... Richard Peary was the first person to reach the North Pole. Or not. Maybe it was Frederick Cook. Or not.
There's a fascinating article and related post in the Science Times section of the NYT about competing claims of visits to the North Pole that I never knew about before. Who knew Peary's claims of "FIRST!" were so flawed that the Times would run a formal correction in 1988?
Here's how the article starts:
In September 1909, Dr. Frederick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary each returned from the Arctic with a tale of having reached the North Pole. Neither provided any solid proof or corroborating testimony; both told vague stories with large gaps. They couldn’t even convincingly explain how they had plotted their routes across the polar ice.
Yet each explorer’s claim immediately attracted its supporters, and no amount of contradictory evidence in the ensuing years would be enough to dissuade the faithful.
A century later, the “discovery” of the North Pole may qualify as the most successful fraud in modern science, as well as the longest-running case study of a psychological phenomenon called “motivated reasoning.”
The believers who have kept writing books and mounting expeditions to vindicate Cook or Peary resemble the political partisans recently studied by psychologists and sociologists. When the facts get in the way of our beliefs, our brains are marvelously adept at dispensing with the facts.
Oh yeah, it goes there. No matter who you are, you're likely going to feel a little self-conscious at some point, while reading. This is an excellent reminder about the need to be skeptical.
(h/t: KK)
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