· Systems · 19 min read
The Expiration Date of Truth (Or: Why Your HR Department is Still Using Medieval Medicine)
We keep running modern life on expired science. The scary part is not that the old theories were wrong; it is how many of their descendants are still in circulation.
To be honest, I’ve reached a point of absolute saturation with writing standard pop-science non-fiction and boring blog columns. There are only so many times you can write about “feedback loops,” “generative AI,” or “systems thinking” before wanting to jump out of a window.
So today, we are doing something completely different. I’m going to try my hand at writing a five-act mini-theatrical drama.
But don’t close the tab just yet—it actually makes sense. Well, I think it does. Let’s see.
ACT I: The Humoral Emergency Room
Setting: A state-of-the-art, sterile Emergency Room. Holographic monitors are buzzing, and high-tech life support machines are glowing. A patient, STEVE (30s), sits on the bed with a mild fever. Enter DR. HARRIS (40s), wearing a pristine white coat and carrying an iPad Pro in one hand, and a jar of wriggling, wet parasites in the other.
DR. HARRIS (Cheerfully tapping the iPad) Alright, Steve, I’ve analyzed your blood pressure, your oxygen levels, and your genomic sequence. The diagnosis is clear. You have an excess of yellow bile.
STEVE I… what? I thought I just had a mild case of the flu.
DR. HARRIS Flu? Ha! A fanciful term. No, your humors are completely out of alignment. The winter air has congested your phlegm, leading to an unnatural accumulation of heat.
STEVE (Eyeing the jar) Doctor, why are those worms looking at me?
DR. HARRIS These are not worms, Steve. These are premium, medical-grade Hirudo medicinalis. We are going to place twelve of them on your neck to draw out the corrupt blood. If that doesn’t restore the equilibrium, we will proceed with a classic, double-arm venesection. I’ve already pre-heated the lancet over an open flame in the breakroom.
STEVE Are you insane?! I just wanted some Ibuprofen!
DR. HARRIS (Sighs, writing on his iPad) “Patient is showing signs of hysteria. Recommend immediate application of leeches to the temples to calm the brain-pan.”
ACT II: Searching for Vulcan
Setting: The main control room of an advanced space agency. Giant screens display live telemetry from Mars, deep-space telemetry, and real-time gravitational waves. AMY (20s), a brilliant data analyst, is staring at a monitor. Beside her is PROFESSOR VAUGHN (60s), looking through a brass telescope pointing out of a double-glazed, triple-insulated window.
AMY Professor, the satellite data shows a slight gravitational anomaly in Mercury’s orbit. We should double-check the calculations using Einstein’s General Relativity.
PROFESSOR VAUGHN (Snorts) Einstein? That patent-clerk rebel? Absolute nonsense, Amy. Relativity is a passing fad. The math of Sir Isaac Newton is absolute. If Mercury is wobbling, there is only one logical explanation.
AMY …Which is?
PROFESSOR VAUGHN (Gleefully) The planet Vulcan! It’s hiding behind the glare of the Sun! I’ve been designing a brand new, fifty-ninth epicycle to map its orbit perfectly on our star charts.
AMY Professor, we have literally sent probes around the Sun. There is no planet Vulcan. And we haven’t used epicycles since Copernicus!
PROFESSOR VAUGHN (Gasping, holding his chest in horror) Copernicus?! Do not utter that heretical name in my presence! The scribblings of that petty priest were rightfully tossed onto the Index of Forbidden Books! I deal with serious science, Amy, not silly mathematical models designed as nothing more than a “useful calculating tool”!
AMY But Professor…
PROFESSOR VAUGHN (Waving his hand dismissively) And of course we haven’t seen Vulcan! It is composed of a highly reflective, invisible planetary crust! But once we add this 59th epicycle to our orbital software, the code will compile beautifully. Now, fetch me the chalk. I must draw the crystalline spheres of the cosmos on the whiteboard.
ACT III: The Thermodynamics of IT
Setting: A modern, icy-cold server room of a major tech conglomerate. Thousands of server racks are blinking green. MARK (30s), a junior DevOps engineer, is panicking over a temperature warning. Enter GARY (50s), the Chief Infrastructure Officer, wearing a thermal suit and carrying a pair of bellows.
MARK Gary! Sector 4 is overheating! The CPU temperatures are hitting 95°C! The liquid cooling loop must have a block!
GARY (Calmly feeling the air) Nonsense, Mark. The cooling loop is fine. The problem is an unregulated escape of Caloric.
MARK Of… what?
GARY Caloric. The weightless, invisible fluid of heat. It is flowing too quickly from the processors into the surrounding atmosphere. It’s basic physics, boy.
MARK Gary, heat is just kinetic energy at the molecular level! We just need to pump more water through the radiator!
GARY Water?! You want to drown the Caloric? No! What we need is a heavy dose of Frigoric. We must pump the fluid of absolute cold into the server chassis to neutralize the Caloric flow. Grab those bellows and start pumping some fresh, cold ether into rack number nine.
MARK I am calling HR.
