It is because people use heuristics to navigate their lives. Instead of doing complicated engineering reasoning all the time to ensure their safety they learn simple “rules of thumb”. These rules are incorrect in as much as they have both false positives (something which the rule prohibits, but is safe) and false negatives (something which the rule lets you do, but is not safe). I’m a hobby jeweler and I use an ordin…
I think the social friction from getting all of this right/wrong really damages inquisitive minds. The visceral negative response you get from, "Wait, I don't think that's right, it's more complicated than that", helps prevent speaking up the next time, unless you have an inherently disagreeable personality (which I cherish working with). I see it all the time with kids. They'll see some fundamental truth that takes…
Even scientific models that we regard as describing fundamental laws of nature will stop describing reality accurately once you hit extreme conditions -- Newtonian physics breaks once you're dealing with relativistic contexts, for example.
The human mind has tendency to generalize its heuristics, and hold certain rules to be either absolutely true or absolutely untrue, which unfortunately hobbles our ability to use our rationality to its fullest potential. People will often dismiss an entire model as being universally "false" as soon as they see a single data point that it doesn't work for, and then try to formulate a new model that's still trying to encompass everything, everywhere. Maybe we'd do better to interpret falsifying data points as helping to map the outer boundaries of the model's applicability, and formulate multiple models, each optimized for different contexts, and each regarded as valid within its bounds.