When the world turns out to be counter-intuitive you can be surprised by how sucky your intuition is (“An absolute time frame? Seriously?”) rather than by the state of the world.
No, it makes sense to be surprised by the world—when that surprise is the sound of you updating to a theory that will be less surprised next time.
Pedantry codicil: information-theoretic surprise doesn’t always indicate that your model needs to be updated. I wasn’t expecting the lottery numbers to be what they were on Saturday.
Surprising facts seems like too useful a term to have it be defined out of existence.
In practice, the term seems to refer to facts that many people find to be surprising.
When the world turns out to be counter-intuitive you can be surprised by how sucky your intuition is (“An absolute time frame? Seriously?”) rather than by the state of the world.
No, it makes sense to be surprised by the world—when that surprise is the sound of you updating to a theory that will be less surprised next time.
Pedantry codicil: information-theoretic surprise doesn’t always indicate that your model needs to be updated. I wasn’t expecting the lottery numbers to be what they were on Saturday.