27 ms·

Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

171 points by tokenadult 14y ago

mikeash 14y ago
Now I know that half the facts I know are probably wrong. But which half is that fact in?
- betelnut 14y ago
  That reminds me of the old joke about medical school: half the things you learn are wrong, and half you forget - you just have to hope it's the same half.
ams6110 14y ago
I guess I have a small problem with this use of the word "fact" which to me is something provably true. What this piece is actually saying is that half of scientific theory is probably wrong.
- 3825 14y ago
  I have a more than small problem with the use of the phrase scientific theory[1] which to me is something provable. >A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.[2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory [2]: http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/evolution/qanda.shtml http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/evolution/qanda.shtml
  - jonhendry 14y ago
    I'm not sure how you'd prove the theory that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, short of taking the rectal temp of a Stegosaur. But you could falsify the theory by finding characteristics incompatible with being exothermic. Finding the dinosaurs with feathers and other characteristics of the (warm-blooded) birds probably helped, too. Some of the "incorrect facts" are really theories that were substantiated to the best degree possible at the time, and no falsifying evidence existed at the time. I suspect some, like "non-functional junk DNA", is a case of scientific qualifiers being ignored in the mainstream media and forgotten. Humans like "facts", but we inevitably drop the error bars that originally accompanied each new "fact".
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Only in mathematics are things provably true. In science, things are considered true based on the best theories and experimental evidence we have so far, and our observational abilities increase as technology gets better over time. For example, Newtonian mechanics was considered "true" for centuries, until it was replaced by relativistic mechanics. In the 18th century, we just didn't have the equipment to measure phenomena at quantum scales; now we do. As we observe the world in greater detail, we find that things that seemed to be true before are now false. That's the best that science can do.
  - Herring 14y ago
    Adding to this, maybe "true" is a bit of a loaded word. Newtonian mechanics works just as well today as it ever did. I prefer to think of it in terms of usefulness. 18th century knowledge is like a Pentium 3 that we just don't want anymore.
  - sea6ear 14y ago
    Actually, I'd say that in mathematics, things are provably true given that the initial assumptions are true. However, mathematics does not so far as I know deal with the truth of those initial assumptions (axioms), it simply accepts them as true. Where this gets interesting is that you can say, what if this axiom was not true? Let's assume it's not. And then possibly come up with a whole new system of mathematics (like non-euclidean geometry) which may turn out to have actual use in previously unsolvable problems.
    - lotharbot 14y ago
      I think it's better to conceive of mathematical axioms as being part of mathematical system X or not, rather than as true or false. That is, they're not self-evident or universal or true according to some external standard, they're merely postulated as properties of a given mathematical structure. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom#Non-logical_axioms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom#Non-logical_axioms
      - sea6ear 14y ago
- smsm42 14y ago
  Depending on meaning of "wrong". If it means that there will be facts that are not accounted for by current version of certain theory - then it's probably true for most of them. If it means that our current interpretation of certain facts is completely incorrect - such as we think X is caused by Y, but in fact X is caused by Z which has zero correlation and no causal links with Y - I would be very surprised if it turned out like this for half of the established theories. Though for those that are just being developed probably much more than half of them will be wrong in this sense. I guess it also depends on the field - I'd say it's unlikely we'd have some overwhelming change in classical mechanics, but if you talk about something like biology or neurophysiology - there are a lot of things that are not clear, so it is entirely possible that our understanding, for example, of how addiction works - would be radically different in 20 years.
greenyoda 14y ago
The article says: In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” If Ioannidis' findings apply to areas of science other than biomedical research (where there is also competition, pressure to publish, conflict of interest, etc.), then most scientific knowledge is already false at the time that it's published; you don't have to wait 45 years for it to become false like this article claims. Here are some references to Ioannidis' work: - The cited PLoS paper (2005): http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal... - A less technical article in The Atlantic: "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" (2010): http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam... Edit: Corrected spelling of Ioannidis' name; it's misspelled in the article.
rustynails 14y ago
Half of the facts are wrong may be a little steep. Do we breathe air? Does it contain oxygen? I'm sure some enthusiast will give me the composition of air (inc some stat on nitrogen:). There are many trivial facts that we know with confidence. However, in a recent conversation with my mother, I asked her about a talking donkey in the bible. she confirmed the reference saying "the lord works in mysterious ways" and "donkeys could talk back then". Maybe there is some truth that 1/2 of our facts are wrong... If you skip religion, I view my mother as a very clever woman who is very astute with business. She was indoctrinated at a young age.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  Religion is everywhere, even where it is specifically disclaimed (see also: The Singularity). We're hardwired for it.
  - Peaker 14y ago
    Are you claiming that the idea that AI will eventually be smarter than humans and thus render human work mostly useless, a religious idea?
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      No, I'm claiming that the idea that progress toward this can be predicted and that the event will occur around 2045 is a religious idea. Like all of the best religious ideas, it is one that came about by a man faced with his own mortality. On a side note, and this is opening a huge philosophical can of worms, I'm not convinced of the utility in merging our intelligence to machine intelligence in such a scenario, either from the point of view of overall utility (what do they gain from our meeker intelligence?) or from the point of view of our own "existence" actually being near-immortalized. Stated simply, if you could make a perfect copy of my brain into a 20 year old clone of myself (I'm 39) and that clone were created such that it didn't have to worry about issues like telomere shortening or any of the other processes theorized to cause issues for clones, but after the process was completed the original copy of me would be terminated, I wouldn't take that deal and I doubt many other people would either regardless of how they feel about the theoretical ability to duplicate an exact copy of their own consciousness. Ultimately, the copy of me that is me wants to continue on but cannot. I will die.
monochromatic 14y ago
