Everything you know is wrong

I love my Twitter stream. A social media sunflower, I am pulled from my shell by a variety of individuals I’ve hand-picked to provide me a warm, steady glow of daily sustenance. As I click on the links they provide, I have slowly, surely grown from the information they’ve shared with me. We all have, haven’t we? The Information Superhighway has become, for many of us, a Social Media Superconductor.

Today is Everything You Know is Wrong Day. It is a reminder that we must take the time to take in new information as it arrives (especially these days,) and embrace when we discover what we “know” is lacking, either due to previous mis-education or simply new advances in knowledge. It’s time to make sure we truly deserve the mantle of the most intelligent species on Planet Earth.

How many times have we all sat back and heard our grandparents tell us stories of the way things used to be? Of how all of the magic surrounding us emerged on the scene? I’ve often stopped and imagined how much of my grandparent’s world has changed, moved on, or been cast aside. Relativity. Space flight. Geosynchronous orbit. Nuclear power. Thermonuclear devices. Social upheaval. Microprocessors. Green energy. Streaming media. DNA sequencing. Genetically modified foods. Weather forecasting.

How much of what we all used to know as fact and relied upon in our daily decisions has become broken crockery by the roadside, as technologies have emerged in all sciences, casting new light on previous notions?

It seems that almost every year there is an advance made somewhere that affects a technology everywhere. Using advanced boolean search technologies, historians have been able to draw from mountains of scanned documents to paint far more accurate (and humbling, or dare I say humanizing) life accounts of notable figures from our past. Ancient and severely damaged documents such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, long abandoned as illegible, have been re-assembled and digitally enhanced to provide a more complete (and sometimes confusing) picture of our great faiths. Disparate technologies are being brought together by brilliant minds to create almost magical things, such as organic digital storage, self-lighting walls, holographic newscasts and flying cars.

If you think your grandparents have been getting a little lost trying to keep up with things in the last 20 years or so, wait to see what happens in the next 20 years! In almost every aspect of our lives, that which we as individuals or a society thought was crystal-clear has been shown to be fuzzy at best. Everything we thought we knew, even what we hold near and dear, is being questioned. We’re discovering everything we think just might be wrong.

Twitter is unlearning me. I click on the links provided to me from individuals from a variety of backgrounds and interests. Because of this, I am exposed to the news they feel might be of interest to all. I read articles and papers from psychological, agricultural, astronomical, historical and even mathematical journals, just to name a few. Because of the wonderful hyperlinks steadily moving under my eye, I’ve found that there’s been an awful lot of incorrect information jangling around in my brain. I’m removing what is out-dated, and painting a new picture of the World around me as I go.

Did you know….

• Sailors in Columbus’ day already knew the Earth was a globe.
• We actually use 100% of our brain’s capabilities.
• The Pilgrims of Plymouth never wore black, tall hats or buckled shoes.
• Hair and fingernails do not grow after we die.
• Abner Doubleday did not invent Baseball.
• Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of average height.
• Humpty Dumpty is never referenced in the story as being an egg.
• Cracking your knuckles does not cause arthritis or other inflammatory conditions.
• A bull cannot see the color red.
• The Roman Catholic concept of the Immaculate Conception does not refer to Jesus himself.
• Sugar doesn’t make a kid act more hyperactive.
• The “Coriolis Effect” does not determine the direction of your toilet’s water flow.
• Nobody knows what the original forbidden fruit was.
• The term “Theory” does not, nor has it ever when used in Science, insinuate doubt in the veracity of the concept.
• Our tongues are not the same with regard to taste, or which “zone” tastes what.
• Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb.
• Shaving does not cause our hair to grow back either thicker or more dark.
• Henry Ford did not invent either the automobile or the assembly line.
• Being out in the cold does not increase your chances of catching one.
• All bats have eyes and are capable of sight.

I chose the above because many of us (including myself at one time) held an opposing viewpoint, until proven otherwise. I could cite for the reader all of the underlying sources disproving these popular notions, but figured the information is readily available for anyone really interested in it. So take a drive on the Information Superhighway, then shoot me a few particles on the Social Media Superconductor.

Because the integration of so much information has caused (and continues to cause) such sweeping change everywhere, some suggest that we are rapidly approaching a Singularity — a period of time scientifically when our knowledge level and abilities, whether through integrated discovery or technological convergence, begin to explode around us. How could such a thing happen?

We are an incredibly intelligent species; however, our brain power is only so limited. Which is why we find supercomputers to be of such great help in accomplishing complicated tasks. We continue to make great strides in artificial intelligence, and it is only a matter of time before we begin to be able to more fully converse our needs to the computers, letting them do the heavy lifting in unison for the rest of us.

We currently share our scientific and sociological discoveries by reading about them or attending lectures, by purchasing licensing rights and making agreements over days, weeks or months. What if one day our working computers talked real-time amongst themselves, sharing all emerging technological advances in all areas from around the Globe, computing in micro-seconds the usefulness of all that is known thus far? When this happens, will we be able to keep up?

My list of bulleted items above were based on long-held beliefs and myths held for great periods of time by large groups of people due to misinformation or misconception. I wonder, when we reach that apex of advancement and a technological Singularity finally occurs, will we be adding to that list:

• Humans are not the most intelligent species on Planet Earth.

Until that happens, I will sit back and enjoy the steady flow of info and comraderie I find here… I meant me and you, not the computer…

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Posted by Steve on Mar 15 2010. Filed under Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry