> Like, sure, sometimes you get popular nonsense like recovered memories or accidental fires can't be as hot as intentional fires or shaken-baby syndrome or bite-mark analysis. But a lot of times, everyone isn't wrong and you've just overlooked something critical or misdefined the problem.
The older I get, the more I find that everyone is wrong. It's fucking astounding how much stuff either was never actually checked, or is true only under very select circumstances with those caveats being widely ignored. For example at work right now we have been using a test for 40 years that was developed around the idea that our product absorbed air - chemical variation would lead to extreme differences in results and you can't retest an item for at least 24 hours because it will still be affected. Turns out that none of that was true, all the error we were getting was from temperature change, the items can be retested after 45 seconds. 40 years and no one took 30 minutes to verify this claim which costs us millions of dollars per year. And this is just the example from this past week. I've probably seen several hundred such cases of completely unjustified claims being treated as gospel truth.
I can't speak for the countless things I've never tested, but if nearly everything I do test is wrong, across numerous fields full of very intelligent people, it doesn't give me much confidence about everything else. We live in a world that values simplicity and confidence, not nuance and rigorous verification. I've gotten to the point where I don't trust anything without verification, not even my own past work.
The older I get, the more I find that everyone is wrong. It's fucking astounding how much stuff either was never actually checked, or is true only under very select circumstances with those caveats being widely ignored. For example at work right now we have been using a test for 40 years that was developed around the idea that our product absorbed air - chemical variation would lead to extreme differences in results and you can't retest an item for at least 24 hours because it will still be affected. Turns out that none of that was true, all the error we were getting was from temperature change, the items can be retested after 45 seconds. 40 years and no one took 30 minutes to verify this claim which costs us millions of dollars per year. And this is just the example from this past week. I've probably seen several hundred such cases of completely unjustified claims being treated as gospel truth.
I can't speak for the countless things I've never tested, but if nearly everything I do test is wrong, across numerous fields full of very intelligent people, it doesn't give me much confidence about everything else. We live in a world that values simplicity and confidence, not nuance and rigorous verification. I've gotten to the point where I don't trust anything without verification, not even my own past work.