> Arbesman notes that “the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of about seven and a half years.” This suggests that brain/computer linkages will one day be possible. What?
- jonhendry 14y ago
  Current brain-computer interfaces have 96 needle-like electrodes, so can interface with 96 neurons. That produces an enormous amount of data at the sampling rates used, but is already being used for things like controlling robot arms. In 7.5 years, perhaps it'll be up to 192 neurons, if the connected computers and processors can keep up with the data flow. 7.5 years after that, maybe it'll be up to 384. Etc.
ealloc 14y ago
> Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk This topic is still very controversial and I don't think the article should be citing it in this context. It was only a few months ago that the ENCODE project released its first results claiming that 80% of the genome is "functional", and many scientists have noted that their definition of "functional" is much too broad. It includes any piece of DNA that becomes bound to protein at some time, while it is known that many proteins bind nonspecifically.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Yup. Most of the DNA is not directly involved in coding proteins but we've been finding out more and more of how DNA works. Significant parts of DNA are there merely to help maintain chemical and solubility properties so that the DNA coils correctly. And far more of it is there for gene regulation.
- nn2 14y ago
  Yes I noticed that too and immediately started to godel: "how many of the wrongnesses the author believes are wrong are really right ..."
- jonhendry 14y ago
  The upshot of the article is that little should ever be published unless you have perfect information and understanding about the subject. No publishing on DNA until we know everything, etc.
javajosh 14y ago
Obligatory xkcd(s): http://xkcd.com/843/ http://xkcd.com/843/ (Misconceptions) http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/ (Ten Thousand) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions (The link referred to in 'Misconceptions') EDIT: Darnit.
- Centigonal 14y ago
  Your links are swapped! Is that a typo or humor about facts being wrong?
hypersoar 14y ago
I try to keep the question "What do you know, and how do you think you know it?" in my head as much as possible (I think I picked it up from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality). I mentally recite it a lot, often without really thinking about it. Every once in a while, though, the thought catches me as I'm recalling some long-known fact, and I'll realize that I don't have a good reason to believe it. Many of these are things I was told long ago by friends/parents/family/teachers and stored away, their sources forgotten. The maxim has proved useful in unlearning things I was too young to disbelieve when I learned them.
- 31reasons 14y ago
  I know its good to have a healthy self doubt but this makes dumb people look more confident (who don't revise their facts) than the smart people who are too cautious with their knowledge. This is the reasons most dumb people end up being the boss of the smart people.
chernevik 14y ago
Re: The title: Not for me, baby. I haven't many "facts", and most of those are math or avowed articles of faith. I learned a long time ago to replace "is" with "I have read that" or "I have heard". My opinions are wrong all the time -- but not for long.
sold 14y ago
A counterpoint - The Relativity of Wrong, famous essay by Asimov. http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
DanBC 14y ago
An interesting BBC Radio Four programme about this kind of stuff specifically about the mind / brain: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016wzs9 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016wzs9) I'm cautious about children. I've seen plenty of boys learn a long list of (for example) dinosaur names. Is this something I should try to avoid with my son, or should I encourage it, or should I just remain neutral? I have no idea. I do know that I want to encourage him to think about relationships between things, rather than just learning a list of names. (For example; "That tree is evergreen, which means it keeps its leaves all year round. It does that because [...]" rather than "That's a Leylandii".
- aes256 14y ago
  > I do know that I want to encourage him to think about relationships between things, rather than just learning a list of names. (For example; "That tree is evergreen, which means it keeps its leaves all year round. It does that because [...]" rather than "That's a Leylandii". I don't suppose there's any harm in loading your children up with trivial knowledge, but I would certainly put more effort into teaching them thinking skills than specific knowledge. These days, if you have the necessary thinking skills, the sum of human knowledge is within reaching distance. If you know how to research a subject, how to corroborate and verify the veracity of positive claims and theories presented to you, you can find out pretty much everything about anything in a matter of minutes. I suppose it's the old "give a man a fish" adage applied to knowledge.
  - jonhendry 14y ago
    "I don't suppose there's any harm in loading your children up with trivial knowledge, but I would certainly put more effort into teaching them thinking skills than specific knowledge." I find that kids are like sponges for details like names. They'll soak them up whether you're teaching them intentionally or not. Or if you're trying to get your kid to learn animals or stars or whatever, they'll be memorizing scores of baseball statistics, or Pokemon, or airplanes. Teach thinking skills; the trivia will take care of itself.
- opminion 14y ago
charonn0 14y ago
We are wrong more often than we are right, but the scientific method has proven itself a powerful error-correction tool.
smsm42 14y ago
>> Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong Now to which half does this fact belong?
reasonattlm 14y ago
The scientific method and the community of science that surrounds it is truly a powerful machine - able to take the worst aspects of human nature, sailing atop a river of garbage specked with half-wrong answers, and spin that mix into the gold of technology. It doesn't matter what your right to wrong to nonsense ratio is when it comes to deciphering the world; so long as you have the will to progress and your sifting mechanism is good enough, accumulating a whole pile of right is just a matter of time. The front line of science is a messy place; a mostly wrong messy place, as any of us who have spent time there know. A recent study claimed massive error rates across all scientific papers - which is not a surprise to scientists. The closer to the edge of knowledge you come, the more wrong you'll find - a great frothing sea of wrong, enthusiastically generated by scientists in search of nuggets of right. It's all part of the process, and you have to step back from the details in order to see where the process is taking you. In any complex field, and biotechnology and medicine are about as complex is it gets outside astrophysics, validating truth takes time. Scratch any unanswered question and it'll bleed papers and reviews, a dozen for any given position on the topic.
- maratd 14y ago
  > The front line of science is a messy place; a mostly wrong messy place Reading the article, the most interesting aspect was the concept of a "half-life" of knowledge. This, of course, applies not just to the front lines, but also to the rear guard. By definition, a new idea that proves to work well obsoletes an old one that didn't work quite as well.
lotharbot 14y ago
