I'd be really interested to see what misconceptions people had about flush toilets, but Rozenblit and Keil's paper doesn't seem to really expand on this. (Assuming I found the right paper: http://www.yale.edu/cogdevlab/aarticles/IOED%20proofs.pdf%20... ?)
I've personally assembled and installed a toilet so I am confident that I have an accurate view of how toilets work, but that experience wasn't exactly illuminating; I already knew how they worked. Toilets are pretty simple, anyone who has ever opened the tank of one and looked at it for a minute or two probably has it figured out.
Edit: When other questions from that study include things like " How the liver removes toxins from blood", I don't doubt that they found an overall trend, but it bothers me that a paper like that could include mention of asking questions about toilets, not actually say what people got wrong about toilets, and then because of that paper it is taken as truth that people don't know how toilets work.
This explains how the siphon works to keep the bowl at the same level and to create the force of a "flush". Until I saw a toilet that had the siphon shape visibly exposed on the outside, I don't think I ever thought question how it worked. Once I saw the shape, I immediately thought about it working like a siphon I'd used to pull gas out of my car. For people who have never seen a toilet with the siphon shape exposed, they'd probably have to have siphon experience in some other area to make the leap, or I think how the bowl stays full and flushes would just naturally stay a mystery. Believing that it all happens in the tank might also be enough of an explanation for most to stop thinking about it.
EDIT: US households. I don't know about toilet arrangements in other countries.
The toilet is the thing you sit on that holds water. It works by siphon action (something I didn't know until reading links in this thread).
I think the question "How does a toilet work?" is much like the question "What happens when you type 'google.com' into your browser and press enter?"[1] I'm sure I have a sufficient understanding of the general idea (e.g. flapper and siphon, or parsing and DNS lookup), but I'm well aware I couldn't reproduce or accurately describe the whole system/process on my own.
If the confusion was over things like "how does the siphon work" or maybe "why does the water swirl when it flushes", I think that'd be more understandable.
Personally speaking, I end up feeling very politically marginalized because political group dynamics tend to value consistency over diversity, so if (for example) you're generally conservative but support the idea of socialized medicine, or generally liberal but not supportive of teachers' unions, then the more partisan the political environment you are in the more likely you are to be treated as a heretic. So in the US we see primary contests within the parties wherein candidates are subjected to punishing ideological 'purity tests', to the point that the primary season has increasingly come to look like an internal struggle to see which version of the two main parties will get to compete in the general election. While it appears that Hillary Clinton may have a pretty smooth path to the nomination on the Democratic side this time (to the dismay of the ideological left), over in the GOP the competition for the nomination increasingly looks like internecine warfare between wealthy paternalism and eschatonic populism.
I've taken to calling the modern right-wing movement "post-Voegelinian conservatism" -- as bad as old Buckley was when it came to, oh, all the critical social movements of the 20th century, at least he wasn't into immanentizing the eschaton as the new radical right are wont to do.
Incidentally, if you haven't read Lowi's End of the Republican Era, do check it out. He was about two decades early on his diagnosis, but he accurately sets up the conflict between the Mark Hanna business-friendly versus the Falwell-inspired culture war wings of the party.
All that smoke and mirrors just hides the fact that the incumbents run everything and don't really care what anyone else thinks as long as they continue in power.
Unfortunately, it's a fringe concept at best. It used to be promoted heavily by the German Pirate Party, which as of now unfortunately has pretty much failed.
Political extremists sometimes disagree with the morality of the individual transactions contained within a policy.
"If you only understood the complex effects of the policy, you would agree" is not a valid counter-argument to somehow who thinks it has immoral underpinnings, because you are asking that person to basically cave in to the idea that the end justifies the means: "If only your thinking wasn't clouded by a naive illusion of understanding, you would see that desirable ends are achieved, and therefore you would accept the means."
Moral shortcuts in reasoning are in fact valid, and we see examples of this in law. A judge can hand down a sentence in a complex case which contains 2500 pages of evidence, without knowing the entire contents. He or she just has to know about specific law-breaking actions. That judge does not have an "illusion of understanding", and is not ignorant of that the crime had some benefits to someone. Those benefits were improperly achieved through the perpetration of a crime so they do not matter.
This is a useful analogy. A political extremist sees him or herself as a judge, and the proponent of a policy he or she disagrees with as wrongdoers, and the benefits of the policy (whatever they are, complexity being irrelevant) as being the result of wrong actions.
Doesn't that show the fundamental weakness of moral arguments? If Bob opposes a policy on moral grounds, but you convince Bob that the consequences of the policy would be overwhelmingly good by both of our standards (e.g. a reduction in crime or poverty), wouldn't you expect Bob to change his opinion about the policy (and perhaps concoct some moral justification)?
