This reminds me of the time that a Hungarian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweiss noticed that the bulk of patients in a maternity ward treated by doctors were dying horribly, while the ones treated by nurses were more likely to survive.
He figured out that this was because the doctors were dissecting corpses inbetween delivering babies, while the nurses weren’t, and came up with his controversial “hey, why don’t we all wash our filthy, filthy hands before sticking them in a woman?” theory.
The result, short term, was that the mortality rate on this one maternity ward decreased by a ridiculous amount. They went from “write your will before you come here, because you’re probably gonna die” to “we’re not 100% sure, but you’ll probably live”.
The result, long term, was that Semmelweiss was hated by absolutely everybody, lost his reputation and had his career suffer terribly.
His eventual reward was that eventually people finally started sashimg their hands with soap before operations, history remembers him as a misunderstood hero, and the instinctive angry and defensive reaction so many people give whenconfronted with new ideas that conflict with their established view of the world is now called ‘the Semmelweiss reflex’.
Because some people care more about themselves not being wrong than they do about things in general being right.
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