Sometimes, the more I know about a topic, the less skeptical I am about new things in that field. I’m expecting them to be weird.

One category is deep sea animals. I’ve been learning about them for a long time, and when I started, nearly anything could blow my mind. I’d look up sources all the time because they all sounded fake. Even finding a source, I’d be skeptical. There’s no reason for anyone to photoshop that many pictures of that sea slug, sure, but on the other hand, LOOK AT IT.

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Nowadays, I’ve seen even more deep sea critters, and I’m much less skeptical. I think you could make up basically any wild thing and I’d believe it. You could say: “NOAA discovered a fish with two tails that only mates on Thursdays.” Or “National Geographic wrote about this deep-sea worm that’s as smart as a dog and fears death.” And I’d be like “yeah, that seems reasonable, I buy it.”

Here’s a test. Five of these animals are real, and three are made up.

1. A jellyfish that resembles a three-meter-diameter circular bedsheet
2. A worm that, as an adult, has no DNA.
3. A worm that branches as it ages, leaving it with one head but hundreds of butts.
4. A worm with the body plan of a squid.
5. A sponge evolved to live inside of fish gills.
6. A sea slug that lives over a huge geographic region, but only in a specific two-meter wide range of depth.
7. A copepod that’s totally transparent at some angles, and bright blue from others.
8. A shrimp that shuts its claws so fast it creates a mini sonic boom.
   

(Answers at bottom of page. Control-F “answers” to jump there.)

Of course, I’m only expecting to be surprised about information in a certain sphere. If you told me that someone found a fish that had a working combustion engine, or spoke German, I’d call bullshit – because those things are clearly outside the realm of zoology.

Still, there’s stuff like this. WHY ARE YOU.

Some other categories where I have this:

• Modern American politics
• Florida Man stories
• Head injury symptoms/aftermath
• Places extremophiles live

Note that these aren’t cases where I tend to underapply skepticism – these are cases where, most of the time, not being skeptical works. If people were making up fake Florida Man stories, I’d have to start being skeptical again, but until then, I can rely on reality being stranger than I expect.

What’s the deal? Well, a telling instance of the phenomena, for me, is archaeal viruses.

• Some of these viruses are stable and active in 95° C water.
• This archaeal virus is shaped like a wine bottle.

• This one is shaped like a lemon.

• This one appears to have evolved independently and shares no genes with other viruses.
• This one GROWS ON ITS OWN, outside of a host.
• This one builds seven-sided pyramids on the surfaces of cells it infects.

These are really surprising to me because I know a little bit about viruses. If you know next to nothing about viruses, a lemon-shaped virus probably isn’t that mind-blowing. Cells are sphere-shaped, right? A lemon shape isn’t that far from a sphere shape. The ubiquitous spaceship-shaped T4 is more likely to blow your mind.

Similarly, if you were a planet-hopping space alien first visiting earth, and your alien buddy told you about the giant garbage-bag shaped jellyfish, that probably wouldn’t be mind-blowing – for all you know, everything on earth looks like that. All information in that category is new to you, and you don’t have enough context for it to seem weird yet.

At the same time, if I studied archaeal viruses intensely, I’d probably get a sense of the diversity in the field. Some strange stuff like the seven-sided pyramids would still come along as it’s discovered, but most new information would fit into my models.

This suggests that for certain fields, there’s going to be some amount of familiarity where I’m surprised by all sorts of things, but on the tail ends, I either don’t know enough to be surprised – or already know everything that might surprise me. In the middle, I have just enough of a reference class that it frequently gets broken – and I end up concluding that everything is weird.

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(Answers: 2, 5, and 6 are fictional. Details on the sea tarp jellyfish, the reverse hydra worm, the squid worm, the sea sapphire, and the mantis shrimp.)