on ignoring science & philosophy

[sophiaserpentia]

So I've seen headlines recently on "the science of ignoring science," but really, this is a very simple question. For anything that does not affect day to day life it is easy to repeat whatever you want to yourself. Getting food in your stomach before sundown or passing on your genes does not depend on whether the earth is flat or round or whether the earth is four billion years old or six thousand years old.

Comments

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

There's a scene in one of the Sherlock Holmes books (I'm thinking of it on film, but I'm fairly certain the scene was in one of the stories as well), where Watson is shocked that HOlmes doesn't know that the earth goes around the sun.

Holmes tells him that information of that sort, that doesn't impact his day-to-day life or his investigations, is useless to him, so as soon as he learns it, he forgets it, to make room for more pragmatic information, like bus schedules and ethnobotany...