Is Everyone Once Again Blindly Resisting a Modern Day Intellectual Revolution?

[What follows is an introduction to this Podcast; it is not a transcript]

Image taken from from Atlantic article on Flat Earth theory

Intellectual revolutions come in all shapes and sizes and have transformed essentially all fields of thought. Everything from baseball management and the food pyramid to the movement of planets and continents has experienced upheavals in conventional wisdom. Yet nearly all these revolutions have one thing in common: They were fiercely resisted by experts and authorities at the time—and indeed found little support with outside intellectuals or laymen as well. Everyone seemed to hate these new ideas.

But how would you have responded at the time these ideas were first put forth? Yes, you accept heliocentrism, evolution, & drifting continents today, but what would you have thought back when all the evidence for these ideas was first published? Would you have had the wherewithal to accept the indisputable and logical power of true but heretical arguments—despite what all the authorities and your peers were saying?

The recent reproduction of the Asch conformity experiment (H/T to

Steve Stewart-Williams

for the reference in his great Substack) once again establishes that people will at times not even believe their own eyes regarding something as simple as the relative lengths of lines when a handful of strangers all state aloud the wrong answer.

In the Asch Conformity experiment, six subjects were asked which of the three lines on the right card had the same length as the line on the left card. Five of the subjects were actors and would frequently all give the same wrong answer—and the sixth would conform 33% of the time.

As Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mander wrote about their experiment:¹

“Together with recent studies from Japan [14], and Bosnia and Herzegowina [15], our study provides further evidence that the influence of groups on individuals’ judgments is a universal phenomenon, and is still valid today.”

The famous Hans Christian Andersen fable, The Emperor Has No Clothes, also describes a kind of Asch Conformity experiment (see video on both fable and experiment) in which the townspeople all believed the naked Emperor was normal and that he was just wearing a trendy, ultra-fine suit that other monarchs wore because, well, that’s what all the other townspeople were saying.

But isn’t this all silly? You, of course, wouldn’t fall for any of that nonsense, right? You are an independent thinker and would have accepted all prior intellectual revolutions when first apprised of the evidence. You also would have been the first of Andersen’s townspeople to say, “That Emperor is starkers, and, of course, that’s not normal”—and laughed at the other five people in Asch’s room as if they were wacky on the junk. You would have chosen the right line every time.

Okay, then you want to be inserted into a new The Emperor Has No Clothes experiment?