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Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called "The Relativity of Wrong". (One of several links thereto.)

One thing Asimov says is, "... 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."

He then goes on to note that the Earth actually is flat, to a reasonable approximation, over short distances. He also notes several observations explained by the assumption that the Earth is (nearly) spherical but that are not explained by a flat Earth.

Are there really people who believe the International Space Station is all just faked? For what purpose? Not to mention other planets, Kepler's laws, Newton's laws, and GPS.

Google, initially honored the flag

That doesn't seem true either. All the documents I saw are unanimous in stating Google never honored the flag, even when they were petitioned to do so. And they only came out publicly about it last year.
So, if you can find any proof that Google used to honor DNT, but stopped doing so after it was enabled by default in IE, please post it.

At one point in history, more than 98% of scientists thought the earth was flat. Huzzah Galileo!

Actually it was long before Galileo that the flat-earth hypothesis was challenged. Aristotle, around 350 BC, summarized the weaknesses in this view that had accumulated up until then.

A flat-earth hypothesis is perfectly reasonable as long as you are dealing with a small local area. But as you travel longer distances, the Earth's curvature begins to matter. For more information, consider this famous essay by Isaac Asimov.

TL/DR: generally, new science does not invalidate old science, but instead shows where it is incomplete.

For example, check out the work of Moon Duchin and the Matrix Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts: http://sites.tufts.edu/gerryma... Chronicle of Higher Ed profile: https://www.chronicle.com/arti... And other mathematicians also: http://www.ams.org/publication...

It's "ferentis" in the Greenough edition. I could see "ferentes" being a variant reading though (much like "quidquid" in place of "quicquid"). Both -es and -is occur as accusative plurals for participles and adjectives of one ending.

I was alluding to Islam - it's not so much a religion of peace as a religion of surrender - Muslims surrender to Allah (Abdullah is literally slave of allah) and non Muslims surrender to the Muslims and accept second class status by paying the Jizya

Of course post Muhammad there have been multiple wars between Muslims

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And even now there is a Shia/Sunni split - even when the US troops were patrolling the streets of Iraq most of the Al Qaeda bombings in Iraq were against Shia targets, not US ones. And the biggest tension in the Middle East is not between Muslim states and Israel but between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia and their respective proxy forces.

Adam Smith also mentioned inequality. So does that make him a Marxist as well?

I don't know if he specifically mentioned the word "inequality" at any time, but his opinion on the subject isn't one of endorsement:

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

Yet there remains a broad consensus, even among scholars of the period, that [Adam] Smith was concerned by poverty but not by economic inequality itself. According to this view, Smith hoped to ensure that all members of society could satisfy their basic needs, but he was untroubled by relative differences in income and wealth.

Another source explains it in more detail:

http://as.tufts.edu/politicals...

Essentially, Smith didn't like extreme poverty, but beyond that he didn't see anything inherently wrong with income inequality, and in fact saw it as a required property of a flourishing economy. Virtually all capitalists hold this view.

Karl Marx advocated government ownership of the means of production, take by force from the capitalists, without compensation.

I'm well aware of this.

Please follow the link in TFA to the textbook, and see if you can find even a single passage that advocates anything even remotely comparable.

TFA specifically calls out issues of inequality, and Karl Marx is pretty much the first economist (even if he was a bad economist) to ever make an issue out of income inequality, which is also why he came up with his socioeconomic class system and the concept of class warfare.

Asimov expounded on that idea: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

The relativity of wrong

No flat map of the world is more or less accurate than any other.

No flat map of the world is perfectly accurate. But some are more accurate than others.

All of them are wrong.

Just because all are wrong doesn't mean that some aren't more wrong than others. There's a great Isaac Asimov essay on that subject: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

And the north hemisphere is distorted in exactly the same way that the south hemisphere is.

Even there, you're mostly wrong. Grab your dictionary and take a look at the Mercator maps (here, for example, or here): they very rarely have the equator in the middle. The reason they don't is that if the map goes all the way north to show Alaska and Scandanavia, then if they want equally far south, Antarctica becomes absolutely huge on the map.

