[robg]

It’s easy to forget how difficult learning is, for us as individuals and as flocks in formation. Pick any topic and it’s likely it took you years to learn well. So simply switching out beliefs embedded in that topic requires overwriting years of patterns and synapses in sync.

Where Kuhn is so helpful in understanding that even scientists have immense difficulty, if not vigorous myopia, stuck with wrong beliefs. Paradigm shifts with funerals is easier over decades than getting scientists to evolve their models.

[MichaelZuo]

It's so much so that I would almost define intelligence as the ability to "switch out beliefs".

[lanstin]

The geologists that died disbelieving in plate tectonics weren’t free of intelligence. The very systems that allow us to find patterns are also liable to get stuck with seeing certain patterns.

Not only is it impossible with current human knowledge to construct an infallible theory that predicts everything we encounter, it is also impossible with current human physiology never to cling to wrong ideas in the face of counter evidence. When examining our rationality, we must not only admit our data are incomplete and our theories flawed, but we ourselves might be thinking foolishly.