What’s Between Us and Reality

We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated.  Put another way, rather than p...
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Seven amazing things we take for granted most of the time, ordered from least to most weird

Photo by Omid Armin on Unsplash
1. How much dogs love us. There is no way we've been good enough boys/girls/humans to deserve this. 2. Popcorn. It's freakily amazing that corn kernels turn into this stuff. And as a bonus, it's delicious. 3. That humans, working together, eradicated the last wild strain of smallpox in the 1970s. This was a mind-blowingly huge win for our species. It had plagued us since ~3rd century BCE and is estimated to have killed ~500 million people just during the last 100 years it w...
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