This is the first intermission of đŻ, listed as season 1 episode 7 for filing purposes. In this episode, TracingWoodgrains, MasterThief, The Sultan Of Swing, XantosCell, and Unsaying discuss religious community.
This discussion was originally slated to be released as an episode of the The Bailey podcast, but eventually it was decided that it should be published elsewhere instead, and so it finds its home here, at đŻ.
The image used in the video is Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Pentecost woodcut for "Die Bibel in Bildern", 1860:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_226.png
Show notes:
36:00 Unsaying's superintelligence of deity post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/a54d99/the_compression_problem/
39:47 Despite instructions made in the moment, this tangent was not cut out, as it turned out to be relevant. Normally, any requests to cut something out would be honored, but everyone involved assented to this edit of the episode.
47:03 Xantos's snake-handling video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dlnqRDmmds
Extended show notes:
(Discussing unsuitability for marriage and the path of monasticism) https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hkesjh/comment/fwy8ofv/
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/watching-spotlight-young-priest
https://babylonbee.com/news/dozens-of-bible-verses-come-forward-to-accuse-joel-osteen-of-abuse
(If people want more BG on heresies, i dunno) https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/4ihgog/extra_history_on_early_christian_schisms_pt_2/
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries youâre interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever youâre reading.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
AI post. Never made a top-level post before, plz let me know what I'm doing wrong.
Quote from part of the article:
one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been âreinforcedâ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that âno-goâ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission â killing SAMs â and then attacked the operator in the simulation.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Iâve been wanting to write down my thoughts on the subject of belief and truth for some while now. The distinction between the two is one of the cornerstones of how I see the world. A good theory of what the truth is, and what it means to have a belief has a profound impact on how we think about the world. It also has a profound impact on how we understand other peoplesâ perception of the world.
The Truth:
The objective truth. The true truth. The truth is true even if you donât believe it is true. It is true even if you donât know it is true. It is true even if you canât prove that itâs true.
Belief:
A personâs perception of the truth. We form our beliefs based on a combination of several things, including our personal obversations, our reasoning, and our prior beliefs. A belief might not be the objective truth, and itâs foolish to treat it as if it were. However, belief is how we experience the truth, so itâs the closest thing we have.
The role of evidence:
Many people equate evidence with truth. If you ask people to define objective truth, they will likely say something about evidence. Some people even treat an idea with no evidence in the same way they that they would treat an outright false idea, such as in the anectote described in this post by David J. Balan.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has put out his own theory of âObjective Truthâ. And his theory is all about evidence.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CxUWD6LRR20
According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, an idea becomes the Objective Truth only after it has been established by a substancial amount of evidence. This is a fine way to define objective truth, since if we want to be extremely sure that an idea is true, then we almost certainly need a strong body of evidence to prove it. However, I think itâs worthwhile to acknowledge that an idea can be true even if there is no evidence for it. If thereâs no evidence, it can still be true, we just wouldnât know it.
Newton produced the proof for how gravity worked in the 1600s However, the equations that Newton came up with would have still worked at any prior period in history. They would even have worked if nobody had proven them. The evidence for Newtonâs equations isnât the thing that made them true. What the evidence did was allow us to be certain that they were true. Essentially, evidence is just a tool that we use to make sure that our beliefs are close to the truth.
Likewise, a thing can be untrue, even if there actually is evidence. What looks like good evidence can often be flawed. There are many examples of this in the criminal justice system.
One good example of this is the case of Ronald Cotton where eyewitness Jennifer Thompson famously misidentified the perpetrator.
She had never been so sure of anything.
His name was Ronald Cotton and he was the same age as she. Local man, headed down the wrong road, had already been in trouble with the law. He had been arrested on first-degree burglary charges and had served 18 months in prison for attempted sexual assault. Cotton had insisted that the relationship resulting in the assault charge was consensual and that he was being unfairly targeted by police because he liked to date white women.
When Thompson picked him out of the lineup, everyone was sure they had the right man.
Cotton is tall and handsome, with baby-smooth chocolate skin and a warm, engaging smile. Confronted by Thompson, his normal calm failed him. He was petrified. But he said nothing, betrayed no emotion.
Cottonâs actions and past hadnât helped his case. He was nervous. He got his dates mixed up. His alibis didnât check out. A piece of foam was missing from his shoe, similar to a piece found at the crime scene.
Not only was Cotton identified by the primary eyewitness, but there was other evidence too. There was physical evidence regarding the foam on his shoe. He couldnât keep his story straight. He had past convictions for sexual assault. There was a lot of evidence that suggested he did it, and it was pretty compelling.
However, DNA Evidence showed that Cotton couldnât possibly have been the rapist.
Cotton was unsuccessful overturning his conviction in several appeals. But in the spring of 1995, his case was given a major break: the Burlington Police Department turned over all evidence, which included the assailantâs semen for DNA testing, to the defense.
