6 Lies You’ve Been Told, and the Complex Truths Behind Them

How many states of matter do you think there are?

In school, you were probably taught that there are three: solid, liquid, and gas.

If you were a nightmare for your teachers, you might have put your hand up while your teacher was talking about these three states of matter to ask “What state of matter is lightning? Or fire?” At which point you might have seen your teacher do what teachers often have to do when children see through the simplifications of school-level explanations: sigh and tell you that things are actually a bit more complicated than you are being taught right now, but if you continue studying this stuff to higher levels, then you’ll learn more. Please, please, you nightmare child, just accept this explanation for now.

In reality, lightning and fire are typically considered to be (or at least involve) a fourth state of matter: plasma.

And there are more! Liquid crystal is an intermediate state (between liquid and solid). And then there are ‘exotic’ states of matter like neutron degenerate matter, Bose-Einstein condensates, and so on.

The lesson is this: the world is often far more complicated than the explanations we are taught in school or that we encounter when we first start learning about a subject. Those are useful simplifications, because they help us grasp enough to keep learning. But we should always be open to the possibility that things are more complicated and that we will have to update our understanding (of even the fundamentals) as we learn more.

This article is all about embracing complexity. We’re going to undermine some common misconceptions about all sorts of things you may have been taught in school or seen in public discourse, with the goal of coming away with important critical thinking lessons.

But first, a quote from Terry Pratchett that captures this phenomenon perfectly:

Of course, many of the lies we are told are by well-meaning people. Teachers, for instance, don't lie about the states of matter because they want to deceive - rather they're hoping to simplify for our benefit. But this simplification also comes at a cost, especially when we're not aware that it's a simplification.

Now, let’s discover some complexity.

Lie 1: Words have clear meanings

Dictionaries seem to promise us that words have clear and precise meanings that can be captured in just a few short sentences. And when you’re at school, you’re often taught “X means Y.” But when I was teaching philosophy at university level, I regularly implored my undergraduate students along the following lines: 

The truth is, as you study any subject, you find more and more complexity behind many of even its simplest-looking terms.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Words are developed as we humans wander about the world, see something (or think something, etc) and come up with a term for it. Words are invented, not discovered. They are invented and applied to a world that might not actually fit them perfectly.

Some words might fit the world perfectly (Plato used an evocative metaphor, saying that these words are ones that ‘carve reality at its joints’), but many won’t. Try defining a chair. It seems simple, but reasonable people disagree wildly on what counts as a chair and what does not.

Most people seem to agree that the first of these images depicts a chair, 

but reasonable people disagree on the rest

It seems likely that even words that seem as simple as ‘chair’ are not ‘joint-carving’ words that map onto reality perfectly. Instead, they are imbued with parochial human interests, intentions, and purposes (e.g., there is experimental evidence that we think of chairs as whatever things serve the intended purposes of a chair). Given that human interests, intentions, and purposes have unclear boundaries and differ across times and places, we should expect that the meanings of many words do too.

Lie 2: There is a ‘Scientific Method’

You were probably taught that science has a specific method that has clearly defined steps like: observation; question; hypothesis; experiment; conclusion; result. But how accurately does this describe the processes of all the things we call science?

The reality is that philosophers of science as far back as Aristotle have been wondering whether there is any single thing that can be called ‘the’ scientific method. Unificationists are people seeking one underlying methodology that ties all the different practices of scientists together, while pluralists think there are many different methodologies at play. One notable pluralist is Nobel Laureate (for physics) Steven Weinberg, who argued that:

Pluralism is the more popular view among experts in this area, and it seems like every unificationist proposal has some exceptions. For example, here are some approaches to science that don't match the simple version of the scientific method:

• Theoretical physics often involves proposing models or equations based on things like mathematical elegance or internal consistency (these are called ‘theoretical virtues’ and we have a whole article about them), sometimes decades before any experiment can confirm or falsify them.

• Paleontology and evolutionary biology frequently rely on making inferences from historical data (like fossil records) and hypotheses are often evaluated against patterns in evidence (e.g., morphological features of fossils), rather than repeatable experiments.

This suggests that the notion of a single unified scientific method might be a kind of simplification or ‘lie-to-children’. 

