Reverse Engineering Intellectual Humility From Fruit Selection

Choosing oranges is easy. Heavy = good, light = bad. Heavy is juicy. Light is dry. Water weighs more than dry pulp. Duh!

Yet I’ve never seen anyone perform this check. They poke, inspect, admire color, avoid blemishes, compare shapes. Even in Portugal, where oranges are everywhere, I watch shoppers deplete the various bins evenly, even if one contains noticeably heavier fruit.

How can anything so obvious remain so utterly invisible?

Even stranger: it took me six decades to see it, myself.

We should be trained by now. We choose heavy oranges and are sensually REWARDED. We choose light ones and are PUNISHED. Even mice can be trained. Why not us?

The orange trick is like a spooky invitation from an invisible dimension to consider what else we're missing.

It feels like we've nearly filled in the map of knowledge, so at this mature stage we are simply adding minor details to First Principles which feel like solid bedrock. But what if the "unknown unknowns" are far, far more numerous than we imagine?

We never knew we were walking around unable to choose oranges. No one knows the orange trick until they're told, so the rest don't perceive a gap. In our ignorance, we feel reasonably whole. What if, despite our blithe confidence, it's a landscape of gaps, and we never notice because the thing about gaps is that there's nothing there?

Is it possible that we have not, in fact, done anything like filling a map? Have we, instead, been plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched? Missed truth, leaving no evidence, can't be weighed. And yet we imagine — both as individuals and as a species — that we have some real sense of "where we're at.”

As a side note, even those spindly lines — our proud "First Principles" — might not be broadly foundational, after all. What if our First Principles are nothing but a tentative first try? Maybe our "First Principles" are more in the sense of First Batch of Pancakes? Idunno, I'm just asking questions.

Recognitions of missed truth do tend to accumulate in daily life, don't they? And if we're intellectually honest and not comically over-proud of human accomplishment, we might wonder whether the total mass of overlooked a priori "duhs" — the myriad latent epiphanies — might titanically outweigh everything we've figured out from a few centuries of plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched.

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I have not devised some brilliant new orange choosing system. I have simply pointed out the obvious. So obvious that one absorbs it without a sense of prior absence. My point here is that there are many widely-know things no one knows.

Let's call them A Priori wormholes. Latently obvious insights that remain utterly invisible until they suddenly become boringly inevitable. Assimilation erases subjective evidence that they were ever missing.