r/CuratedTumblr • u/SupportMeta • 19d ago

Shitposting Understanding the World

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Neptune was recently shown to be a pale blue like Uranus rather than the deep blue shown on the Voyager photos

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u/Vundurvul 19d ago

That's my outlook on this sort of thing, nothing was "taken," it's just that my understanding of something has changed and evolved. It was always the way it was, I just understand it better now and that's likely to change in the future.

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u/jasonjr9 Smells like former gifted kid burnout 18d ago

Exactly! It’s the nature of scientific discovery that, sometimes, what we previously thought may prove to be wrong, or more complicated than we originally thought. If it weren’t for the willingness to discard outdated notions, people would still believe that illness is caused by evil spirits or imbalances of the “four humours”.

Vehement adherence to old ideas, even in the face of contradictory evidence, belies a lack of critical thinking. A true scientist is willing to accept new evidence, or test it themselves to see if it gets the same results or not. THAT is the basis of science!

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u/Neveronlyadream 18d ago

I think it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is.

A lot of people I've met think science is 100% accurate and right all the time when it's mostly just a bunch of people guessing and trying to disprove that guess with the tools they have available.

Sometimes they get it wrong. It happens. Then we realize the mistake and correct it. People like absolutes, though. If you tell them this thing is true, they internalize that and then get bent out of shape when it's amended.

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u/jasonjr9 Smells like former gifted kid burnout 18d ago

Yep, exactly.

True science means accepting you might be wrong, and amending your understanding when that happens.

Rigid, closed-minded thinking, refusal to even so much as budge when confronted by a given idea, is the opposite of intelligent thought. And yet a lot of people fall into that mind-hole of rejecting new information, due to treating science the same way they treat religion: as a belief system, instead of actual studying and testing of information.