A random thought emerged today. Is there a cognitive bias, similar to the Dunning—Krueger effect, but for degrees of weirdness?
I couldn’t find any, so I decided to coin one.
Behold, the Tardigrade Effect.
The Tardigrade Effect
A cognitive bias in which the weirdness of a subject is inversely proportional to the observer’s knowledge of the subject. The more one knows about a subject, the weirder it seems. The less one knows about a subject, the less weird it seems.
The Tardigrade Effect is named after the tardigrade, a microscopic, water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animal. Tardigrades are known for their ability to survive in extreme conditions that would be fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C), pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.
Now that’s weird. Tardgrade also serves as a reminder of the time travelling phone booth in Dr. Who.
What do you think? Is the Tardigrade Effect a thing? Have you experienced it? Is this a duplicate of an existing cognitive bias?