ACT IV: The Shrinking Planet
Setting: A high-level geological survey presentation for an offshore drilling project. A massive LED screen displays 3D seismic scans of the ocean floor. SARAH (30s), a geophysicist, is presenting. Sitting in the front row is DR. COBB (70s), a legendary consultant.
SARAH …and as we can see from the tectonic movement along the fault line, the continental drift is pushing these two plates together at a rate of 2cm per year—
DR. COBB (Interruping, laughing loudly) Continental drift? Drifting plates? What is this, a fantasy novel? Next, you’ll tell me the continents are floating on giant turtles!
SARAH Dr. Cobb, plate tectonics has been the fundamental consensus of geology for over half a century.
DR. COBB It’s a children’s story, Sarah. The Earth is a physical body. And what happens when a physical body cools down? It contracts! It shrinks!
SARAH Are you saying…?
DR. COBB The Earth is like a drying, baked apple! As the interior cools and dries, the crust wrinkles. Those mountain ranges you love so much? Wrinkles! The oceans? Simply puddles of water left over in the deep folds of a shrinking planet. We don’t need “plate boundary” analysis. We just need to calculate where the next major wrinkle is going to fold!
SARAH (Staring blankly) We are going to lose our drilling license, aren’t we?
ACT V: The Cleanroom Rodent
Setting: A Class-100 sterile biotechnology laboratory. Scientists are wearing full-body HAZMAT “bunny suits.” Inside a laminar flow cabinet, DR. HELENA (30s) is meticulously pipetting gene-editing cocktails. Enter DR. ALBERT (60s), carrying a dirty cardboard box containing a sweaty gym shirt, a handful of raw wheat, and some dust bunnies.
DR. HELENA Albert! What are you doing? This is a sterile environment! You are going to contaminate the entire CRISPR batch!
DR. ALBERT Relax, Helena. I’m just setting up the control group for our next generation of lab mice.
DR. HELENA By putting a sweaty shirt and wheat in a box?
DR. ALBERT Exactly. It’s a well-documented scientific recipe. You take dirty linen, add active wheat germ, leave it in an open press for twenty-one days, and voila! The sweat reacts with the grain, and spontaneous generation transforms the raw matter into fully formed Mus musculus.
DR. HELENA Are you telling me you believe mice are spontaneously born from dirty laundry?!
DR. ALBERT Of course they are! How else do they get into the pantry? Do you think they have tiny keys? Science, Helena! It’s called Abiogenesis. You really should have paid more attention in your undergraduate lectures instead of partying with those Erasmus exchange students! Now, don’t touch that shirt, my sweat is the crucial catalyst.
The Reality Check
Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? It feels like a fever dream of scientific illiteracy. You probably read those scenes wondering how any educated, rational human being could ever look at a colleague with a straight face and defend those ideas.
But here is the chilling truth:
Every single one of those ridiculous theories was, at some point, the absolute global scientific consensus.
They were taught at Oxford, Sorbonne, and Harvard. They were defended by the most brilliant minds of their respective eras. Millions of dollars (or their historical equivalent) were spent researching them. Experts built entire careers on them, and anyone who questioned them was labeled a dangerous crank or an uneducated fool.
Let’s be completely clear though: this is not an attack on science.
Science is, without a doubt, the greatest intellectual toolkit humanity has ever constructed. The brilliant minds who defended these theories were not stupid; they were giants of their respective eras, doing the best they could with the information they had.
Science is not exceptional because it is always right. It is exceptional because it has a built-in mechanism for detecting and correcting its own errors. It is a moving train that accelerates. It discards what doesn’t work so it can move closer to what does.
But while we laugh at the doctors of the 1800s or the geologists of the 1920s, we are doing exactly the same thing every single day.
Most of us have not updated our fundamental assumptions about psychology, management, education, economics, or health since the day we walked out of our high school or university classrooms ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. We love to claim our decisions are “evidence-based,” but our evidence is running on severely expired intellectual firmware.
What is Your Vulcan?
In an era where scientific and technological knowledge doubles at an unprecedented rate, staying mentally stagnant is a choice. There is an old saying: “Only fools and dead men never change their minds. Fools won’t, and dead men can’t.”
Yet, we prefer the comfortable warmth of a twenty-year-old textbook to the discomfort of realizing our most cherished professional beliefs might have been thoroughly debunked while we were busy watching TikTok.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the modern corporate equivalent of the “leeches and humors” doctor:
Exhibit A: The PowerPoint Pyramid
Go to any HR department, leadership seminar, or corporate retreat, and within twenty minutes, someone will bring up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. They will show you that colorful pyramid and explain how you cannot motivate an employee with “self-actualization” if their “safety needs” are not met.
The reality? Modern academic psychology threw the “rigid step-ladder” concept into the trash heap decades ago. Empirical research has completely dismantled the idea that human needs operate in neat, sequential steps.
Even worse? Abraham Maslow never drew a pyramid. The pyramid was invented in 1960 by a management consultant named Charles McDermid because it looked clean, simple, and fit perfectly into slide decks. We are literally managing, motivating, and structuring human career paths in multi-billion-dollar enterprises based on a 65-year-old marketing graphic that has zero empirical validity.
