Much has been written, here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, about the media's willingness to give a couple of kids their 15 minutes for challenging scientific orthodoxy, despite the fact that in both cases, the young Galileo-wannabe figures were dead wrong. Now someone has finally summed it all one in one pithy sentence:
I'd like to caution especially my younger readers that you may be very smart, but you should assume that you are making a mistake if you find yourself thinking you are smarter than every scientist in the world put together. (Michael Tobis, Wired Science)
Thanks, Michael. My thoughts exactly.
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"You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
After three college years when I would think, "Hey, wait a second- I don't buy what this teacher is telling me. I bet what I'm thinking is totally new and unique!" and finding later that it hadn't been, I sorta got this message.
I'm super-fancy-smart. But me reading this chapter of the history book doesn't make me qualified to overturn it all.
Funny how the closer I got to graduation, the more I found myself respecting degrees.
Some things are wasted on the young, even aside from youth itself (thank you GBS), and a word of caution is among them.