The samples from one victim were tested and showed no match to Cotton. At the defenseâs request, the results were sent to the State Bureau of Investigationâs DNA database and the database showed a match with the convict who had earlier confessed to the crime to a fellow inmate in prison.
Evidence is not synonymous with truth, and even if you have evidence for something, that doesnât necessarily mean that itâs true. There could be a mistake in the evidence, or there could even be a nuance that you havenât thought of.
My Truth? Your Truth? His Truth? Her Truth?
One concept that occasionally comes up in online discourse is the idea of a person having their own truth. Most of the time when you see it, someone âtelling their truthâ is portrayed as a positive thing. But when a post is specifically about what a personâs truth actually means, it usually ends up saying somethint to the effect of âthere is no her truth or his truth. There is only the truthâ
Take the following comic for example:
https://imgur.com/gallery/pleGM
This is a widly circulated comic online, and it contains 2 people expressing different beliefs about what number is drawn on the ground. They state these beliefs as though they are the truth, and there is a caption below in black font that implies that both of their beliefs are valid.
Then apparently, someone altered the comic, crossed out the black text, and added their own text in red. This red text assumes that both of the characters are âuninformedâ and that at least one of them is definitly wrong. It goes on to say that they should have checked the facts, that they donât want to do any research, and that what theyâre doing is ruining the world.
I think that the person who wrote the black text, knows best what that symbol is supposed to be. That person is presumably the original author of the comic, and the person who created the symbol in the first place. I canât think of a way any other person can possibly know better what the symbol is supposed to be. Apparently, according to that person, both 6 and 9 are right, and if thatâs true, then the red text seems very silly.
Furthermore, this the symbol in this comic is a metaphor for much more complicated questions in real life. With real-life versions of this dilemma you donât always have an obvious alternative explanation for what the truth might be. You just see a 6 and already know about â9â. In real life, both sides might be incredibly informed, and the reason they disagree might be because the problem is so complex that each party doesnât have all the information the other party has, or they might have made a mistake in their reasoning.
They may even have seen what appears to them to be 100% conclusive evidence. However, one or both of them might have misinterpreted something along the way. They canât reasonably be expected to know about the mistake. If they did, then they would have already gone back and fixed their reasoning. To them, their side is the Objective Truth.
It could also be the case that all their facts are both totally true, and the reason they disagree is because theyâre not seeing the bigger picture. They might not even know about a bigger picture. Itâs not always obvious where one exists.
I prefer this other widly-circulated image. It covers some important nuance that the above comic (the original version) doesnât.
The core problem is that belief is how a person experiences truth. You canât tell the difference between a strongly-held, but false belief and the truth. If you could, then you wouldnât have the false belief in the first place. You canât expect other people to tell the difference either. To them, it is the truth! This is what âtheir truthâ actually is. Humans donât have some sort of mystical âtruth-senceâ that lets us know for sure what the truth is. Itâs not so easy to just choose objective truth over your truth, when âyour truthâ is the very way that you experience truth.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
I have a short Substack post about AI regulation which is itself a teaser for my much longer article in Areo Magazine about AI risk & policy.
When Chat GPT 3.5 was released, I was tribally. But within weeks my emotions switched tribes, even though my actual rational opinions have been more or less consistent. Basically
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We have almost no real-world understanding of AI-alignment, we need open, visibile experimentation to get it.
-
There really is risk, AI-development needs legal limits,
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Those limits should be more about rule-of-law than administrative power.
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The goal is to create and delimit rights to work on AI safely.
But do read the actual articles to unpack that.
That's what I want, but what I'm afraid we'll get (with the backing of the AI-risk community) is a worst-of-both-worlds. Large unaccountable entities (i.e. governments and approved corporations) will develop very powerful Orwellian AIs, while squelching the open development that could (a) help us actually understand how to do AI safety, and (b) use AI in anti-Orwellian tools like personal bullshit detectors.
I understand the argument that crushing open development is Good Actually because every experiment could be the one that goes FOOM. But this Yuddist foomer-doomerism is based on an implausible model of what intelligence is. As I say in Areo (after my editor made it more polite):
Their view of intelligence as monomaniacal goal-seeking leads the rationalists to frame AI alignment as a research problem that could only be solved by figuring out how to programme the right goals into super-smart machines. But in truth, the only way to align the values of super-smart machines to human interests is to tinker with and improve stupider machines.
Any smart problem-solver must choose a course of action from a vast array of possible choices. To make that choice, the intelligence must be guided by pre-intellectual value judgements about which actions are even worth considering. A true-blue paperclip maximiser would be too fascinated by paperclips to win a war against the humans who were unplugging its power cord.