> "In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong.... As facts are made and remade with increasing speed, Arbesman is worried that most of us don’t keep up to date." It can take a lot longer than a half-century to catch up. For example, it's surprising how often I hear people talk about "exponential" population growth, which was the going theory in 1798 [0] but known to be inaccurate by 1838 [1]. I hear similarly out-of-date comments on topics ranging from evolution to Bible manuscripts with shocking regularity. People sometimes learn "facts" from trusted friends or preferred authority figures, who learned them the same way, going back generations without anybody thinking to double-check. I suspect the emotional cost of finding out a friend was wrong provides just enough friction to keep people from looking things up, even in a world with wikipedia and snopes at our fingertips. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_modeling_population_growth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...
- baddox 14y ago
  To be fair, a lot of laypeople use "exponential" to mean superlinear. Not to mention that the "logistic function" you cited is essentially exponential until it hits saturation.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- tshepang 14y ago
  Laziness seems a far simpler and more believable reason why people don't double-check, not the emotional cost of finding a friend was wrong... or did I miss something?
trustfundbaby 14y ago
Complete fantasy tangent here but ... Its amazing to me how much effort we as human beings put into memorizing and retaining 'factual' knowledge like this. Can you imagine how far we could go if all this knowledge could literally be loaded into our brains at an early age so that instead of basic arithmetic (for example) kids in elementary were already doing quantum physics and things of that nature. I know its far far away, but it really really fascinates me to think of the implications of just doing away with having to relearn "learned" things so that we could devote energies to far more advanced topics.
- itcmcgrath 14y ago
  Assuming that the act of learning doesn't 'grow' the brain in a meaningful way as part of the process. I think that's probably an assumption too far though.
  - ijl 14y ago
    When you learn, the myelin between the relevant neurons increases. The Talent Code discusses this at length, and argues that skill in something is a function of myelin strength.
ryguytilidie 14y ago
My first foray into science was working in a lab at NASA on an internship. The scientist I was working with came up with a hypothesis and instead of testing it in a scientific way, simply disregarded the information that didn't agree with her thesis and used the information that did. I'm obviously not saying all scientists do this, but the way she did it, and the complete lack of self awareness for what she was doing make me feel like it happens fairly often. I also feel like its a pretty good analogue for modern life. People seem less willing to discover the truth than they are to use facts that support the point they want to make while ignoring the inconvenient parts of the facts.
- richcollins 14y ago
  I experienced the same thing in my masters degree.
- nunb 14y ago
  discovery of the truth is in our self-interest, nobody else's. therefore, it is a more lonesome endeavour, and harder than subscribing to the pap fed to the masses. see my [other](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968390) comment. (edit: link, grammar &c.)
- splat 14y ago
  I think the way the scientific method is generally presented does not really accurately represent how science is really done. It's true that there are many scientists who more or less follow the scientific method to the letter. But I think it's more common that scientists individually don't follow the scientific method terribly closely. It's only scientists collectively that follow the scientific method. One scientist might come up with a hypothesis, never test it, but nevertheless believe it devoutly. But science progresses because other scientists are sceptical and test the hypothesis. It's in the first scientist's self-interest that the hypothesis is proven true, but it's generally more in other scientists' self-interest to prove the hypothesis false. Some of the greatest scientists of the 20th century closed their eyes to overwhelming evidence that their pet hypothesis was wrong. One of the classic examples was Geoffrey Burbidge (known best for showing that the heavy elements were created in stars and released into the universe in supernovae) who believed until the day he died that quasars were galactic objects.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I'd peg it at over 90%, depending on how your define terms. One of the difficult parts of being a teenager and young adult is that you learn the rhythm and gist of how things operate without actually learning how they operate. This is one of the reasons "being cool" is such a big deal at that age -- the idea is to learn to mimic and fit in with the rest of how society works, not actually to be able to manipulate it. Faking it is much more important than actually doing it. That's what everybody else is doing anyway. Somewhere in your 30s or 40s (perhaps sooner or later) you realize that much of life is like that: you don't really understand how a car works, only that most of the time you can get in it and go places. When it doesn't work, you take it to another person. She may also not understand what's wrong. But most all of the time she does. If she doesn't, she takes it to another person, and so on. You keep getting closer and closer to total understanding but you never reach 100%. That same pattern applies to medicine, advanced physics, and most everything else. When there's a billion areas of knowledge, even 99% knowledge leaves a helluva lot of holes. There's this surface layer of generalities and half-truths that work so often that it's just not worth diving down into the details on everything else. On top of that, other people are very happy to share their own generalizations and heuristics, so we're kind of operating in a rumor-of-a-rumor mode. The vast majority of the time it doesn't matter, but sometimes, like when you ask questions about how startups work and most of your surrounding culture gives you bad answers, it does. Most of life isn't a geometric proof built on the linear progress of science; it's a bunch of heuristics strewn together to make something practical that you can use. What we "know" is a product of generalizations and communications about half-truths from the environment we're in. This is one reason why it's so critical to spend a lot of time challenging the things you think you know, especially in areas that make a big difference to you personally. It also means that you must accept a deep and abiding peacefulness in not knowing very much at all about most of the stuff you actually work with in your day-to-day life.
- NeilRShah 14y ago
  This was a fantastic insight. Thanks for writing.
- Jun8 14y ago
  This is a great point. Another good example is the "linguistic division of labor", put forth by Putnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam) wherein it is proposed that language can function (i.e. words have meaning) because people assume there's a person (or people) that can fix the meaning of a certain term. An example: When it was announced in 2011 that researchers have found that the electron was (nearly) a perfect sphere, I had no idea what "perfect sphere" meant in this context, so I appealed to the experts on on PE (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-the-electron-is-a-near-perfect-sphere http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-i...).
jonhendry 14y ago
Several of these are things that were the good-faith best effort at the time based on available knowledge and/or technology. (DNA, cold-blooded dinosaurs, star size limits, etc). I don't much like the depiction of scientific knowledge as "manufactured facts".
