water vapor is lighter than air  ( and we have clouds) and why barometers work.

Of course, the real interest in matters being " counter -intuitive" came from much more complex and advanced realms of science than that, especially physics and quantum mechanics.

To my surprise, wikipedia has not just a GOOD explanation of the  whole concept of "counter-intuitive" but a really elegant and clear one. I have to quote it in its entirety and also give the references I usually omit. ( Where, oh where, would we be without wikipedia? I finally gave them a little money, I owe them a lot more but don't have it).

Here it is: 

Counterintuitive

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A counterintuitive proposition is one that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition, common sense, or gut feelings.^[1]

Scientifically discovered, objective truths are often called counterintuitive when intuition, emotions, and other cognitive processes outside of deductive rationality interpret them to be wrong. However, the subjective nature of intuition limits the objectivity of what to call counterintuitive because what is counter-intuitive for one may be intuitive for another. This might occur in instances where intuition changes with knowledge. For instance, many aspects of quantum mechanics or general relativity may sound counterintuitive to a layman, while they may be intuitive to a particle physicist. Nevertheless counter-intuitive concepts are psychologically more preferred than intuitive concepts^[2] like in Von Restorff effect.

Flawed intuitive understanding of a problem may lead to counter-productive behavior with undesirable outcomes. In some such cases, counterintuitive policies may then produce a more desirable outcome.^[3]This can lead to conflicts between those who hold deontological and consequentialist ethical perspectives on those issues.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Counterintuition in science
• 2 Examples
• 3 See also
• 4 References
• 5 Further reading

Counterintuition in science[edit]

Many scientific ideas that are generally accepted by people today were formerly considered to be contrary to intuition and common sense.

For example, most everyday experience suggests that the Earth is flat; actually, this view turns out to be a remarkably good approximation to the true state of affairs, which is that the Earth is a very big(relative to the day to day scale familiar to humans) oblate spheroid. Furthermore, prior to the Copernican revolution, heliocentrism, the belief that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than vice versa, was considered to be contrary to common sense.

Another counterintuitive scientific idea concerns space travel: it was initially believed that highly streamlined shapes would be best for re-entering the earth's atmosphere.^{[citation needed]} In fact, experiments proved that blunt-shaped re-entry bodies make the most efficient heat shields when returning to earth from space. Blunt-shaped re-entry vehicles have been used for all manned-spaceflights, including the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.^[4]

The Michelson-Morley experiment sought to measure the velocity of the Earth through the aether as it revolved around the Sun. The result was that it has no aether velocity at all. Relativity theory later explained the results, replacing the conventional notions of aether and separate space, time, mass, and energy with a counterintuitive four-dimensional non-Euclidean universe.^[5]

Examples[edit]

Some further counterintuitive examples are:

In science:

• Gödel's incompleteness theorems -- for thousands of years, it was confidently assumed that arithmetic, and therefore similar systems of logic, were completely solid in terms of being reliable for deductions. Gödel proved that such systems could not be both complete and consistent.
• Wave–particle duality / photoelectric effect - As demonstrated by the double slit experiment light and quantum particles behave as both waves and particles.
• A significant number of people find it difficult to accept the mathematical fact that 0.999... equals 1
• The Monty Hall problem poses a simple yes-or-no question from probability that even professionals can find difficult to reconcile with their intuition.
• Horseshoe orbits in orbital mechanics
• That light may pass through two perpendicularly oriented polarizing filters if a third filter, not oriented perpendicular to either of the other two, is placed between them.^[6]
• The Mpemba effect, in which, under certain circumstances, a warmer body of water will freeze faster than a cooler body in the same environment.
• That water vapor is lighter than air and is the reason clouds float and barometers work.^[7]

In politics and economics:

• The violation of the monotonicity criterion in voting systems
• David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage that suggests that comparative advantage is in general more important than absolute advantage

Many examples of cognitive bias, such as:

• The clustering illusion that suggests that significant patterns exist in a set of random points when no other cause than chance is present
• That alignments of random points on a plane are vastly easier to find than intuition would suggest

See also[edit]

Look up counterintuitive in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Common sense
• Folk physics
• Folk psychology
• Paradox
• Unintended consequences
• List of paradoxes

References[edit]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2008)

1. Jump up ^ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/counter+intuitive "Counterintuitive: –adjective. Counter to what intuition would lead one to expect: The direction we had to follow was counterintuitive—we had to go north first before we went south." Retrieved: 09 NOV 2010.
2. Jump up ^ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3979650/ - Memory for Expectation-Violating Concepts: The Effects of Agents and Cultural Familiarity
3. Jump up ^ New Scientist, July 2005
4. Jump up ^ http://www.freshbrainz.com/2009/12/counterintuitive-science-fast-speed-fat.html Fresh Brainz. Counterintuitive Science: Fast Speed, Fat Shape. "It turns out that pointy-nosed spaceships perform well on their way out of the atmosphere, but not when they have to come BACK." Retrieved 09 NOV 2010.
5. Jump up ^ http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/michelson.html The Michelson-Morley Experiment. "As a result of Michelson’s efforts in 1879, the speed of light was known to be 186,350 miles per second with a likely error of around 30 miles per second. This measurement, made by timing a flash of light travelling between mirrors in Annapolis, agreed well with less direct measurements based on astronomical observations. Still, this did not really clarify the nature of light. Two hundred years earlier, Newton had suggested that light consists of tiny particles generated in a hot object, which spray out at very high speed, bounce off other objects, and are detected by our eyes. Newton’s arch-enemy Robert Hooke, on the other hand, thought that light must be a kind of wave motion, like sound. To appreciate his point of view, let us briefly review the nature of sound." Retrieved: 09 NOV 2010.
6. Jump up ^ http://alienryderflex.com/polarizer/
7. Jump up ^ http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~stevenb/vapor/

Further reading[edit]

• Alvermann, D. E.; Hague, S. A. (1989). "Comprehension of counterintuitive science text: Effects of prior knowledge and text structure". The Journal of Educational Research 82 (4): 197–202. JSTOR 27540341.
• Forrester, J. W. (1971). "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems". Technology Review (Alumni Association of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.35.4776. Based on testimony given to the Subcommittee on Urban Growth of the Committee on Banking and Currency, U.S. House of Representatives. Updated March, 1995.
• Havil, J. (2008). Impossible?: surprising solutions to counterintuitive conundrums. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13131-3.
• Norenzayan, A.; Atran, S.; Faulkner, J.; Schaller, M. (2006). "The cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive narratives". Cognitive Science 30: 531–553. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_68. CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.88.187.

[hide] v t e Unintended consequences Abilene paradox Adverse effect Butterfly effect Cobra effect Counterintuitive CSI effect Externality Failure mode and effects analysis Hawthorne effect Hutber's law Inverse consequences Jevons paradox Murphy's law Nocebo Osborne effect Parable of the broken window Perverse incentive Relevance paradox Risk compensation Self-defeating prophecy Self-refuting idea Serendipity Social trap Streisand effect Tragedy of the commons Tyranny of small decisions