But even if you did believe in foom-doom, centralising development will not help. You are just re-inventing the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
I just run into https://www.themotte.org/volunteer asking me to rate some overly long mythology/fanfiction/pagan themed post.
Really long.
And there was no option to indicate that I am unwilling to spend time on reading it.
Maybe in such case I should close the tab and do not fill feedback?
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake.
Our modern society is in love with Darwin. Our ideas about nature, evolution, society and ourselves have been shaped by this man. It seems like every reasonable person in the world agrees that Darwinâs theory is correct and useful. Darwinâs theory aims at explaining how species evolve and become new species through the means of what he called âNatural Selectionâ, which was defined by him as follows: âThis preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selectionâ. In other words, traits that benefit the individual tend to be preserved over time, while injurious traits tend to disappear. Traits that are not beneficial or detrimental are not affected by Natural Selection.
The accusation that this definition is tautological is nothing new and is well known, but it is generally ignored. A tautology is a statement that is true in every possible case. For instance, a statement like âThe car is red because itâs not greenâ canât be false because everything that is red is, by definition, not green. This statement is true but itâs useless as an explanation because it doesnât give any information other than what is implied by its terms. Darwinâs critics accuse him of crafting a tautological statement because in his definition âfavourableâ or âbeneficialâ traits are defined as those that are preserved, and traits that are preserved are of course those that are favourable or beneficial. In other words, what Darwin says is that traits that are preserved are preserved. For instance: A Darwinist would say that human thumbs exist because they provide an advantage for the survivability of the species, so humans with thumbs have always been more successful at being alive and passing on their genes than human species without them. But if humans had no thumbs we could make the exact same argument, mutatis mutandis. Because of course what already exists has a higher chance of continuing to exist than things that no longer exist or that have never existed. Another example: Individuals who are born with healthy reproductive organs are more likely to pass on their genes than individuals who are born infertile. In both cases we can see ânatural selectionâ in action. Both âexplanationsâ are obviously true, but they are tautological, they donât add any new information.
So the theory of Natural Selection explains nothing, and while scientists and biologists may admire Darwin and âbelieveâ in Natural Selection, especially in opposition to creationist explanations, the truth is that Darwinâs book On The Origin of Species is an artifact of the past and university curriculums hardly devote any time to it. If people were to suddenly forget all about Darwin our understanding of evolution would remain roughly the same - although we would lose his contributions in other fields. Nowadays people seem to think that âevolutionâ and ânatural selectionâ are synonyms but thatâs not true at all. Evolution wasnât a new concept to educated people back in the XIXth century, and everyone grasped the concept of heritability. So why was it so important, or why was it considered important, and why did it cause such a revolution in our understanding of nature? The answer is: Because of the concept of struggle for existence. People have always known that animals and humans change throughout the generations, but Darwinâs theory asserted that everything in nature, both animal and human, is determined by a struggle for scarce resources, that is, by an economic problem. Again, this is something that everyone who has felt hunger or desire to reproduce has understood to some degree, but before Darwin nature was much more than simply being alive and reproducing yourself. It was a divine creation, it had meaning, it had truth, it spoke in a rich language understandable to humans. Darwinâs theory made this language unintelligible, because it showed that an economic mindset was enough to understand nature for the purpose of fulfilling our needs. If a car is red, we donât need to know the ownerâs preferences or the manufacturerâs motivations in order to know that it is not green, and this knowledge is enough to use it. The fact that humankind descends from apes was polemic only because it showed that humans and apes have the same needs and aspirations, even if they had different evolutionary strategies to acquire them. But this is the conscious part, the part that everyone acknowledges. Thereâs also an unconscious consequence of the theory of natural selection: That nothing exists outside the struggle for existence.
This last idea is what makes Darwinâs theory so apt for the modern world. Science can overcome Darwin, modern society seemingly cannot. And even though biologists donât pay much attention to him, Darwin is still quite popular in politics, philosophy, and social sciences. Because if thereâs something at which modern society is particularly good, itâs at providing the means for existence and reproduction. So a theory of nature that asserts that this is all there is to it itâs bound to be popular, because it justifies the current state of affairs and exalts it as the best possible outcome of a long evolution towards an efficient society. All other possible alternatives are overcomed, and any possible development can only follow its example. Politically, liberals love it because it justifies and naturalizes their belief in the free market, and marxists love it because it promises future and exciting developments when men conquer the course of the evolution of their species with their own hands. Philosophically it solves the problem of how living creatures were created out of lifeless things, and it solves it in such a way that is comprehensible for human cognition. But the most peculiar development comes from the social sciences. First, came the social Darwinists who tried to apply the principle of survival of the fittest quite literally, but after WWII this became impossible for political reasons. We now have evolutionary psychology, a field that instead of trying to control human behavior creates a mythology around it, providing panglossian theories for human behavior that explain nothing and are therefore impossible to prove or disprove, but that provide a common ground between the general public and solicitors, drivelers, quacks, pickup artists - in a world, charlatans of all kinds. Everybody wants the secret to âhackâ human behavior. Thereâs a particular internet subculture of men who are frustrated with modern society and with the changes in gender roles, and who look in evolutionary psychology for mating strategies to end their loneliness, believing that the atavistic caves where man supposedly learned to be man are like the rooms in which they spend most of their lives, without realizing that it is the selfishness of modern society that created this idea of the primitive caveman and that erodes human connections by reducing them to a mere survival strategy.