jonhendry 14y ago
Given the source, I can't help but suspect there's an underlying desire to willfully misunderstand how science works in order to dismiss all research that could be used to support or justify regulation. Hey, you never know, maybe in ten years we'll find out tobacco use doesn't cause cancer. Better remove all the restrictions that have been placed on tobacco until we're certain.
- splat 14y ago
  I would agree that having a healthy scepticism of those in authority is a very fundamental part of libertarian philosophy. But if you find the author's political inclinations objectionable you can read the original book by Samuel Arbesman that Ronald Bailey based his article on.
wissler 14y ago
It's not that widely held bogus views turn out to be wrong by accident or from some congenital defect in human reasoning. Issac Newton's physics, while not applying to all possible contexts, still holds as correct over a vast range, and that's because it's properly identifying an aspect of Nature's behavior, and it did so due to Newton's extreme methodological diligence. Some of these other "facts" that get overturned likely did not adhere to Newton's Rules of Reasoning, or had some other flaw that led people to jump to conclusions prematurely. Of course, it's exceedingly unpopular to point out that we should learn why we make mistakes and then strive to not make them by scrutinizing the source of the error and adopting better methods. Most people are amenable to having their mistakes pointed out, but are extremely offended if you try to point out that the way they are arriving at conclusions is mistaken. It's as if most people don't want to believe that yes, there is a difference between wisdom and foolishness, and instead want to believe that the highest form of foolishness is in fact to believe in wisdom.
nunb 14y ago
I was telling somebody my theory on this the other day, and I thought I might share it here. Basically information is power. Due to informational asymmetry[1] being exploitable via economic, political and other forms of power, it is almost always in somebody else's interest that you be misinformed. Therefore the person with the most to lose (and the person with the best interest in being informed) is you. And instead of seeking out the forms of information that empower us, we fritter away our attentions on trivialities and pop culture (yes, including programming pop culture). A good example of a prophet who tries to steer us programmers the right way is Kalzumeus, imho. Part of the reason we fritter away our time is that it is simply easier to consume the mass-delusion, because the search for truth can be fairly lonesome (since you are the only interested party). Under the circumstances outlined above, it is no wonder that most of what we believe may be false, and part of a larger (self-bootstrapping) conspiracy to keep us in the dark (cue ominous music, break out the tin-foil hats). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
pinaceae 14y ago
The problem is the word "fact". Somehow this is now perceived as an eternal truth, rather than a statement which is true right now, but might change soon. Some of the examples point this out nicely, let's take the 10 biggest cities in the US. Isn't it obvious that this "fact" only works with a timestamp attached to it? The 10 biggest cities in 1990? Maybe this is more about the language in science, textbooks and science journalism. A little more precision would make the real facts stand out better.
yarrel 14y ago
Including this one.
edtechdev 14y ago
This is a naive view, with inaccuracies in at least one of the "facts" it claims to be wrong. It's what I would call a level 2 grad student view. Level 1 - you believe every research article you read and everything your advisors tell you, and you glom onto one area or viewpoint in particular without considering alternatives. Level 2 - you reject everything that isn't in line with your viewpoint. I've seen professors stuck at level 1 and 2. Level 3 - you start to see what's 'right' and 'wrong' (and more useful or less useful) about everything you learn. Consider this "fact" from the article, which has no citation whatsoever: "Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes." Which the author claims is "wrong." Actually the evidence suggests that it is right, although the effect of class size alone may be small. And it is not just a matter of how much an effect reducing class size has on learning, but also in what circumstances and to what extent. And even with these "facts", it doesn't mean that big classes are inherently always "bad" and useless - MOOCs are still quite useful even though 90% of students don't finish them. And large class lectures actually could be made more effective if given after (not before) a lab or other interactive learning activity. But a wealth of research has showed how one on one tutoring is generally the most effective method of teaching (which also directly contradicts the author's assertion that reducing class size has no effect). http://www.districtadministration.com/article/does-class-size-really-matter http://www.districtadministration.com/article/does-class-siz... http://www.ppta.org.nz/index.php/-issues-in-education/class-size?start=4 http://www.ppta.org.nz/index.php/-issues-in-education/class-...
MrJagil 14y ago
These days, QI is my favourite TV show for exactly these reasons. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=qi&page=&utm_source=opensearch http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=qi&page=&#38...
MrJagil 14y ago
These days, QI is my favourite TV show for exactly these reasons. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=qi&page=&utm_source=opensearch http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=qi&page=&#38...
tgb 14y ago
Please, please don't listen to this article! The author is far worse than the processes he is demeaning. This article gives no reason whatsoever to believe the title. The main argument seems to be "we learn lots of new things, therefore most of what you previously learned is wrong." This has numerous and obvious problems. We can easily be learning new facts about things that were previously not considered or not known. Most facts that humans know are not scientific facts but rather personal. The large majority of people don't know very much about recent experimental results and only hear about ones after they have been so long and well-established that there is little chance they are significantly wrong. A fact can be 'wrong' while still being nearly right. That the list of ten largest cities in the US has changed just means that the person only knew the list of ten largest cities at the time that they learned it. If 'half of our facts were wrong' is taken at face value, then our truth-determining process is no better than flipping a coin. Do you think we could engineer bridges, build computers, get to the moon, sequence the human genome, or write software if every time we didn't know something we just asked it as a yes-no question and flipped a coin? So as much as I want to support skepticism and free-thinking or whatever this article is aiming at, this article is wrong and bad. I have the means to go out and determine true facts and I do this routinely.
samspot 14y ago
Then article speaks about the half life of truth, but that is really just how long it takes us to find out it was never true in the first place. But even that is assuming that in 100 more years we don't find out it was actually correct. We need to make a distinction between truth that becomes outdated and facts that were never true in the first place. So what percentage of current scientific conclusions are likely to be wrong?

