Have you ever used a zipper?
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina Fifty fans standing in two stadium rows, shaking hands as they do “the wave.”
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so zippers are really interesting as something people take for granted in clothes but they weren't always there.
it’s why i wanted to study the logic of crafting pants in a zipperless world.
well, for starters, pants aren’t trousers because pants are held up by a belt whereas trousers are held up by a fly.
a zipperless world forces you to fit the pants with just enough ease to keep the pants up without a belt or with an open fly.
it’s technique over tech. /🧵
I think I was about 12 when I got my first pair with a zip. Buttons before that.
Mid 1960s England.
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina I fear this may be a worldview issue*, but as a (lapsed) physicist my natural bent is to apply methods and processes to develop a hierarchies of abstraction and detailed to describe and model the physical world.
For example, with zippers and crossbows, even with limited prior knowledge. Albeit this works better than politics or literature,
* or it could just be XKCD #793
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@grimalkina I fear this may be a worldview issue*, but as a (lapsed) physicist my natural bent is to apply methods and processes to develop a hierarchies of abstraction and detailed to describe and model the physical world.
For example, with zippers and crossbows, even with limited prior knowledge. Albeit this works better than politics or literature,
* or it could just be XKCD #793
@grimalkina (as in "liberal arts majors may be annoying, but there is no nothing more obnoxious than a physicist encountering a new subject...")
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@grimalkina
And if you can, did you have David McCauleys The Way Things Work as a kid?@grimalkina
Page 15 and 17. Of course, you could be excused for thinking that a mammoth was involved. -
In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina look, I learned long again that sewing machines work through MAGIC and require consistent and blind faith in that or the tension on the bobble gets out of whack and my mother will come in and complain whatever have I done to her sewing machine.
I have modified military equipment to quadruple its range. I have macguyver’d together art supplies to transform their intent into my vision. I have been the catalyst that drove actions literally across entire continents, and had my threat analysis briefed at some of the highest levels of government.
Sewing machines? Magic. The things my spouse can do with yarn and sticks? SECRET KNOWLEDGE OF THE OLD ONES.
I am ok with this
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina Yes, it draws in opposite lines of "teeth" to clamp them together.
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@grimalkina
Is there a collective noun for a group of outliers?
@joepie91@gnate@ohai.social @grimalkina@mastodon.social @joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech an anomaly, of course.
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Metacognition is something I highlight in my book. These are *learnable skills* and they are *very predictive* for real-world outcomes. People who cultivate habits of puncturing cognitive illusions form expertise, and make the people around them better thinkers too.
Amazing how much we can learn just from a little zipper!
Remembering how someone used a similar technique against the climate denialist claim that it is not humans but undersea volcanoes that cause the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 'Okay, but we know how much fossil fuels the countries of the world are burning, and how much CO2 is released in the process. Where does that all go?' Now we are talking numbers, and models, and there is just no consistent way to make it work where the human CO2 all goes 'somewhere else' (ocean? Vegetation? Rock weathering?) while only the volcanic CO2 collects in the atmosphere...
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina Oh, that IS fun!
First off, no I can't explain how a zipper works. I understand the principle to a degree, but the specific geometries that work or don't work are beyond me.
But sewing machine, can opener, flush toilet (both US style and UK style), heart pumping, piano, aqualung pressure regulation - I just happen to know all of those and have had need to fix most of them.
Not transistor, though. Relay, yes. Transistor, no.
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina It's unfair to include sewing machines because they work by magic. Especially four-thread sergers.
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina
I figured out how a zipper worked by looking closely. This might have been on the zippered coat I wore in grade school.I might have been older when I understood the “strength in numbers” offered by the regular interlock when a zipper broke down from years of use.
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina Zippers? I’m still figuring out buttons.
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina
I have been lucky to know people who own boats, and occasionally get on the water for a sail. It's magic when you put up a big sheet of canvas and watch the wind move around the surface. That same sail can catch the wind to push the boat along, or cut the wind to pull it forward.
That a yacht can sail INTO the wind at all makes perfect sense from the physics, but absolutely no sense to my brain. It still feels improbable and weird. It's not intuitive at all. I understand on a very superficial level, but totally do not believe it deep down.
So it feels like magic. -
- Trying to encourage mechanism thinking can break through extremist belief patterns.
You might have heard "facts don't change minds, feelings do." Well, KIND OF. Facts, feelings and interpretations are actually all deeply intertwined in our processing of the world. It's tempting to think that our minds process and absorb the world like tape recorders. If I list a bunch of reasons why I support a policy, maybe that will convince someone. But dissecting their causal model might work much better.
@grimalkina
This is true from my experience. When you do get a chance to ask more detailed questions from people with extreme beliefs, they often stumble.
They are also the most resistant to actually digging into those ideas of course. That's often how they got there in the first place, by outsourcing the thinking. -
Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina
Yes, but probably only because I've got young children and it's one of those early age curiosities -
@grimalkina It's like, I knew graphite was a dry lubricant. But I don't think I would have ever thought to just use a pencil on a zipper. And now I know that I can apply dry lubricant to all kinds of assemblies by just jamming a pencil up in there. Thanks, metacognition!
@sidereal @grimalkina Same here! As soon as I read your post it, it made perfect sense. I already knew everything I needed to know to understand it. But I NEVER would have come up with that idea on my own.
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina Love this post! (p.s. zippers are a fantastic invention of the kind that leaves me thinking: "How could anyone think of this?")
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina Oooh, this is great.
Am I falling for some trap by bringing up "The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work" (Lawson, 2006)?
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- Trying to encourage mechanism thinking can break through extremist belief patterns.
You might have heard "facts don't change minds, feelings do." Well, KIND OF. Facts, feelings and interpretations are actually all deeply intertwined in our processing of the world. It's tempting to think that our minds process and absorb the world like tape recorders. If I list a bunch of reasons why I support a policy, maybe that will convince someone. But dissecting their causal model might work much better.
@grimalkina Very interesting thread, I've just ordered your book. Have you ever read "A Theory of System Justification" by John Jost? If not I feel it might be of interest.
