Other people's behaviour acts as a cue for what to do, buy, or believe.
More quotesPlanck’s line is funny because its darkest implication often feels true: the argument wins shortly after the people who built careers opposing it lose the power to decide. Evidence does not arrive at an empty mind. It arrives amid reputations, teaching, professional language and methods that already distribute status. A new idea can threaten far more than a belief. It may turn somebody’s expertise into historical context.
This is why “we presented the facts” is such a feeble theory of change. Facts have to be understood through concepts people possess, tried through systems that allow them and judged by institutions whose authority may depend on the old answer. A generation trained with the new method experiences none of that upheaval. To them, yesterday’s revolution is simply how the work is done.
Institutions also decide which evidence becomes career-safe to pursue. A question ignored by established journals, funders or teachers can remain intellectually possible and professionally foolish. Familiarity affects production before it affects belief.
The comforting response is to blame stubborn veterans and wait. That wastes experience and lets younger people inherit fashionable rubbish with equal enthusiasm. Generations are perfectly capable of replacing one orthodoxy with another. Age does not own dogma.
Some opponents change their minds. They usually need more than a humiliating correction. They need a way to test the alternative, language that connects it to what they know, and permission to update without performing a public funeral for their past judgement. Progress therefore has two clocks. One measures accumulating evidence. The other measures who is allowed to interpret it. Occasionally they move together. Often the second drags behind, refusing to move until authority does.
Eventually the new generation calls the whole argument obvious. That is how victory hides the cost of becoming familiar.