171 points by tokenadult 14y ago

mikeash 14y ago

Now I know that half the facts I know are probably wrong. But which half is that fact in?

betelnut 14y ago
That reminds me of the old joke about medical school: half the things you learn are wrong, and half you forget - you just have to hope it's the same half.

ams6110 14y ago

I guess I have a small problem with this use of the word "fact" which to me is something provably true. What this piece is actually saying is that half of scientific theory is probably wrong.

3825 14y ago
I have a more than small problem with the use of the phrase scientific theory[1] which to me is something provable. >A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.[2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory [2]: http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/evolution/qanda.shtml http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/evolution/qanda.shtml
- jonhendry 14y ago
  I'm not sure how you'd prove the theory that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, short of taking the rectal temp of a Stegosaur. But you could falsify the theory by finding characteristics incompatible with being exothermic. Finding the dinosaurs with feathers and other characteristics of the (warm-blooded) birds probably helped, too. Some of the "incorrect facts" are really theories that were substantiated to the best degree possible at the time, and no falsifying evidence existed at the time. I suspect some, like "non-functional junk DNA", is a case of scientific qualifiers being ignored in the mainstream media and forgotten. Humans like "facts", but we inevitably drop the error bars that originally accompanied each new "fact".
greenyoda 14y ago
Only in mathematics are things provably true. In science, things are considered true based on the best theories and experimental evidence we have so far, and our observational abilities increase as technology gets better over time. For example, Newtonian mechanics was considered "true" for centuries, until it was replaced by relativistic mechanics. In the 18th century, we just didn't have the equipment to measure phenomena at quantum scales; now we do. As we observe the world in greater detail, we find that things that seemed to be true before are now false. That's the best that science can do.
- Herring 14y ago
  Adding to this, maybe "true" is a bit of a loaded word. Newtonian mechanics works just as well today as it ever did. I prefer to think of it in terms of usefulness. 18th century knowledge is like a Pentium 3 that we just don't want anymore.
- sea6ear 14y ago
  Actually, I'd say that in mathematics, things are provably true given that the initial assumptions are true. However, mathematics does not so far as I know deal with the truth of those initial assumptions (axioms), it simply accepts them as true. Where this gets interesting is that you can say, what if this axiom was not true? Let's assume it's not. And then possibly come up with a whole new system of mathematics (like non-euclidean geometry) which may turn out to have actual use in previously unsolvable problems.
  - lotharbot 14y ago
    I think it's better to conceive of mathematical axioms as being part of mathematical system X or not, rather than as true or false. That is, they're not self-evident or universal or true according to some external standard, they're merely postulated as properties of a given mathematical structure. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom#Non-logical_axioms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom#Non-logical_axioms
    - sea6ear 14y ago
smsm42 14y ago
Depending on meaning of "wrong". If it means that there will be facts that are not accounted for by current version of certain theory - then it's probably true for most of them. If it means that our current interpretation of certain facts is completely incorrect - such as we think X is caused by Y, but in fact X is caused by Z which has zero correlation and no causal links with Y - I would be very surprised if it turned out like this for half of the established theories. Though for those that are just being developed probably much more than half of them will be wrong in this sense. I guess it also depends on the field - I'd say it's unlikely we'd have some overwhelming change in classical mechanics, but if you talk about something like biology or neurophysiology - there are a lot of things that are not clear, so it is entirely possible that our understanding, for example, of how addiction works - would be radically different in 20 years.

greenyoda 14y ago

The article says: In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” If Ioannidis' findings apply to areas of science other than biomedical research (where there is also competition, pressure to publish, conflict of interest, etc.), then most scientific knowledge is already false at the time that it's published; you don't have to wait 45 years for it to become false like this article claims. Here are some references to Ioannidis' work: - The cited PLoS paper (2005): http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal... - A less technical article in The Atlantic: "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" (2010): http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam... Edit: Corrected spelling of Ioannidis' name; it's misspelled in the article.

rustynails 14y ago

Half of the facts are wrong may be a little steep. Do we breathe air? Does it contain oxygen? I'm sure some enthusiast will give me the composition of air (inc some stat on nitrogen:). There are many trivial facts that we know with confidence. However, in a recent conversation with my mother, I asked her about a talking donkey in the bible. she confirmed the reference saying "the lord works in mysterious ways" and "donkeys could talk back then". Maybe there is some truth that 1/2 of our facts are wrong... If you skip religion, I view my mother as a very clever woman who is very astute with business. She was indoctrinated at a young age.

georgemcbay 14y ago
Religion is everywhere, even where it is specifically disclaimed (see also: The Singularity). We're hardwired for it.
- Peaker 14y ago
  Are you claiming that the idea that AI will eventually be smarter than humans and thus render human work mostly useless, a religious idea?
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    No, I'm claiming that the idea that progress toward this can be predicted and that the event will occur around 2045 is a religious idea. Like all of the best religious ideas, it is one that came about by a man faced with his own mortality. On a side note, and this is opening a huge philosophical can of worms, I'm not convinced of the utility in merging our intelligence to machine intelligence in such a scenario, either from the point of view of overall utility (what do they gain from our meeker intelligence?) or from the point of view of our own "existence" actually being near-immortalized. Stated simply, if you could make a perfect copy of my brain into a 20 year old clone of myself (I'm 39) and that clone were created such that it didn't have to worry about issues like telomere shortening or any of the other processes theorized to cause issues for clones, but after the process was completed the original copy of me would be terminated, I wouldn't take that deal and I doubt many other people would either regardless of how they feel about the theoretical ability to duplicate an exact copy of their own consciousness. Ultimately, the copy of me that is me wants to continue on but cannot. I will die.