Here's a good primer on the economics of climate change (costs and benefits) http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/...

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

Isaac Asimov has a great response to that old canard.

Antibacterials are antibiotics used to treat surfaces rather than being ingested. This article predates the ruling but the scientific explanation is still relevant. Note the following text:

Additional experiments found that some bacteria can combat triclosan and other biocides with export systems that could also pump out antibiotics. It was demonstrated that these triclosan-resistant mutants were also resistant to several antibiotics, specifically chloramphenicol, ampicillin, tetracycline and ciprofloxacin.

> why would I care about one lasting 90 years? Unless these life-extension therapies come through, it's not like I'm going to be around long enough for that to matter

The solution for that will be growing new teeth using stem cells.

http://now.tufts.edu/articles/...

Today's understanding of the universe will probably be ridiculed in the future and get compared to when everyone accepted that the world was flat or that the Sun orbited the Earth.

The relativity of wrong - Issac Asimov's reply to that old canard.

Isaac Newton was proven wrong, he was ignorant. Did anyone prove Trump wrong? Or is it just opinion that doesn't have scientific merit?

If you think Newton was ignorant you have a bad definition of ignorant.

Also, well, there's the well-known discussion about the relativity of wrong by Asimov.

If you (or GP) hasn't read it, it's worth it -- but basically, it would be more accurate to say that Newton's theory was "incomplete" given what he knew and had observed at the time. Nobody else in his era had better data, so he couldn't be called "ignorant" and really not even "wrong" in some sense. (That's why we still teach his physics to students -- it's really not absolutely "wrong," just an approximate understanding that's incomplete in special circumstances that most people don't encounter every day.)

Trump, on the other hand, utters known factual errors on a daily basis... and actually doesn't seem to care. When someone calls him on it, his reaction is usually either to deny he's wrong (with no evidence) or to act like a bully and insult the person who called him out. Either way, he epitomizes ignorance.

Scott Adams makes two great mistakes in that blog post: The first is that he blames science instead of industry for industry-led pseudoscientific disinformation campaigns (diet and tobacco specifically, and presumably also climate). He lays it all at the feet of science for failing to overpower these efforts with hardly a finger shaken at industry. He is saying that science has a credibility problem because of industry's lies. That's bullshit.

The second is that he fails to see that the wrongness of science is relative. Apparently until some extremely stringent rightness threshold is passed, science's answers are uselessly wrong, and telling people to cut down on fatty foods to prevent obesity was as wrong as telling them that they're fat because they're full of demons. That's also bullshit.

It's not a boolean variable. I have a BSc, so I'm more of a scientist than Sarah Palin, but I'm less of a scientist than a university science professor.

There's a relativity of science just like there's a relativity of wrong. http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

I think you need to read this, first of all: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

Actually, the earth is not round. It is more round than flat, but it is an oblate spheroid. You are showing off your high school education there...

Actually, the Earth is round. If you're going to claim that an oblate spheroid isn't round, then I'm going to claim that the sandcastle I built has taken the Earth from being an oblate spheroid to a sandcastle-surfaced oblate spheroid.

Somebody with a post-high school education can surely look up the definition of round: "shaped like or approximately like a sphere.". The Earth is approximately an oblate spheroid, and approximately a sphere.

The earth orbiting the sun is a tautology,

No it isn't. Seriously? People got burned at the stake over this.

Okay, it's disputed whether they were burned over this, whether the most prominent proponents just *happened* to get burned at the stake for unrelated reasons, but still.

that is the planets orbit the sun, and that defines the word orbit

For it to be a tautology, Earth would have to be, by definition, a planet. But we Earthlings concluded that Earth is a planet because the Earth orbits the sun.

Note though that we say the Earth orbits the Sun because that's a much simpler model than epicycles, but you *can* come up with an entirely consistent set of orbital mechanics where the Earth is defined to contain the center of the solar system. It's just not worth doing, so we say prefer to say the Earth orbits the sun. Planets are defined in the sense that is most convenient, without all the epicycles.

