Information is not so cut and dry that we can assign each bit of it a binary flag like “fact” or “fiction.” It’s often not easy to tell which pieces of information are true and which are false.
Dr. Charles Sidney Burwell of Harvard Medical School once said, “Half of what we are going to teach you is wrong, and half of it is right. Our problem is that we don’t know which half is which.” It’s an inconvenient truth that information is fluid and always changing. What is true today may be false tomorrow, because truth is relative to a foundation of facts. When any of the facts in the foundation are found to be false, every fact built on the foundation is subject to change.
Given the ever-shifting nature of information based on new information, it appears true that the more recent the information, the more likely it is to change. There are certain facts that bedded so deep in our foundation of knowledge that they are unlikely to change. They were tested and questioned by many, but stood the test of time.
The wisdom of the ancients represents the core of our knowledge. Ancient thinkers such as Aristotle, Lao-tsu, and Socrates helped lay the foundation of all of our knowledge today. I’d like to explore ancient texts and find which ideas have been proven true time and again. It is the ancient wisdom that we can most reliably build our base of knowledge upon.
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