[Applejinx]

It depends on who the onlooker is, though. I'm always fascinated with flying car stories because I understand them: I can look at the Ilium story and know immediately things about it, for instance that it will not glide with weight distribution and wings as shown.

But if I looked at Theranos, I wouldn't have any idea what I'm looking at. We all have our own brain structures that set up our respective abilities to call BS: part of this is understanding the psychology, as you (jacquesm) do. This gives the background to not take claims at face value.

The other part of BS-calling is that structure of experience telling us things like 'center of mass for the object will be here' or 'adding 20 more people to this dev team will have this effect on their ability to coordinate development'. These are heuristics that might be more difficult to explain than to be directed by, but in practice they'll tend to function like iron laws: if an exception is ever found it's a huge deal. The trick is getting people to accept the iron law without the structure of experience to support it.