SYLVIA MCKEOWN: Human population may be heading down, not up
In their book Empty Planet, two authors argue that the numbers will begin to decline in about three decades
The sky is blue because it reflects the sea and the sea is blue because it reflects the sky. You can suck the venom out of a snake wound if you react quickly enough. Those self-same reflexes will be useful so you can bop a shark on the nose when it tries to attack you. The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object you can see from space, unless you are as blind as a bat. Such vertical knowledge, or “everybody knows” knowledge, is ingrained in our everyday consciousness. Too bad none of it is true. It’s called the “illusory truth effect”, a mechanism whereby a person’s perception of truth is skewed towards an understanding that feels familiar. We tend to assess new information against what we already know to be true, so if we hear the same thing repeated with some authority we tend to just accept it. The phenomenon was first detailed in the study “Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity” in 1977. Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino asked a group of coll...
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