I just would have thought that people like Ziz and their followers, who ostensibly think of themselves as “rational” and are interested in how the brain hemispheres really work, would have searched for even superficial-level information like “each eye feeds both hemispheres” that supports—or contradicts—their mental model about the brain.
Or not. Zizians, like all of us, are only human. They might be in a cult, but, while I here cast the first stone, I’m sure have I too have erroneous beliefs that could be corrected with just “superficial-level” expert information in other domains.
I just hope that I’m not overconfident about my own errors. An even bigger problem than known ignorance in a knowledge domain is overconfidence in that domain. If I forget how to calculate a cone, and someone explains to me that “the volume of a sphere is a cylinder’s minus a cone’s”, I ought not to be that surprised, because I shouldn’t have held a strong preexisting erroneous intuition about this thing in the first place. In contrast, a Zizian, I imagine, might well be surprised (or contrary) that “blocking your left eye’s vision reduces input to both hemispheres evenly”, because they overconfidently held a strong (and wrong) belief about basic brain neuroanatomy and invested a ton of time and pain into practices based on that belief. While figuring out their “unihemispheric sleep” practices, they should have actually done the research...or maintained a healthy amount of “I don’t really know much about that field right now”.
The relationship between the sphere, cylinder, and cone is still pretty cool, though.
Yeah, that’s true.
I just would have thought that people like Ziz and their followers, who ostensibly think of themselves as “rational” and are interested in how the brain hemispheres really work, would have searched for even superficial-level information like “each eye feeds both hemispheres” that supports—or contradicts—their mental model about the brain.
Or not. Zizians, like all of us, are only human. They might be in a cult, but, while I here cast the first stone, I’m sure have I too have erroneous beliefs that could be corrected with just “superficial-level” expert information in other domains.
I just hope that I’m not overconfident about my own errors. An even bigger problem than known ignorance in a knowledge domain is overconfidence in that domain. If I forget how to calculate a cone, and someone explains to me that “the volume of a sphere is a cylinder’s minus a cone’s”, I ought not to be that surprised, because I shouldn’t have held a strong preexisting erroneous intuition about this thing in the first place. In contrast, a Zizian, I imagine, might well be surprised (or contrary) that “blocking your left eye’s vision reduces input to both hemispheres evenly”, because they overconfidently held a strong (and wrong) belief about basic brain neuroanatomy and invested a ton of time and pain into practices based on that belief. While figuring out their “unihemispheric sleep” practices, they should have actually done the research...or maintained a healthy amount of “I don’t really know much about that field right now”.
The relationship between the sphere, cylinder, and cone is still pretty cool, though.