It can be summed up as brilliant ideas, that fall apart due to lack of rigor in research. The insidious part of this is that brilliant ideas and pithy quotes a

It can be summed up as brilliant ideas, that fall apart due to lack of rigor in research. The insidious part of this is that brilliant ideas and pithy quotes and the essays that result from them are so memorable, that in a way the bar for research disproving them is even higher that it would be if the statement in question was some dusty historical or physical science hypothesis.