I find that most people who hold a moral position also have (what they believe are) strong arguments for why the consequences of breaking that moral position will be bad. And yet, most of them are not consequentialists, and are very resistant to consequentialism. Doesn't that seem too convenient?
What I mean by bad morals is ones that have to do with controlling aspects of other people's lives that don't affect others.
For example, say, opposition to two people of the same sex being married, which is purely their business. One justification is that it takes away from the "sanctity" of marriage, which somehow takes something away from the marriage of some opposite-sex couple who don't even know those two men.
Another example is appeals to traditions. Doing something is right because it's "always" been done that way.
On a related note, some moralists simply oppose change as a kind of moral. Change is bad. Lack of change is good! Anything that forces me to make an effort and learn something new or adjust is immoral; things staying the same is moral.
http://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-are-we-doing-when-w...
Voters with a competent understanding of issues (which sometimes just means understanding that some topics are too complex for a layman to fully grasp) have a large number of inflection points that have to be considered when stumping for votes; voters in the thrall of superficial and ideologically-driven simplifications of issues are relatively easier to manipulate, because they have fewer levers for a politician to pull. (There's a reason party committees love running Three Minute Hates against the ideological enemy of the moment: the easiest lever of all is to whip up a frenzy against an Obama, Cruz, Pelosi, Palin, etc. No policy arguments needed!)
The open question is, how long can a republic last that depends on ignorant (not stupid!) voters electing competent politicians? The recent influx of (I would argue) actively incompetent politicians (or, worse yet, competent politicians who support policies they know to be incompetent), many drawn from fringe voter movements, suggests we may discover sooner rather than later how such a system ends.
>> Participants’ reported political affiliations were 40% Democrat, 20% Republican, 36% independent, and 4% other
I think that distribution is quite a bit different than a random sampling of US adults would get you. For a study examining political preference, having such a bias is pretty harmful.
Perhaps their effect would have been more pronounced with more Republicans, or maybe it would have been less pronounced. Maybe the unusually high percentage of independents dampened the precondition of extremism, or maybe it actually exacerbated the precondition.
When you ask people on Mechanical Turk how well they understand a political issue on a scale of 1-7, the mean of their ratings is 3.82. But if you ask them to explain the issue first, then the mean of their ratings is 3.45.
If you ask them to rate whether they are in favor of some policy on a scale of 1-7, their average ratings are 1.41 away from 4. After asking people to explain the policy, their average ratings are 1.28 away from 4.
These are tiny effects. The effects in the second experiment appear to be just as small, judging by the figures.
The third experiment finds that, for people who rate how much they are in favor of a policy as 6 or 2, if asked to list reasons for their opinion, they are about 70% likely to donate 20 cents to that cause, and if they are asked to explain their opinion, they are about 30% likely to donate to that cause. At last, a non-minuscule effect! But it's about people's willingness to donate 20 cents, a negligible amount of money.
The overall finding seems to be "people slightly underestimate how well they understand things, and if you ask them for an explanation, they get confused and become slightly less confident."
How strong are the generalizations we can draw from such small effects? Are changes of this magnitude really informative about what determines people's behavior? Personally I suspect not.
Something I've been thinking about for a little while, that is sort of related to the topic of this study, is how to tie laws with intent. If we assume that legislatures make laws for reasons, and that these reasons involve some desired effect that the laws are intended to cause, then we should be able to draw some theoretical causal chain between the law and the desired effect.
The trick would be, that if the law does not cause the desired effect, it would be automatically repealed. So if a Senator wants to draft a bill banning drinking on Sundays, he would be required to establish some causal chain - in the text of the bill itself - between the policies that would be enacted by the new law and the desired effects (e.g. reduce traffic fatalities by x%, increase church attendance by y%, etc., within z years). If, after the law is passed, the desired effects do not occur, and the proposed causal chain therefore proven false, the law simply winks out of existence and ceases to be. No act of Congress, Supreme Court review, etc. It just ends.
Of course, we're dealing with humans here, and this being politics, there would have to be some oversight of the process to ensure fair play, and I imagine it would be similar in design and scope to our existing justice system, though largely separate from it. You'd have to be sure that legislators couldn't submit causal chains with time horizons of 1000 years (without a very good reason), or alleged "causal chains" that don't really follow (e.g. ban drinking on Sundays so that the sun rises on Mondays). I don't underestimate the task here - it would be at least as involved as criminal and civil law already are. However, when it comes to law right now we mostly just study the impact on people who break the laws, or occasionally whether the laws conflict with other laws of greater precedence. There doesn't seem to be any formal approach for evaluating the logical validity of laws: whether they do what they say, what they're even supposed to accomplish in the first place, much less how they do it. Should there be?
Perhaps if we implemented this, among other things it would get people thinking more about how the policies they support do what they are supposed to do, since it would be ingrained in the system itself.
