Monday, February 7, 2011

Unlearning - A Mark of Intelligence?

Among the scientific certainties I have had to unlearn: that upbringing strongly shapes your personality; that nurture is the opposite of nature; that dietary fat causes obesity more than dietary carbohydrate; that carbon dioxide has been the main driver of climate change in the past.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116032151311622.html?mod=ITP_review_1


It is always interesting to see how knowledge expands.  I have been reading about the role of carbohydrates in obesity for a long time, and often feel astounded when I find folks who still think it has something to do with fat consumption, or is just a "calories in calories out" linear equation.  How long until everyone's unlearned 'the truth' about diet and obesity?


Mr. Stevenson borrows it from Abraham Lincoln, whose 1862 message to Congress speaks of disenthralling ourselves of "the dogmas of the quiet past" in order to "think anew."


We are always on a path, never at a turning point (every generation narcissistically thinks it stands at a turning point in history). There simply is no ideal human social arrangement, and there won't ever be one. For me this has been the biggest disenthrallment of all—the growing realization of the ever-changing, chronically dynamic nature of the world. "Nothing endures," said Heraclitus (supposedly), "but change."

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