Right and Wrong

My dad and I disagree on whether things are ever wrong. Nope, the topic isn’t moral wrongs or nonsensical beliefs based on no justification. Rather the topic was about views or theories built upon available data which later proved to be…well, not correct.

To me, such views or theories are wrong. (Just to be clear, I don’t mean the people who came up with those ideas were idiots). My dad disagrees: to him, if the view or theory was based on all available data of the time, then it isn’t right to call it wrong just because you got more data later on.

I suspect that my dad believes that my stance is, to quote Issac Asimov:

“Everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.”

But I don’t believe that all wrongs are “equally wrong”. In fact, I fully agree with Isasac Asimov’s point about the relativity of wrong:

“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.”

If you’re wondering what that means, Asimov’s next lines should help:

“What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.”

While all of the above is indeed true, I think Asimov misses the point that what happens to many theories isn’t just fine tuning or marginal improvement or adding another place of decimal. Some theories are thrown out because they are, well, wrong. I agree with Kathryn Schulz when she says:

“We nurture the fantasy that knowledge is always cumulative, and therefore concede that future eras will know more than we do. But we ignore or resist the fact that knowledge collapses as often as it accretes, that our own most cherished beliefs might appear patently false to posterity.”

Just to give 2 examples of what I consider as examples of “knowledge collapses”:

1)      Scientists believed that if you knew all the information about everything in the universe at a certain time, you could (in theory) know how everything would be in the future.

Quantum mechanics proved that idea to be wrong: probability and uncertainty are a fundamental part of the universe.

2)     Everyone, not just scientists, considered gravity to be an attractive force.

Einstein’s theory of relativity showed that gravity can, at times, be a repulsive force as well.

These examples aren’t cases of fine tuning: they overturn the most fundamental characteristics of the topic under discussion. If that isn’t the definition of wrong, what is?