https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2040031866204688769
"Creating new thoughts is work." I might have used this in an explanation about declining human intelligence.
I'm vaguely aware that Feynman diagrams help with understanding a complex thing, but they are not something I understand myself. Just that they allow other people to understand something about quantum mechanics. Maybe there is an explanation or representation that would explain the 'signal accuracy' problem better than my previous explanations of it.
Some people are sources of information with a higher accuracy than average; one might say rare levels of accuracy. But no one is right about everything. At which point (what level of discrepancies or distance from knowledge specialties/competences) does one disregard a familiar and accurate source of information, in favor of one with unproven accuracy (but a reasonable-sounding argument or consistent data)?
I think a lot of it is people being unwilling to communicate their uncertainties, and from there possibly not being able to admit them at all to themselves: dishonest thinking. Might be more than a little bit related to, or the consequence of, the "are you happy if other people think you are" question. But as it relates to other people: someone not wanting to criticize a source of knowledge, either explicitly, or implicitly by prioritizing other sources of knowledge, because they think it would be too much of a shock to other people for that criticism to happen.
Compare to my last mass email about this idea, which I think was the one where I said "if you don't share it you're stupid", and "don't be afraid of making other people look stupid by sharing it, because they would be surprised if you act in a way that criticizes the current state of affairs".
Maybe a physical analogy is like how sand works or something. Like, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilatancy_(granular_material)
which I found via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ssTdOt9DKI which I haven't watched, 2K subs and 14k views.
Or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilatant
So in this analogy, expectations get 'locked' into a certain configuration? And some tiny changes, which with sand is from the grains rotating or something (maybe this is explained in [4.57M views, 22 Jun 2025]Why Are Beach Holes So Deadly? - YouTube), can result in significant changes in the macroscopic properties: the strength of the material, or in the case of expectations about signals, how easy it is to for knowledge to change from one configuration to another configuration: ideally because the second configuration is more accurate, so there is 'pressure', however slight, to move in that direction.