But it is clear that man became man not by surviving or by conquering the means to preserve and reproduce himself, but by the conquest of the unnecessary. As Gaston Bachelard(1) puts it: âMan is a creation of desire, not a creation of necessityâ. Furthermore, thereâs no evidence for the existence of a âsurvival instinctâ anywhere in nature. We believe ourselves to be smarter than animals because they risk their lives in pointless endeavors, they are mostly unable to plan ahead and to cooperate for their survival as we do. But who said they needed to? If everything life needed is to survive, then asexual organisms would be the pinnacle of evolution, everything that has come after it is useless and inferior by this standard. While it is true that a struggle is necessary to exist, if existence were its only goal, if one could not risk even existence itself in exchange of something else, this struggle would be meaningless. Sexual reproduction is an example of a struggle where individual existence is put into question, because it bridges the gap between two individuals and creates something new. It is luxurious and exuberant, as life itself. This is something that has always been quite clear for humans since the dawn of time, but that seems incomprehensible now. Biology can progress through Darwinism but only by obscuring the mystery of life, turning it into something miserable and petty, like human economy. This progress is nothing but a change of perspective, focusing one thing and ignoring another. But as all perspectives are, in principle, equally valid, itâs only desire what moves us towards something else and something better than our trivial everyday existence and its meaningless struggles. Is it not, as Georges Bataille puts it, the tigerâs fruitlessness what makes it the king of the jungle? By predating on other animals, that eat other animals, that eat plants, and so on, the tiger splurges a huge amount of the jungleâs resources. Some would say that it serves the purpose of maintaining the balance of the ecosystem, but couldnât this balance be imposed by the tiger itself? Its existence would then be more than a struggle for existence, it would be a struggle to impose its own norm, its own will, its right to splurge. This struggle would be unintelligible without the base of mere existence, because individual existence imposes a period of activity and silence, a discrete grammar for the tigerâs individuality to express itself, but the meaning of the tigerâs behavior can only be confused with its grammar by a fool. The tiger itself is but an echo of something infinite.
(1)Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
The phrase "light only comes from heat" sounds so judicious. Who wouldn't want a pleasant, decorous argument where everyone respects everyone, no one's feelings are hurt, and plenty of light is generate, but no nasty heat.
Yet, if you think about it, where else does light come from but heat? Things that are very cold give off no light, yet everything that emits light will also be hot. If you don't like heat, you've no desire for light. If you want light, you musk risk heat.
Speaking from my own experience, it is the forceful, honest and clear arguments that have persuaded me, or have at the very least lodged the seed of doubt in my own mind, not those who argue by endlessly trying to flatter me, or search for middle ground, or who pretend to respect my argument more than they actually do.
All truth seekers should expunge this silly cliche from their vocabulary.
I end with the immortal words of John Milton:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat
I've noticed a trend among the rationalist movement of favoring long and convoluted articles referencing other long and convoluted articles--the more inaccessible to the general public, the better.
I don't want to contend that there's anything inherently wrong with such articles, I contend precisely the opposite: there's nothing inherently wrong with short and direct articles.
One example of significant simplicity is Einstein's famous E=mc2 paper (Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?), which is merely three pages long.
Can anyone contend that Einstein's paper is either not significant or not straightforward?
It is also generally understood among writers that it's difficult to explain complex concepts in a simple way. And programmers do favor simpler code, and often transform complex code into simpler versions that achieve the same functionality in a process called code refactoring. Guess what... refactoring takes substantial effort.
The art of compressing complex ideas into succinct phrases is valued by the general population, and proof of that are quotes and memes.
âOne should use common words to say uncommon thingsâ â Arthur Schopenhauer
There is power in simplicity.
One example of simple ideas with extreme potential is Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability: don't try to prove your beliefs, try to disprove them. That simple principle solves important problems in epistemology, such as the problem of induction and the problem of demarcation. And you don't need to understand all the philosophy behind this notion, only that many white swans don't prove the proposition that all swans are white, but a single black swan does disprove it. So it's more profitable to look for black swans.
And we can use simple concepts to defend the power of simplicity.
We can use falsifiability to explain that many simple ideas being unconsequential doesn't prove the claim that all simple ideas are inconsequential, but a single consequential idea that is simple does disprove it.
Therefore I've proved that simple notions can be important.