Friday, January 21, 2011

I like this thought on differences of being wrong

One of the tricks in life is recognizing that much of what we "know" may not be completely correct.

This line from Dan Galvin's Thought For The Day mailing list does a great job of framing this thought:

----------
The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

... My answer to him was, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
----------


-Isaac Asimov (1920-1992),The Relativity of Wrong, Kensington Books, New York, 1996, p 226.

3 comments:

Bill Starr said...

This isn't really post-specific, but I didn't see a generic "Contact us" link so am leaving it here.

Good article, but while waiting (impatiently) three times for the page to load, I noticed that my browser's waiting for blogcarnival and homeschoolbuzz was resulting in page load times that might encourage some others to just give up and move on without reading the post.

Johnh said...

Of course, people who think that people used to think the world was flat are also wrong.

Henry Cate said...

Bill, I apologize for taking so long to respond.

I think there was a version of Firefox that had problems for a week or so, but then a new version came out.

For future reference you can get my email address from my blogger profile. There is a link to my profile, from my name at the top of the page.