monochromatic 14y ago

> Arbesman notes that “the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of about seven and a half years.” This suggests that brain/computer linkages will one day be possible. What?

jonhendry 14y ago
Current brain-computer interfaces have 96 needle-like electrodes, so can interface with 96 neurons. That produces an enormous amount of data at the sampling rates used, but is already being used for things like controlling robot arms. In 7.5 years, perhaps it'll be up to 192 neurons, if the connected computers and processors can keep up with the data flow. 7.5 years after that, maybe it'll be up to 384. Etc.

ealloc 14y ago

> Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk This topic is still very controversial and I don't think the article should be citing it in this context. It was only a few months ago that the ENCODE project released its first results claiming that 80% of the genome is "functional", and many scientists have noted that their definition of "functional" is much too broad. It includes any piece of DNA that becomes bound to protein at some time, while it is known that many proteins bind nonspecifically.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Yup. Most of the DNA is not directly involved in coding proteins but we've been finding out more and more of how DNA works. Significant parts of DNA are there merely to help maintain chemical and solubility properties so that the DNA coils correctly. And far more of it is there for gene regulation.
nn2 14y ago
Yes I noticed that too and immediately started to godel: "how many of the wrongnesses the author believes are wrong are really right ..."
jonhendry 14y ago
The upshot of the article is that little should ever be published unless you have perfect information and understanding about the subject. No publishing on DNA until we know everything, etc.

javajosh 14y ago

Obligatory xkcd(s): http://xkcd.com/843/ http://xkcd.com/843/ (Misconceptions) http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/ (Ten Thousand) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions (The link referred to in 'Misconceptions') EDIT: Darnit.

Centigonal 14y ago
Your links are swapped! Is that a typo or humor about facts being wrong?

hypersoar 14y ago

I try to keep the question "What do you know, and how do you think you know it?" in my head as much as possible (I think I picked it up from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality). I mentally recite it a lot, often without really thinking about it. Every once in a while, though, the thought catches me as I'm recalling some long-known fact, and I'll realize that I don't have a good reason to believe it. Many of these are things I was told long ago by friends/parents/family/teachers and stored away, their sources forgotten. The maxim has proved useful in unlearning things I was too young to disbelieve when I learned them.

31reasons 14y ago
I know its good to have a healthy self doubt but this makes dumb people look more confident (who don't revise their facts) than the smart people who are too cautious with their knowledge. This is the reasons most dumb people end up being the boss of the smart people.

chernevik 14y ago

Re: The title: Not for me, baby. I haven't many "facts", and most of those are math or avowed articles of faith. I learned a long time ago to replace "is" with "I have read that" or "I have heard". My opinions are wrong all the time -- but not for long.

sold 14y ago

A counterpoint - The Relativity of Wrong, famous essay by Asimov. http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

DanBC 14y ago

An interesting BBC Radio Four programme about this kind of stuff specifically about the mind / brain: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016wzs9 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016wzs9) I'm cautious about children. I've seen plenty of boys learn a long list of (for example) dinosaur names. Is this something I should try to avoid with my son, or should I encourage it, or should I just remain neutral? I have no idea. I do know that I want to encourage him to think about relationships between things, rather than just learning a list of names. (For example; "That tree is evergreen, which means it keeps its leaves all year round. It does that because [...]" rather than "That's a Leylandii".

aes256 14y ago
> I do know that I want to encourage him to think about relationships between things, rather than just learning a list of names. (For example; "That tree is evergreen, which means it keeps its leaves all year round. It does that because [...]" rather than "That's a Leylandii". I don't suppose there's any harm in loading your children up with trivial knowledge, but I would certainly put more effort into teaching them thinking skills than specific knowledge. These days, if you have the necessary thinking skills, the sum of human knowledge is within reaching distance. If you know how to research a subject, how to corroborate and verify the veracity of positive claims and theories presented to you, you can find out pretty much everything about anything in a matter of minutes. I suppose it's the old "give a man a fish" adage applied to knowledge.
- jonhendry 14y ago
  "I don't suppose there's any harm in loading your children up with trivial knowledge, but I would certainly put more effort into teaching them thinking skills than specific knowledge." I find that kids are like sponges for details like names. They'll soak them up whether you're teaching them intentionally or not. Or if you're trying to get your kid to learn animals or stars or whatever, they'll be memorizing scores of baseball statistics, or Pokemon, or airplanes. Teach thinking skills; the trivia will take care of itself.
opminion 14y ago

charonn0 14y ago

We are wrong more often than we are right, but the scientific method has proven itself a powerful error-correction tool.

smsm42 14y ago

>> Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong Now to which half does this fact belong?

reasonattlm 14y ago

The scientific method and the community of science that surrounds it is truly a powerful machine - able to take the worst aspects of human nature, sailing atop a river of garbage specked with half-wrong answers, and spin that mix into the gold of technology. It doesn't matter what your right to wrong to nonsense ratio is when it comes to deciphering the world; so long as you have the will to progress and your sifting mechanism is good enough, accumulating a whole pile of right is just a matter of time. The front line of science is a messy place; a mostly wrong messy place, as any of us who have spent time there know. A recent study claimed massive error rates across all scientific papers - which is not a surprise to scientists. The closer to the edge of knowledge you come, the more wrong you'll find - a great frothing sea of wrong, enthusiastically generated by scientists in search of nuggets of right. It's all part of the process, and you have to step back from the details in order to see where the process is taking you. In any complex field, and biotechnology and medicine are about as complex is it gets outside astrophysics, validating truth takes time. Scratch any unanswered question and it'll bleed papers and reviews, a dozen for any given position on the topic.

maratd 14y ago
> The front line of science is a messy place; a mostly wrong messy place Reading the article, the most interesting aspect was the concept of a "half-life" of knowledge. This, of course, applies not just to the front lines, but also to the rear guard. By definition, a new idea that proves to work well obsoletes an old one that didn't work quite as well.

lotharbot 14y ago

> "In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong.... As facts are made and remade with increasing speed, Arbesman is worried that most of us don’t keep up to date." It can take a lot longer than a half-century to catch up. For example, it's surprising how often I hear people talk about "exponential" population growth, which was the going theory in 1798 [0] but known to be inaccurate by 1838 [1]. I hear similarly out-of-date comments on topics ranging from evolution to Bible manuscripts with shocking regularity. People sometimes learn "facts" from trusted friends or preferred authority figures, who learned them the same way, going back generations without anybody thinking to double-check. I suspect the emotional cost of finding out a friend was wrong provides just enough friction to keep people from looking things up, even in a world with wikipedia and snopes at our fingertips. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_modeling_population_growth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...

baddox 14y ago
To be fair, a lot of laypeople use "exponential" to mean superlinear. Not to mention that the "logistic function" you cited is essentially exponential until it hits saturation.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tshepang 14y ago
Laziness seems a far simpler and more believable reason why people don't double-check, not the emotional cost of finding a friend was wrong... or did I miss something?

trustfundbaby 14y ago

Complete fantasy tangent here but ... Its amazing to me how much effort we as human beings put into memorizing and retaining 'factual' knowledge like this. Can you imagine how far we could go if all this knowledge could literally be loaded into our brains at an early age so that instead of basic arithmetic (for example) kids in elementary were already doing quantum physics and things of that nature. I know its far far away, but it really really fascinates me to think of the implications of just doing away with having to relearn "learned" things so that we could devote energies to far more advanced topics.

itcmcgrath 14y ago
Assuming that the act of learning doesn't 'grow' the brain in a meaningful way as part of the process. I think that's probably an assumption too far though.
- ijl 14y ago
  When you learn, the myelin between the relevant neurons increases. The Talent Code discusses this at length, and argues that skill in something is a function of myelin strength.

ryguytilidie 14y ago

My first foray into science was working in a lab at NASA on an internship. The scientist I was working with came up with a hypothesis and instead of testing it in a scientific way, simply disregarded the information that didn't agree with her thesis and used the information that did. I'm obviously not saying all scientists do this, but the way she did it, and the complete lack of self awareness for what she was doing make me feel like it happens fairly often. I also feel like its a pretty good analogue for modern life. People seem less willing to discover the truth than they are to use facts that support the point they want to make while ignoring the inconvenient parts of the facts.

richcollins 14y ago
I experienced the same thing in my masters degree.
nunb 14y ago
discovery of the truth is in our self-interest, nobody else's. therefore, it is a more lonesome endeavour, and harder than subscribing to the pap fed to the masses. see my [other](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968390) comment. (edit: link, grammar &c.)
splat 14y ago
I think the way the scientific method is generally presented does not really accurately represent how science is really done. It's true that there are many scientists who more or less follow the scientific method to the letter. But I think it's more common that scientists individually don't follow the scientific method terribly closely. It's only scientists collectively that follow the scientific method. One scientist might come up with a hypothesis, never test it, but nevertheless believe it devoutly. But science progresses because other scientists are sceptical and test the hypothesis. It's in the first scientist's self-interest that the hypothesis is proven true, but it's generally more in other scientists' self-interest to prove the hypothesis false. Some of the greatest scientists of the 20th century closed their eyes to overwhelming evidence that their pet hypothesis was wrong. One of the classic examples was Geoffrey Burbidge (known best for showing that the heavy elements were created in stars and released into the universe in supernovae) who believed until the day he died that quasars were galactic objects.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

I'd peg it at over 90%, depending on how your define terms. One of the difficult parts of being a teenager and young adult is that you learn the rhythm and gist of how things operate without actually learning how they operate. This is one of the reasons "being cool" is such a big deal at that age -- the idea is to learn to mimic and fit in with the rest of how society works, not actually to be able to manipulate it. Faking it is much more important than actually doing it. That's what everybody else is doing anyway. Somewhere in your 30s or 40s (perhaps sooner or later) you realize that much of life is like that: you don't really understand how a car works, only that most of the time you can get in it and go places. When it doesn't work, you take it to another person. She may also not understand what's wrong. But most all of the time she does. If she doesn't, she takes it to another person, and so on. You keep getting closer and closer to total understanding but you never reach 100%. That same pattern applies to medicine, advanced physics, and most everything else. When there's a billion areas of knowledge, even 99% knowledge leaves a helluva lot of holes. There's this surface layer of generalities and half-truths that work so often that it's just not worth diving down into the details on everything else. On top of that, other people are very happy to share their own generalizations and heuristics, so we're kind of operating in a rumor-of-a-rumor mode. The vast majority of the time it doesn't matter, but sometimes, like when you ask questions about how startups work and most of your surrounding culture gives you bad answers, it does. Most of life isn't a geometric proof built on the linear progress of science; it's a bunch of heuristics strewn together to make something practical that you can use. What we "know" is a product of generalizations and communications about half-truths from the environment we're in. This is one reason why it's so critical to spend a lot of time challenging the things you think you know, especially in areas that make a big difference to you personally. It also means that you must accept a deep and abiding peacefulness in not knowing very much at all about most of the stuff you actually work with in your day-to-day life.

NeilRShah 14y ago
This was a fantastic insight. Thanks for writing.
Jun8 14y ago
This is a great point. Another good example is the "linguistic division of labor", put forth by Putnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam) wherein it is proposed that language can function (i.e. words have meaning) because people assume there's a person (or people) that can fix the meaning of a certain term. An example: When it was announced in 2011 that researchers have found that the electron was (nearly) a perfect sphere, I had no idea what "perfect sphere" meant in this context, so I appealed to the experts on on PE (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-the-electron-is-a-near-perfect-sphere http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-i...).

jonhendry 14y ago

Several of these are things that were the good-faith best effort at the time based on available knowledge and/or technology. (DNA, cold-blooded dinosaurs, star size limits, etc). I don't much like the depiction of scientific knowledge as "manufactured facts".

jonhendry 14y ago

Given the source, I can't help but suspect there's an underlying desire to willfully misunderstand how science works in order to dismiss all research that could be used to support or justify regulation. Hey, you never know, maybe in ten years we'll find out tobacco use doesn't cause cancer. Better remove all the restrictions that have been placed on tobacco until we're certain.

splat 14y ago
I would agree that having a healthy scepticism of those in authority is a very fundamental part of libertarian philosophy. But if you find the author's political inclinations objectionable you can read the original book by Samuel Arbesman that Ronald Bailey based his article on.

wissler 14y ago

It's not that widely held bogus views turn out to be wrong by accident or from some congenital defect in human reasoning. Issac Newton's physics, while not applying to all possible contexts, still holds as correct over a vast range, and that's because it's properly identifying an aspect of Nature's behavior, and it did so due to Newton's extreme methodological diligence. Some of these other "facts" that get overturned likely did not adhere to Newton's Rules of Reasoning, or had some other flaw that led people to jump to conclusions prematurely. Of course, it's exceedingly unpopular to point out that we should learn why we make mistakes and then strive to not make them by scrutinizing the source of the error and adopting better methods. Most people are amenable to having their mistakes pointed out, but are extremely offended if you try to point out that the way they are arriving at conclusions is mistaken. It's as if most people don't want to believe that yes, there is a difference between wisdom and foolishness, and instead want to believe that the highest form of foolishness is in fact to believe in wisdom.

nunb 14y ago

I was telling somebody my theory on this the other day, and I thought I might share it here. Basically information is power. Due to informational asymmetry[1] being exploitable via economic, political and other forms of power, it is almost always in somebody else's interest that you be misinformed. Therefore the person with the most to lose (and the person with the best interest in being informed) is you. And instead of seeking out the forms of information that empower us, we fritter away our attentions on trivialities and pop culture (yes, including programming pop culture). A good example of a prophet who tries to steer us programmers the right way is Kalzumeus, imho. Part of the reason we fritter away our time is that it is simply easier to consume the mass-delusion, because the search for truth can be fairly lonesome (since you are the only interested party). Under the circumstances outlined above, it is no wonder that most of what we believe may be false, and part of a larger (self-bootstrapping) conspiracy to keep us in the dark (cue ominous music, break out the tin-foil hats). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

pinaceae 14y ago

The problem is the word "fact". Somehow this is now perceived as an eternal truth, rather than a statement which is true right now, but might change soon. Some of the examples point this out nicely, let's take the 10 biggest cities in the US. Isn't it obvious that this "fact" only works with a timestamp attached to it? The 10 biggest cities in 1990? Maybe this is more about the language in science, textbooks and science journalism. A little more precision would make the real facts stand out better.

yarrel 14y ago

Including this one.

edtechdev 14y ago

This is a naive view, with inaccuracies in at least one of the "facts" it claims to be wrong. It's what I would call a level 2 grad student view. Level 1 - you believe every research article you read and everything your advisors tell you, and you glom onto one area or viewpoint in particular without considering alternatives. Level 2 - you reject everything that isn't in line with your viewpoint. I've seen professors stuck at level 1 and 2. Level 3 - you start to see what's 'right' and 'wrong' (and more useful or less useful) about everything you learn. Consider this "fact" from the article, which has no citation whatsoever: "Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes." Which the author claims is "wrong." Actually the evidence suggests that it is right, although the effect of class size alone may be small. And it is not just a matter of how much an effect reducing class size has on learning, but also in what circumstances and to what extent. And even with these "facts", it doesn't mean that big classes are inherently always "bad" and useless - MOOCs are still quite useful even though 90% of students don't finish them. And large class lectures actually could be made more effective if given after (not before) a lab or other interactive learning activity. But a wealth of research has showed how one on one tutoring is generally the most effective method of teaching (which also directly contradicts the author's assertion that reducing class size has no effect). http://www.districtadministration.com/article/does-class-size-really-matter http://www.districtadministration.com/article/does-class-siz... http://www.ppta.org.nz/index.php/-issues-in-education/class-size?start=4 http://www.ppta.org.nz/index.php/-issues-in-education/class-...

MrJagil 14y ago

These days, QI is my favourite TV show for exactly these reasons. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=qi&page=&utm_source=opensearch http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=qi&page=&#38...

MrJagil 14y ago

tgb 14y ago

Please, please don't listen to this article! The author is far worse than the processes he is demeaning. This article gives no reason whatsoever to believe the title. The main argument seems to be "we learn lots of new things, therefore most of what you previously learned is wrong." This has numerous and obvious problems. We can easily be learning new facts about things that were previously not considered or not known. Most facts that humans know are not scientific facts but rather personal. The large majority of people don't know very much about recent experimental results and only hear about ones after they have been so long and well-established that there is little chance they are significantly wrong. A fact can be 'wrong' while still being nearly right. That the list of ten largest cities in the US has changed just means that the person only knew the list of ten largest cities at the time that they learned it. If 'half of our facts were wrong' is taken at face value, then our truth-determining process is no better than flipping a coin. Do you think we could engineer bridges, build computers, get to the moon, sequence the human genome, or write software if every time we didn't know something we just asked it as a yes-no question and flipped a coin? So as much as I want to support skepticism and free-thinking or whatever this article is aiming at, this article is wrong and bad. I have the means to go out and determine true facts and I do this routinely.

samspot 14y ago

Then article speaks about the half life of truth, but that is really just how long it takes us to find out it was never true in the first place. But even that is assuming that in 100 more years we don't find out it was actually correct. We need to make a distinction between truth that becomes outdated and facts that were never true in the first place. So what percentage of current scientific conclusions are likely to be wrong?