Say I asked you if salt raises your blood pressure significantly - you’d probably say yes. You’d have a 10% chance of being correct about that.1
If I asked you if caffeine raises your blood pressure, you’d probably also say yes. You’d have a 50% chance, or less, of being wrong about that.23 To wit, those who drink more than 4 cups of coffee appear to have similar blood pressure effects as those who do not drink coffee, and a decreased risk of diabetes mellitus type 2.
Prost!
By the way, if someone cranks the sphygmomanometer (the blood pressure machine) over 300 mmHg, you should consider giving them a gentle nudge with your free hand. (They might be asleep while something important is happening.)
If I asked you if Trump was a successful businessman, many of you, not long ago, would have been wrong, as we now know he can’t put up a $454 million bond, and will lose the whined-down $175 million bond held in a Schwab account just to appeal, which he will then lose again along with the rest of the $454 million.
If I asked you if the New York Times was a reliable news sources, most of you, when the United States was invading and destroying a sovereign nation (much like Russia invading Ukraine), would have been dead wrong.4 Sure, that list is a lot longer, but come on now, you have to admit that one’s a doozie.
Such conventional wisdom is of course not necessarily true.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith gets the most credit for popularizing the term Conventional Wisdom in The Affluent Society (1958). “It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability.”
Though the polite current definition is “something that is generally believed,” I think Galbraith was really on to something.
Convenience.
It is absolutely convenient to believe such things. But worse, conventional wisdom may be seen as obstructive to acceptance of truth, and especially the introduction of new theories.
Such intellectual inertia was the backdrop to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), absurdly precluding objectivity, and creating a society highly appealing to the intellectually lazy.
The Big Lie is itself a case study.5 Repeated many times over, à la Goebbels, it becomes fact to many, and completely divorced from reality. Because it is convenient. It is convenient to blame immigrants. It is convenient to blame women. It is convenient to blame LGBTQ. It is convenient to blame the educated. It is a convenient to blame everyone else for what you perceive as your personal misfortune rather than a series of poor choices.
And here we are.
Democracy is far from convenient. It requires a lot of effort.
In case you havent noticed (?) blowing off the whole dumpster for a moment. ANYTHING food-wise that we get enjoyment from as we get older - i.e., coffee, eggs, cheese, ice cream (I could go on & on) automatically becomes - to the medical establishment - as "bad" for us!
So Yup its not always what you "think", read, or come to believe!