However, this doesn’t mean nothing can be said to characterize science. Discussions of scientific method(s) tend to focus on a few recurring themes (e.g., having a hypothesis, testing it against empirical data, and so on). It’s just likely that the various methods used when science is actually practiced are less like clones of each other and more analogous to the resemblance between family members.

Lie 3: Supply and demand set prices

If you know just a little about economics, you may think you know that prices are set where supply and demand curves intersect. This model is elegant and useful. But in real-world markets, prices are influenced by many things: information asymmetries, monopolies, psychological framing, transaction costs, speculation, regulation (like rent control or minimum wage), and more. Supply-and-demand equilibrium is a simplification.

Consider this example. Suppose there is only one manufacturer of a product that is in high demand. The manufacturer can set the price to whatever they want. If they choose the price that maximizes their own profit, this will typically be higher than the price where supply and demand curves meet.

Or consider the fact that the price for a diet coke around Central Park in Manhattan can vary by more than a $1 depending on which of the vendors you happen to attempt to buy it from.

The concept that prices are set where supply and demand curves intersect is a powerful (and useful) idea. It can upgrade a person's understanding of markets. But it is also just a stepping stone to a deeper understanding. 

Lie 4: There are seven colors in the rainbow

Before Isaac Newton, people like Robert Boyle (perhaps the first modern chemist) said that there were 5 colors in the rainbow. It is hypothesized by some that Newton observed 5 colors but deliberately added two more (orange and indigo) to make 7 because 7 is a more satisfactory number. Some suggest he valued its connection to music, while others suggest his preference for the number 7 was an extension of his mysticism.

Of course, the colors in rainbows actually blend smoothly into each other, and the divisions are arbitrary. There’s no natural line between green and blue (for example), and so other ways of carving up the rainbow into numbers of colors are possible. Seven colors is just a simple model. So is five. And, as a matter of fact, different cultures have different numbers of color words, effectively splitting the rainbow into different numbers of colors that can be referenced with a word. 

Lie 5: Genes determine traits

You may have learned that you have a gene “for” blue eyes, or a gene “for” being tall. But most traits are polygenic (determined by the interaction of many genes) and also heavily influenced by the environment. Even seemingly straightforward traits like height depend on nutrition, stress, and other factors. While the gene-for-X model is accurate in some special situations (such as for Huntington's disease),  for most traits the gene-for-X model is a caricature of the way things really work. 

Lie 6: There is a food chain

The food chain is often taught as a simple linear progression: grass → rabbit → fox, and so on. But ecosystems are actually full of tangled food webs, not neat chains. We’re often told that a single animal is either a scavenger, hunter, or herbivore. But it is well-documented that many herbivores in the wild will sometimes eat meat (including their own young) to survive, if they have to - when food is scarce. And animals typically viewed as hunters can be found scavenging. Some organisms don’t even fit the chain model at all: fungi and parasites exploit complex ecological relationships that cannot be simplified into neat chains.

Important takeaways

We chose these lies because we thought they were interesting. They are far, far from unique. Pick any discipline you like; when you start to study it, you will have to start with simplifications, which are often presented as hard facts (rather than useful approximations). Lies-to-children that are helpful but not exactly correct.

Takeaway 1: Always be open to updating your models

When you’re learning about a subject that you are not a world-class expert in, you are likely to be learning simplifications. Those simplifications are probably useful, but you will find that you have more true beliefs if you are always open to the possibility that things are more complicated than the models you have learned so far. And if you're the one teaching these simplifications, it's beneficial to pause to remind the learners that this is a useful simplification that will have exceptions they can learn about later - it's not the full reality.

Takeaway 2: Many people don’t think like this

If you hear someone saying something like “that's just basic (or high-school) biology” as part of their argument, they probably think they’re making a good point. They probably think they’re saying “This is so obvious that it’s among the first things you learn in this subject. It’s basic. It’s fundamental. How do you not know this!?” But now you’re equipped to understand that such claims are sometimes actually confessions: they tell you that the person arguing may not have gone beyond the basic, oversimplified, lies-to-children that people learn when they are introduced to a topic.

Want to take your thinking about the complexities of the world even further? If you want to test yourself on whether you can spot common misconceptions, try our Common Misconceptions Quiz:

Or if you want a short mini-course that will introduce you to some techniques for thinking of things more complexly, try our Nuanced Thinking Techniques tool: