How can facts change

That said, medicine still has a very short half-life; in fact it is one of the areas where knowledge changes the fastest. One of the slowest is mathematics, because when you prove something in mathematics it is pretty much a settled matter unless someone finds an error in one of your proofs. For instance, in physics, if you want to understand the arc of a parabola, you shoot a cannon times and see where the cannonballs land. And when you do that, you are likely to find a really nice cluster around a single location.

But if you are making measurements that have to do with people, things are a lot messier, because people respond to a lot of different things, and that means the effect sizes are going to be smaller. I want to show people how knowledge changes. But at the same time I want to say, now that you know how knowledge changes, you have to be on guard, so you are not shocked when your children are coming home to tell you that dinosaurs have feathers. You have to look things up more often and recognise that most of the stuff you learned when you were younger is not at the cutting edge.

We are coming a lot closer to a true understanding of the world; we know a lot more about the universe than we did even just a few decades ago. It is not the case that just because knowledge is constantly being overturned we do not know anything. But too often, we fail to acknowledge change. Some fields are starting to recognise this. Medicine, for example, has got really good at encouraging its practitioners to stay current.

A lot of medical students are taught that everything they learn is going to be obsolete soon after they graduate. In that sense we could all stand to learn from medicine; we constantly have to make an effort to explore the world anew—even if that means just looking at Wikipedia more often. And I am not just talking about dinosaurs and outer space. You see this same phenomenon with knowledge about nutrition or childcare—the stuff that has to do with how we live our lives.

In this view, scientific scholars are subject to status quo persistence. Far from being objective decoders of the empirical evidence, scientists have decided preferences about the scientific beliefs they hold. From a psychological perspective, this preference for beliefs can be seen as a reaction to the tensions caused by cognitive dissonance. A lot of scientific advancement happens only when the old guard dies off. What do they say?

And why? Facts are supposedly measurable, quantifiable, observable, reproducible, and therefore undeceiving. Unfortunately, this meta- observation itself is only valid within a certain meta- reference system as per the previous points. And reference systems, as opposed to the facts within them, are often emotionally loaded. We read the news outlets that are on the same political frequency as us. Make a point to befriend people who disagree with you.

Expose yourself to environments where your opinions can be challenged, as uncomfortable and awkward as that might be. A person who is unwilling to change his or her mind even with an underlying change in the facts is, by definition, a fundamentalist. Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned law professor and bestselling author. Join Us. About Us. We all tend to identify with our beliefs and arguments. This is my business. This is my article. It was no longer personal.

It was simply a hypothesis proven wrong. Get out of your echo chamber We live in a perpetual echo chamber. In the end, it takes courage and determination to see the truth instead of the convenient. Next Big Idea Club Picks. Thinking, Fast and Slow. As a result, women everywhere starting asking for ultrahard nanotwinned cubic boron nitride engagement rings. Because those really are forever. Even if you didn't read Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" in high school, you probably learned somewhere that the townspeople of Salem burned witches at the stake.

But that never happened, according to Richard Trask , a town archivist for Danvers formerly known as Salem Village. At the time of the trials, New England still followed English law, which listed witchcraft as a felony punishable by hanging — not burning at the stake, Trask said. In Europe, however, the church labeled witchcraft heresy and did tie up suspected practitioners and light them on fire.

You can see where the confusion started. Even movies like "The Prince Of Egypt" perpetuate the idea that slaves built the pyramids. Although many think the Bible tells us they did, the book doesn't mention the story specifically.

This popular myth reportedly stems from comments made by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin when visiting Egypt in , according to Amihai Mazar , professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recent archaeological finds actually show that Egyptians built the pyramids themselves. Workers were recruited from poor families in the north and south but were highly respected, earning crypts near the pyramids and even proper preparation for burial.

When you remember learning of a giant plant-eating dinosaur with a very long neck, you're probably thinking of the Brontosaurus. But technically, that brand of beast doesn't exist. Sounds dramatic, right? Well, the scenario kind of was. Two paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, were engaged in a bitter rivalry for evidence of dinosaurs.

In , in the heat of the conflict, Marsh discovered a partial skeleton, unfortunately lacking a head, which he named Apatosaurus. He used the skull of another dinosaur, a Camarasaurus, to finish the replica.

But when Marsh discovered another skeleton two years later, he named it a Brontosaurus, when in reality, he had just found a more complete Apatosaurus.