But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman

Nowadays, people like to say: this is fact. Scientific fact.

But what if we’re wrong? …. Throughout history, we have been wrong on a myriad of issues, if we were to count them, they’ll just be a potpourri of unquantifiable mess.

In 1984, after the Civil War ended, a research shown that ‘Full Black people’ or ‘Mulattoes’ have weaker lungs, therefore were fit for the field and little else. Forced labor was to “vitalize the blood” of flawed black physiology, and slavery is what kept black bodies alive. This was a fact.

In 1906 skeptics in the European aviation community had converted the press to an anti-Wright brothers stance. French newspapers were especially openly derisive, calling them bluffeurs. The Wright brothers were told that to bring such a gigantic machinery into the air defies the law of physics. Well, that law of physics has its jaws dropped.

Well, you may think you are quite open minded and quite a skeptic….but…what about ideas that are so accepted and internalized that we’re not even in a position to question their fallibility? For example…..gravity?

The most skeptical person I know is also in the tank for gravity. The fact that most people aren’t physicists makes our adherence to gravity especially unyielding, since we don’t know anything about gravity that wasn’t “told” to us. Yet, my confidence in gravity is also unwavering, and this will be true until the day I die. If somebody throw my body outside of the window, my corpse’s rate of acceleration will be 9.8 meters per second squared.

But What If We’re Wrong is a book that illustrates most contemporary evidence is circumstantial, but we’re starting to behaving as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

Aristotle had argued that a drop rock fell to earth because the geocentric center of the universe was earth. His view exists unchallenged for almost two thousand years. Newton, history’s most meaningful mathematician, eventually watches an apocryphal apple fall from an apocryphal tree and inverts the entire human understanding of why the world works as it does. Two hundred years later, in 1907, Einstein radically changes our understanding of gravity: No longer is gravity just a force, but a warping of space and time. THIS TIME! We are finally right! …..or are we?

If mankind could believe something false was objectively true for two thousand years, why do we reflexively assume that our current understanding of anything will somehow be correct?

Klosterman believes that the answer is we can’t. We have no idea of what we don’t know, but at least we need to have the maturity to understand that our contemporary understanding of ANY phenomenon is NOT remotely complete. This is no brilliant insight, but it is remarkable how habitually this idea is ignored.

The modern problem is that reevaluating what we consider “true” or “facts” is becoming increasingly difficult. In a frame work where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to ask “What if”. Certainty can often be paralyzing. It locks us into paths that may not be preferable. The problem is never about finding what is right, but realizing oneself can be wrong even when proven right.