Knowing Its Wrong But Ignoring It We as humans sometimes think we know everything. This has gotten many of us in trouble over the years. I knew one person who I am sure the old timers who retired from the job will recognize even though I am not mentioning his name. Whenever someone around him was having a conversation, he would insert himself into it and correct the facts. The problem was he was usually wrong. After a while people would make believe they were talking about complicated scientific principles when he was around and sure enough, he would not know the foggiest about what they were talking about, but this didn’t stop him from correcting them. I remember one particular time one guy looked up a very obscure word and he and another made believe they were discussing the meaning of the word near mister know it all. He jumped in and gave a corrected definition and then they said no he was wrong they had just looked it up in the unabridged dictionary we use. They thought they had him and then he replied, “what is the date the dictionary was written?” When they gave the date, which was twenty years before he said, “no wonder.” This might be funny on this level, but it isn’t funny on some others. Some people are in a position where their decisions matter to the lives of others. Take doctors for example. One doctor who was from a foreign country had operated on someone and cut through a muscle he shouldn’t have. He thought he knew a lot about medicine, but it turned out in the country he came from the medical training for a doctor was equivalent or less than that a corpsman in the military gets. It just so happened in New York State at the time any foreign trained doctor could practice in a hospital without being tested. Throughout history there are plenty of cases where people believed they knew much more than the rest of us and were completely wrong. Take the case of Giordano Bruno. In 1600 he was burned at the stake for saying the planets revolved around the sun. The church thought they knew better and what he had said was heresy and when he was executed his tongue was tied so he couldn’t address the crowd. Dustan “Disko” Popov was a spy who worked for the British and the famous MI6. As a matter of fact, it is said the character of James Bond was fashioned after him. He had found something very important out but the powers that be in the United States paid absolutely no attention to what he told them, because they Knew Better. What was this incredible message he had for us? He had found out the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor. The bureaucrats knew better. One of the pieces of evidence he had presented to us was a request from Japan on the defenses of Pearl Harbor along with other evidence. Bernie Madoff was the darling of Wall Street. The rich and powerful had heard about huge returns on investments made with him and he would play hard to get until these people begged him to take their money. Madoff as most know was running what is known as a Ponzi Scheme where he would take in a lot of money and give a few people a large return so they would tell others and while doing this keep taking large amounts for himself illegally. A portfolio manager of Rampart Investment was asked by his company to find out how Madoff was so successful and see if his company could develop a similar product. It didn’t take him very long to realize Madoff was running a criminal enterprise. He went to the SEC but no one would listen. A year later he tried again, but again he was brushed off. A few years later in 2005 he compiled proof in a dossier and the title was ”The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud” and again gave it to the SEC. The SEC said they didn’t find any wrongdoing. In 2008 Madoff’s sons turned him into the FBI and the rest is history. To me, one of the worst examples in modern times of bureaucrats thinking they know better than even scientists and engineers came about during the launch of a space shuttle flight. Morton Thiokal was the manufacturer of the booster rockets which were used on the Challenger Space Shuttle. An engineer from that company called NASA and told them it was too cold to launch the Challenger because parts known as O rings could fail. He went on to say since they were rubber, they were affected by the cold and they should abort, but the man in charge of the decision blew him off. He tried to stop the blast off a couple of times and this aggravated the NASA official who launched anyway. The Challenger Space Shuttle blew up. One of the problems we face as humans is our beliefs. We might believe something is true for hundreds of years and we eventually could be proven wrong. When this happens, people sometimes don’t want to accept the fact they have been wrong and keep on believing the erroneous facts. Sometimes these things are harmless. Take the height of Napoleon for example. For hundreds of years, it has been said he was short and sometimes even called the little corporal. The truth is he was of average height for his time which was 5 foot 7 inches. The term short is relative to the time period and the height of others at the time. When I went onto the replica of the Mayflower, I was amazed at the low archways on the ship then someone reminded me the people then were very short compared to us. One of the most harmful beliefs takes place in some parts of the world and it is women must be submissive to men and have no rights. Women are killed every year to enforce this belief and are denied education. Some scientists believe the most harmful things we believe comes from our advances in technology. I tend to agree. Chances are being taken in so many areas of science and engineering which could harm us as a race. One is experimenting with creating tiny black holes while another is experimenting with deadly pathogens. Right now, scientists are working on taking deadly animal diseases and converting them into diseases which could harm humans. As a race I have to say we are nuts to be doing things like this, and these are only a couple of things we know are going on.
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