Probably the most persistent and problem-causing is the common sense way to treating things as having essences.
By this I mean that people tend to think of things like people, animals, organizations, places, etc. etc. as having properties or characteristics as if they had a little file inside them with various bits of metadata set that define their behavior. But this is definitely not how the world works! The property like this is at best a useful fiction or abstraction that allows simplified reasoning about complex systems, but it also leads to lots of mistakes because most people don’t seem to realize these are like aggregations over complex interactions in the world rather than real things themselves.
You might say this is mistaking the map for the territory, but I think framing it this way makes it a little clearer just what is going on. People act as if there was some essential properties of things and think that’s how the world actually is and as a result make mistakes when that model fails to correspond to what actually happens.
Probably the most persistent and problem-causing is the common sense way to treating things as having essences.
By this I mean that people tend to think of things like people, animals, organizations, places, etc. etc. as having properties or characteristics as if they had a little file inside them with various bits of metadata set that define their behavior. But this is definitely not how the world works! The property like this is at best a useful fiction or abstraction that allows simplified reasoning about complex systems, but it also leads to lots of mistakes because most people don’t seem to realize these are like aggregations over complex interactions in the world rather than real things themselves.
You might say this is mistaking the map for the territory, but I think framing it this way makes it a little clearer just what is going on. People act as if there was some essential properties of things and think that’s how the world actually is and as a result make mistakes when that model fails to correspond to what actually happens.