One of my favorite ideas from recent memory is pessimistic induction. As usual, a quick search finds plenty of smarter people who thought of it before me and easily refuted it. Even so, it’s oddly compelling, a gem of a misconception.

Looking back at history, most of our ideas, even the best ones, have turned out to be wrong. Very few have stood the test of time. Newtonian physics, the rational economic actor, and fat vs sugar are just a few famous examples.

It’s easy to think that we’re at the final culmination of our entire historical arc of science, art, and civilization. We may have been wrong in the past, but we’ve rooted out our mistakes, corrected them, and we now have everything figured out. It’s such a common misconception that it has its own name: the end of history illusion. Continue reading →