There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.
Gah, I was going to say plate tectonics.
I think it’s important to detail just how much the scientific community rejected the whole idea of washing your hands. Even though Semmelweis dropped his hospitals maternity mortality rate from 18% to 2%
“In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.”
So the answer is “most things”.
Quantum Mechanics: The early concepts of quantum mechanics, such as quantized energy levels and wave-particle duality, were initially met with resistance, even by scientists like Albert Einstein, who helped develop them.
Reason for Rejection: The ideas were counterintuitive and challenged classical physics’ deterministic view, introducing probabilistic interpretations of nature.
Adoption: The overwhelming experimental evidence, such as the photoelectric effect, blackbody radiation, and the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, eventually led to the acceptance of quantum mechanics as a fundamental framework in physics.
Schrödinger’s cat was also meant as a rejection of quantum mechanics. Something cannot be both a wave and a partical until observed the same way a cat cannot be both alive and dead until observed. However, it does seem like quantum superposition is a reality, making the thought experiment even more bizarre.
For us today it may be surprising, but in 1922, Einstein was not awarded for the Relativity theories (SRT 1905, ART 1915) with the Physics Nobel prise 1921, but for his theory on the explanation of the photoelectric effect (1905), as the theory of relativity was still controversially discussed.
Our professor in quantum chemistry always told the story, that no one believed in it in the beginning and wanted to disprove it. This lead to one of the best tested hypotheses in the field that it is today.
Continental drift was a theory formed in 1912 by a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener. Geologists balked at the idea of enormous landmasses moving and said the idea of an Urkonintent was ridiculous. And besides, he was a weatherman, German weatherman, so outside of his field and untrustworthy as a German was considered at the outbreak of WW1.
Then, 50 or so years later his theory was rediscovered when different fields were trying to understand polar magnetic drift evident in iron ore formation. The only explanation that made sense from the evidence is that mountains were not permanent and oceans didn’t exist in some areas - a lot like the land masses moved.
Wegener was eventually vindicated in almost all areas except drift speed. There was an Urkonintent, which has been named Pangaea. The continents do move but because they sit upon plates. He had taught the world about the world but died before anyone thought he was right.
An interesting detail of this story that I only learned recently was that the core ideas of Wegener’s theory were in fact generally more well-received by European geologists, with prominent advocates even in the 1920s. It was primarily North American geologists who mocked him and dismissed the theory upon its 1925 American publication, and this may have been partly due to the English translation (from the 1922 German 3rd edition of his book) having a “tone” of stilted presumption and dogmatism that utilitarian translations of German sometimes have.
That tone might explain why the theory (and Wegener himself) was smacked down with such prejudice by American geologists. In particular, we have a talk given by Charles Schuchert at the 1926 Symposium on Continental Drift hosted by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in which he mischaracterized Wegener’s theory as a facile observation of coastline similarity. In fact, Wegener based his argument on deep-sea continental slopes, where edges could be shown to fit more closely, but he didn’t defend himself at the symposium (perhaps again due to the language barrier). So unfortunately the misunderstanding of continental drift persisted in tangential American geology circles until the 1958 theory of plate tectonics took over while European geologists generally accepted the core ideas early on.
The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.
But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:
- Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
- Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.
It wasn’t due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.
This is the first I’m hearing of antisemitism being at all related. Where did this come from?
Secret ruling elites is a dog whistle - it’s Nazi cabalistic rhetoric. See also Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a Nazi propaganda piece.
Okay but what does that have to do with dead internet theory? Last I saw, it just suggests that internet comments are largely bot-generated.
As the original comment said: the origins of dead Internet theory pre-date the prevalence of LLMs and are conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals of elites controlling the Internet
OP is inadvertantly providing another example: the phrase “conspiracy theory”. It was coined by the US government as a way to discredit ideas - to make people look like crackpots. Lots of negative propaganda was created around that phrase.
Fast forward to today and “conspiracy theory”, though admittedly still tainted in various ways, has made a resurgence. Things that would have gotten you laughed out of the room are now proven fact(like Iran-Contra, for a simple and fairly uncontroversial example).
Dude. Just take a stroll along X (Twitter) or YouTube comments.
Sooooooo many bots linked to profiles with Ai generated images talking to each other. It’s wild.
