The surrounding environment affects people to interact with an object differently. Take the simple car door. The dutch have a lot of cyclists, and most drivers frequently ride a cycle. So, it’s intuitive (to them) that a cyclist might be in your blind spot when you’re opening a door. So, using the far hand to open the door, allowing you to peek at the blind spot before opening the door, only seems natural.

This is the Dutch Reach .

Did you notice the other thing the driving instructor (in the video) said in passing? Holding the door with the left hand because it’s windy? Tells you a lot about the environment and how people interact with objects taking the environment into consideration.

There is a lot that we humans have learned. In a small fraction of the 4.5 billion years that the earth has been around, one species has progressed to astronomical levels of understanding, self-awareness, communication and discovery. In just the last five years, CRISPR as a gene-editing technology has started to look viable, the discovery of the Higgs-Boson has credence to the standard model, we have a fairly good idea of what happened as far back as 10^-43 of a second, and AI has started to match human abilities in activities as complex as Go. On the face of it, we seem to have reached a state of diminishing returns. Are we in a state of scientific saturation?

“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”               – Albert A. Michelson, 1894

Well, clearly not. Each generation’s conceit has led it to believe that there is nothing new to learn and that, surely, everything significant that needs to be known must be known by now. And every such generation has been wrong. Mysteries abound. Entire branches of knowledge are on the verge of being proven wrong. That is how science progresses.

It is at the very edge of our understanding that we learn, discover and progress. This is why it’s so hard to understand where we are going without understanding what we already know, and more importantly, what we don’t.