J. B. S. Haldane? Louis Agassiz? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: The British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane stated that interesting new truths were resisted, and acceptance required traversal through a series of four stages. During the first stage the new fact or theory was rejected as nonsense. Are you familiar with Haldane’s quotation on this topic?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1963 J. B. S. Haldane reviewed a book filled with tables of statistics describing human longevity. The tables revealed that humans were living much longer than insurance companies were commonly calculating. Haldane thought that there was a financial incentive for companies selling life insurance to overestimate the probability of death when setting prices. He also thought that the new data would initially be rejected. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
This will create a resistance. I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:
1. This is worthless nonsense,
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view,
3. This is true, but quite unimportant,
4. I always said so.
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