Bacteria being the cause of ulcers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori
You’ve led me to quite a Christian Scientist rabbit hole, but I cannot for the life of me find the requirement to start smoking. Rereading, is that maybe a typo that should’ve said they required people to stop smoking? I can’t find that either, but it seems to make more sense to me.
You can’t stop smoking until you start smoking…
Same. All it made me think of was that show The Leftovers (I think??) where you just see clumps of people staring at other characters while dressed all in white and chain-smoking.
A lot of science around trees and forest management has gone this way. Forest used to be seen as competitive areas that needed to be thoroughly managed to be healthy. Now we know that’s not true at all, and overall would be better off if we just let them be (in most, though not all cases). Same with the idea that trees communicate with each other and share resources. This was dismissed and ridiculed for a long time, but has now been pretty resoundingly proven true. Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees talks a lot about this.
Kind of a reverse Uno on your question, but I thought it was interesting while Nazism came to prominence, some scientists were like hey I’m just as racist and anti-semitic as you, but this race stuff you’re doing isn’t very scientific. They were dismissed as quacks. Later after doing horrible experiments, nazi scientists were frustrated that their findings weren’t adding up to their ideology.
See also: Jesse Owens.
Many scientific hypotheses started out as what seemed like crazy ideas at the time. When Galileo and Newton challenged the ideas of Aristotle, this was seen as fringe and radical. When Einstein challenged the accepted Newtonian dogma it was seen as scientific heresy at first. These ideas only seem mainstream to us with hindsight.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
Planck’s Principal
A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists. However, a more recent study on life science researchers found that following the deaths of preeminent researchers, publications by their collaborators rapidly declined while the activity of non-collaborators and the number of new researchers entering their field rose.
So, not really accurate. Throw it on the pile with horseshoe theory.
The fact that people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis originally and demeaningly called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can’t exercise.
It was first believed to be a mental health disorder where people are scared of doing activity. And patients who said exercising made them worse were treated for hysteria and kinesophobia (fear of exercise).
Now after a decade of so of biomedical research, and after research showing Graded Exercise therapy worked was discredited, we have a steady stream of studies showing different abnormalities and harmful reactions to exercise. Increased autoimmune activation post exercise, microclotting, mitochondial dysfunction, T-cell exhaustion. And most importantly with a dozen or so 2-day CPET studies, we have definitive proof that while healthy controls improve exertional capacity by exercising, these patients are the exact opposite, they worsen.
There’s even been a couple cases of young people 20-30 having a degenerative disease state that killed them.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) was originally dismissed by a lot of community doctors as well as more academic medical people. There are still a few who don’t believe in it and dismiss it as a behavioural or attitude problem. Thankfully those people are in the minority now. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they’re not in influential positions.
One surprising contributor to validating ME/CFS is long covid, which seems to be the same condition but catalysed by a different virus.
I’m not a medical expert and could have mistakes in the above post but it’s generally correct.
I think an interesting one (that is still controversial) is that megakaryocytes(MKs) in the lung actually produce a significant amount of the platelets in your body. Rather than platelets all coming from bone marrow MKs. It is interesting because these two different platelet origins have different responses to infection.
Epigenetics vindicates a small portion of the theory behind Lamarckism, though there’s still a lot of research to be done to understand the actual mechanisms underlying it
Lamarckism is the idea that a parent passes traits to its offsprings based on use or disuse of the trait. There is no support for this in genetics or epigenitics. Epigenitics deals with stably heritable traits based on by a mechanism other than DNA. It doesn’t pertain to whether a trait is used or disused.
A lot of mathematicians made fun of imaginary numbers when they were first proposed. In fact, the name “imaginary numbers” was actually given by skeptics to make fun of it. It kinda makes sense, imaginary numbers are all based off of a couple fairly strange assumptions, but they make otherwise difficult problems solvable.
The whole thing kinda ruined math though. Nowadays, mathematicians spend their entire careers building frameworks based on silly assumptions in the hopes that one day it’ll be useful.
People had similar responses to the ideas of negative numbers and irrational numbers when they were identified. There’s a story that a follower of Pythagoras was drown for identifying irrational numbers. I suspect its not true, but certainly it seems people had a hard time grasping the concept.
The idea that rocks sometimes fall from the sky.