If you mean that the earth revolves around the sun as opposed to the sun revolving around the earth, you are describing a physical fact, not a scientific one.

Meaningless. Physics is science. Physical facts are scientific facts.

Science defines the law of gravity, the application of science only deduces that the earth revolves around the sun.

I don't understand the use of the word "only" in that sentence, but regardless, you seem to be contradicting yourself.

Space time can be curved AS FAR AS WE KNOW.

That's what SCIENCE IS.

Your statement is very similar to the statements made by Newtonian physicists.

So...correct?

You have to realize, if there's something deeper than General Relativity (and there is, because it's not fully unified with Quantum Mechanics, at least not in a settled way), it has to converge to the same results as General Relativity, within the very small margins of error we have, for every test we've ever had of General Relativity. The same as General Relativity converges on Newtonian Physics. Newtonian Physics is correct, so long as you aren't dealing with quantum-scale things or situations where space-time's curvature comes into play.

We might learn tomorrow that this only appears to be the case and there is some other, deeper fundamental behavior.

Yep. But the ground doesn't cease to be flat as far as the eye can see when we discover that the round-Earth model is the best explanation for why you can walk due east from a given point and never head West, and ultimately end up back where you started.

Curved space-time is the difference between General Relativity and Newtonian Physics, and the difference is there.

This is why we have theories about everything, instead of laws, because even Newtons laws have caveats thanks to our understanding of general relativity.

No, it's not. Theory doesn't mean a law we aren't sure of. It's not a hierarchy. The difference is somewhat fuzzy but as a rule of thumb, if you see a mathematical statement with an equals sign, it's a law. If

As for Flamma, its latin and is a verb there. Go ask them.

No, "flamma" is not a verb. Flamma is a noun, meaning a "blazing fire." Flammo/flammare is a verb. (Well, technically I suppose "flamma" could be an imperative of the verb flammo -- "Be on fire, you heathen!" -- but the normal dictionary entry for the verb is under flammo or flammare.)

There is a fairly clear reason for why both these words carry the same meaning: the prefix in- does not always function as a negative prefix.

Sometimes (and this is one of those times) it serves as an intensifier. Itâ(TM)s fairly obvious how this could lead to problems.

That's not quite right. "In-" is NOT an intensifer. It's derived from the Latin prefix "in" which means "into" or sometimes "on/upon." Hence, in Latin "inflammare" means "to set INTO flames" or "to light on fire," whereas "flammare" simply means "to burn."

(For comparison, think of a word like "intimidate" -- it doesn't mean "more timid." It means to MAKE fearful, to force someone INTO timidity.)

This distinction hasn't really carried over into English in the case of flammable/inflammable, especially since the fire prevention folks started using "flammable" to mean "easily set on fire," which would be a better fit to "inflammable." (If we follow the Latin origin, "flammable" would be better suited to mean, "capable of being burned" (at all).)

Surprisingly, both flammable and inflammable coexisted peacefully in English for hundreds of years before anyone decided to do something about it.

It's not exactly surprising if you know anything about Latin or the history of English. As I just noted, most such pairs actually meant different things. And if you want to see real confusion, read the etymology page for "in-" at the link above. Centuries ago, you had examples like "implume" which mean "to put feathers on" (as in "tar and feathering" or something) from the "in-" = "into" meaning. But "implumed" generally meant "unfeathered," from the "in-" = "not" meaning. THAT was confusing since the same word meant two different things.

But in most cases "in-" was either used in one sense or the other, and when it was used to mean "into," it was generally clearly distinct in meaning from the form without the prefix. (E.g., note that "implume" didn't simply mean "feathered" -- it meant to ADD or put INTO feathers.) I think it's really the fire prevention folks who should be blamed on the confusion, since they took the word "flammable" (which was never popular, never had a clear meaning, and was basically obsolete in the early 1900s) and started using it commonly to mean something that "inflammable" properly should mean.

As for Flamma, its latin and is a verb there. Go ask them.

No, "flamma" is not a verb. Flamma is a noun, meaning a "blazing fire." Flammo/flammare is a verb. (Well, technically I suppose "flamma" could be an imperative of the verb flammo -- "Be on fire, you heathen!" -- but the normal dictionary entry for the verb is under flammo or flammare.)

There is a fairly clear reason for why both these words carry the same meaning: the prefix in- does not always function as a negative prefix.

Sometimes (and this is one of those times) it serves as an intensifier. Itâ(TM)s fairly obvious how this could lead to problems.

That's not quite right. "In-" is NOT an intensifer. It's derived from the Latin prefix "in" which means "into" or sometimes "on/upon." Hence, in Latin "inflammare" means "to set INTO flames" or "to light on fire," whereas "flammare" simply means "to burn."

(For comparison, think of a word like "intimidate" -- it doesn't mean "more timid." It means to MAKE fearful, to force someone INTO timidity.)

This distinction hasn't really carried over into English in the case of flammable/inflammable, especially since the fire prevention folks started using "flammable" to mean "easily set on fire," which would be a better fit to "inflammable." (If we follow the Latin origin, "flammable" would be better suited to mean, "capable of being burned" (at all).)

Surprisingly, both flammable and inflammable coexisted peacefully in English for hundreds of years before anyone decided to do something about it.

It's not exactly surprising if you know anything about Latin or the history of English. As I just noted, most such pairs actually meant different things. And if you want to see real confusion, read the etymology page for "in-" at the link above. Centuries ago, you had examples like "implume" which mean "to put feathers on" (as in "tar and feathering" or something) from the "in-" = "into" meaning. But "implumed" generally meant "unfeathered," from the "in-" = "not" meaning. THAT was confusing since the same word meant two different things.

But in most cases "in-" was either used in one sense or the other, and when it was used to mean "into," it was generally clearly distinct in meaning from the form without the prefix. (E.g., note that "implume" didn't simply mean "feathered" -- it meant to ADD or put INTO feathers.) I think it's really the fire prevention folks who should be blamed on the confusion, since they took the word "flammable" (which was never popular, never had a clear meaning, and was basically obsolete in the early 1900s) and started using it commonly to mean something that "inflammable" properly should mean.

The earth is flat.
The earth is round.
The earth is an oblate spheroid.

Within some error bar.

From http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On the earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On the earth's oblate spheroidal surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile.

The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat.

You mean besides how gravity does not seem to affect subatomic particles?

Relativity makes a lot of really good predictions so in a broad sense, it's right. It as I mentioned is also known to be incomplete. Actually it's so very right that despite knowing it's incomplete it has not failed a single experimental test we've thrown at it.

i.e. it's not wrong, merely incomplete.

If you don't get it, read "relativity of wrong" by Isaac Asimov (freely available online).
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

Indeed "faith" is part of the philosophy of Science - The faith that the real world exists outside of our individual experience, ie: there's a "reality" that we can observe and agree about what we observe, it's not just a figment of our imagination. Unlike many other "ways of thinking" science does not require blind faith, nor does it claim "the truth", but if history is any kind of judge, it does offer an increasingly accurate approximation to it.

Holy Mary Mother of Jesus! Somebody is actually running this argument.

Oblig.

At least try FFS. I want at least a medieval warm period and little ice age argument in here. What did you have for breakfast? They say you are what you eat. When I look at you, I see a cream cheese bagel! I expect more out of my trolls!

Give it a break. This is what 'settled science' means. Karl Popper, called the same concept "The republic of Science", it's a key concept in the philosophy of Science, it is the difference between "A scientist says" and "Science says", why do so many people of one political colour have a problem with that?

As for TFA, there is nothing in it that says or implies "they've been measuring it all wrong", they are using all the measurements they have. NASA found something interesting in the data, something that doesn't fit previously extrapolated assumptions that were made because the data did not exist, they make it perfectly clear it does not change previous findings. The ocean is still rising, this observation means they cannot account for a very small portion of the observed rise.

By definition all scientific knowledge is imperfect but the mere existence of the modern world is very strong evidence that imperfect knowledge is preferable to ignorant speculation. So if being 'wrong' embarsses you, don't chose a STEM career.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

It's usually not the manufacturing that is so expensive but the research and testing needing to get the drug on the market. In this case neither company needs to do any research or additional testing with the FDA since the drug is well known and has been on the market for 60 years. That doesn't apply with a brand new drug which may have to go through years of testing even if the first version is perfect with no side effects.

According to a study done by Tufts University, Cost to Develop and Win Marketing Approval for a New Drug Is $2.6 Billion that "cost" includes (quoting these Washington Post and New York Times write-ups:

Its estimate includes another $1.2 billion in foregone returns investors would have otherwise seen while the drug was under development.

Basically, the money investors *could* have earned by simply putting the other money used for development into the market over the development period. So not actual cost, but lost earnings.

What is the subtext here, "Lord Kelvin was arrogant and foolish, but we are not and there's no way we'll make the same mistake?"

Jebus, do geeks not understand humility and self-deprecation? By quoting Lord Kelvin he is saying - even great minds sometimes forget that by definition today's science will be 'wrong' tomorrow, what follows is the best answer we have right now.

'wrong' - Maybe it will be clear if I link to a popular sci-fi writer.

The relativity of wrong.

[...] And decades later they realised their model was totally wrong. THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. Of course, people only act when they think they know the answer. Of course, decades of expertise can go into that answer. And it can still easily be wrong. To think otherwise is just overconfidence in a world of complex systems. More fool you.

You might want to look at Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. Science can never give us philosophical certainty, and many scientific theories are incomplete (i.e. "wrong" in the strict sense). But that does not mean that all are equally wrong, or wrong enough to be useless. Newton was superseded by Einstein, but is still good enough for nearly all practical purposes.

Yes. The Earth has recently been shown to not be sphere-shaped (it's more of an oblate spheroid), so if you have data that shows it's actually a sphere that would indeed need a citation.

Strictly speaking, it's not even an oblate spheroid, but very slightly pear-shaped.

For more details, read this excellent essay by Isaac Asimov.

Actually, it has even more recently been shown to be the surface of a 5th dimensional Mobius spheroid.

The relativity of wrong.

Except the world is not black and white and wrongness is not a binary thing.

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersI...

Yes. The Earth has recently been shown to not be sphere-shaped (it's more of an oblate spheroid), so if you have data that shows it's actually a sphere that would indeed need a citation.

Strictly speaking, it's not even an oblate spheroid, but very slightly pear-shaped.

For more details, read this excellent essay by Isaac Asimov.

Multiple studies have shown that the climate models are wrong.

So will you accept science, or is the cognitive dissonance giving you problems if it disagrees with your pre-determined world view?

They were wrong.

But you are wronger

Read and become educated.

The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asmiov:

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

I vote for steady state

It doesn't matter what you vote for or what you believe. The data says you're wrong.

To head off this inevitable statement: "But this debate proves that we don't really know anything!"

No, no it doesn't. Read this before you go any further:

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

--
BMO

much like the aether

...and gravity, it is a model that fits our observations.

"John, 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."

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

Take 5min to read this short essay by Asimov, you won't be dissapointed. Asimov was more than just the guy who wrote about fictional robot laws, for example, he was also well known skeptic. Not the modern anti-science kind, a real skeptic, spelt the old fashioned way!

None of it is about robot ethics, it's a metaphor about the folly of thinking that a list of rules, such as the ten commandments, could ever encapsulate all the vagaries of human morality.

Well, Kant with his categoric imperative managed that with even a single rule. (But kind of cheated as it was kind of recursive)

Besides, thanks for the hint. I know I should have read more Asimov (as I always liked what I read) but somehoe never could quite adjust to the style somehow.

Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.

But the importantthing is to keep the basic humility and remember that no matter if your current knowledge is incomplete or plain wrong, one day it will be amended or rectified. And by his own logic, the diffrence between remembering that and assuming your current theory is "right" in the simplistic way, is much much larger than between "wrong" or "incomplete"

Take 5min to read this short essay by Asimov, you won't be dissapointed. Asimov was more than just the guy who wrote about fictional robot laws, for example, he was also well known skeptic. Not the modern anti-science kind, a real skeptic, spelt the old fashioned way!

None of it is about robot ethics, it's a metaphor about the folly of thinking that a list of rules, such as the ten commandments, could ever encapsulate all the vagaries of human morality.

This. Science is a process of progressive refinement, with occasional revolutionary paradigm-changes. Newer, broader understandings of nature almost invariably extend previous work, instead of replacing it.

A good example of the evolution of scientific thought can be found in this essay by Isaac Asimov. TL;DR:

- We used to think the earth was flat. We found out this was an accurate view for short distances, but failed for longer ones.
- Then we thought the earth was spherical. This also was an accurate view for many purposes, but more precise measurements revealed that the earth bulges at the equator due to its rotation.
- Then we thought the earth was an oblate spheroid. This view held until satellites revealed irregularities in the earth's gravitational field due to very slightly larger bulging in the southern hemisphere.

The point is that each successive refinement of our understanding of the earth's shape did not render previous concepts "completely wrong." Rather, it revealed limits on their applicability.

1) They have a ton of integrity.

Scientists have as much (or as little) integrity as the next guy. Fortunately the scientific method yields tools for outing the ones who acted with little integrity. Unfortunately, scientists with little integrity tend to move the discussion into into politics before the integrity problem can catch up with them, after which science kinda goes out the window.

Manning stands accused of the latter. Some of his emails focused on how to discredit folks who dispute his findings suggest those accusations have some merit. If you want to keep politics out of science, you simply can't engage on a political level.

The culture determines integrity, and the scientific culture has a ton of integrity.

As for Manning your narrative would imply that he's moved away from the science, but the reality is that he's still heavily involved in the science. Note that people are experts at compartmentalizing, if Manning has in fact shown less integrity in his public relations work (a point I don't concede) there's no reason to believe that's bled over into his research.

2) They're succeed by finding new things and changing the established thinking.

No. Just no. Finding a new way to confirm an old theory is just as successful science as testing a new theory. Finding a way to refute an established theory is highly successful science which rarely happens, and finding the new theory that fits all the data -and- whose predictions survive the test of time is rare genius.

Test of time is important. If you have to incrementally revise the theory as new data comes in, it's not a very solid theory.

That's not quite right.

Incremental revisions to theories are how science happens. You need to read the relativity of wrong.

3) They use the peer review system to enforce rigorous standards.

A theory which, sadly, has been discredited in the past decade or so.

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Is it perfect? No.

Do we have a better alternative? No.

Are you a practicing climate scientist who has personally checked all those facts? Not many people who would agree with you are. But they are looking at something written down that they- perhaps even you can never check or verify other then asking someone else if it is correct. But it's your version, it's real and factual, just like the faith Jews or Christians, or Muslims have.

Bullshit. First, there are degrees of wrong. Plus, you know, science works.

I am actually a published, practicing scientist. I can do the basic smell test on the papers, if not understand the tiny details.

To come to the conclusion that "the concensus is probably right and that in any case, I have no compelling reson to doubt the conclusions" the only "faith" I need to have is to discount the preposterous notion that the world's climate scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy to defraud us all.

> It simplifies network management

Except that it still doesn't do pair bonding, VLAN tagging, or network bridges for KVM It still has to be done manually, unless, they're *really* revised anything iontead of just slapping more GUI and "ooohhh, shiny!!!" on it. The only legible document I'e seen that walks through setting up all three on RHEL based systems is below.

          https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/co...

One of the great scientific minds of the modern era can say it far better than me.

"John, 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 - The Relativity of Wrong

Isaac Asimov's essay, "The Relativity of Wrong"does a wonderful job of revealing the foolishness of this type of thinking. http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

I forgot the ever important link.