Exhibit B: The “Hunger Games” Performance Review
For years, HR departments championed Forced Stack Ranking (also known as the “bell curve” or the “rank and yank” system, where a fixed percentage of employees must be marked as underperformers and fired). It was hailed as the absolute scientific pinnacle of high-performance culture.
Its loudest champions? General Electric and Microsoft.
Except Microsoft abandoned it in 2013 because it destroyed collaboration and fostered toxic internal warfare. General Electric—the literal birthplace of the system—ditched “rank and yank” that same year, in 2013, and by 2016 completely replaced their legacy review process with a fluid, continuous-feedback mobile app called PD@GE.
Yet, as you read this, there are thousands of managers worldwide still defending stack ranking like a sacred scientific law, entirely unaware that the creators of the system realized it was toxic garbage over a decade ago.
Exhibit C: The “Because We’ve Always Done It” Tech Stack
In software engineering and IT, we see the equivalent of “astrologers looking for Vulcan.” Engineers implement bloated, outdated architectural patterns or refuse to adopt modern compiler optimizations, serverless paradigms, or containerization because “the old way is the industry standard.” They rely on design paradigms from the late 90s, completely blind to how underlying hardware, cloud scalability, and memory safety have evolved.
(With a healthy dose of embarrassment, I have to admit that just a few years ago, I was fiercely defending certain multi-processing design patterns myself. I hid behind CPU architecture limitations and the lack of shared memory, completely ignoring the fact that the architecture of modern programming languages and runtimes had already largely solved those concurrency issues. I was, quite literally, Professor Vaughn drawing epicycles on a whiteboard.)
Exhibit D: The Outdated Social Warrior
We see social and cultural commentators fiercely debating policy, quoting specific, highly narrow, small-sample sociological studies from the early 2000s. They completely ignore two decades of massive cultural shifts, the replication crisis that wiped out half of modern social science, and a mountain of newer, more robust data that says the world has changed dramatically. They are fighting today’s wars with weapons forged in a world that no longer exists.
It is easy to mock the doctor with the leeches or the physicist with the caloric fluid. It is much harder to look at your own resume, your own management style, or your own personal beliefs and ask yourself:
“What is the expiration date on my absolute certainties? And did I cross it a decade ago?”
If you don’t start checking the labels on your truths, don’t be surprised when you find yourself standing in a cutting-edge room, holding a jar of leeches, wondering why nobody wants to play along anymore.
Historical Footnotes (Or: What the Hell Were They Thinking?)
Old science, broken models, and the historical context behind the five acts.
Historical Footnotes (Or: What the Hell Were They Thinking?)
Old science, broken models, and the historical context behind the five acts.
Act I: Humoral Medicine
Why bloodletting, leeches, and temperament charts survived for so long.
Act I: Humoral Medicine
Why bloodletting, leeches, and temperament charts survived for so long.
For over two millennia, from around 400 BCE to the mid-19th century, Western medicine was ruled unconditionally by Humorism. Coined by Hippocrates and heavily systematized by Galen, this school of thought dictated that human biology is governed by four primary liquids, or humors:
- Blood - associated with air, spring, and a sanguine temperament.
- Phlegm - associated with water, winter, and a phlegmatic temperament.
- Yellow Bile - associated with fire, summer, and a choleric temperament.
- Black Bile - associated with earth, autumn, and a melancholic temperament.
Any disease, infection, physical ache, or psychological shift was diagnosed as an imbalance of these fluids (dyscrasia). The cure? Violent physical intervention. Doctors sought to drain the “excess” fluids through forced vomiting (emetics), blistering the skin with toxic compounds to draw out pus, or using heavy metal laxatives like calomel (mercury chloride) to purge the intestines.
But the undisputed crown jewel of humorism was bloodletting. If you had a fever, your “blood was boiling,” and it needed to be let out. This was performed either via leeches (Hirudo medicinalis) or direct vein incision (venesection).
The Shocking Death of George Washington:
To understand how fiercely the elite defended this madness, we only have to look at the death of George Washington in 1799. After waking up with a severe throat infection (likely epiglottitis), his physicians - the most highly trained, prestigious medical minds in America - immediately set to work. Over the course of less than 24 hours, they extracted approximately 80 ounces of blood (2.4 liters, which was roughly 40% of his entire blood volume). They also blistered his throat and forced him to ingest calomel. Unsurprisingly, Washington did not survive the night. He was literally bled to death by state-of-the-art medical science.
Humorism was only dismantled in the late 19th century when Rudolf Virchow’s cellular pathology and Louis Pasteur’s germ theory proved that diseases occur at the cellular level and are driven by microscopic pathogens, not “excessive juices.”
The Modern Corporate Echo (DISC, Persolog, and Structogram):
What is truly mind-blowing is how incredibly durable this medieval fluid-based taxonomy turned out to be. While we no longer bleed ourselves to cure a fever, we are still using Hippocrates’ and Galen’s four humors in our corporate offices every single day.
If you have ever taken a modern personality profiling test like DISC (or its successor Persolog) or Structogram, you were likely categorized into a color-coded quadrant:
- Red (Dominant, active, quick-tempered) - descended directly from the Choleric (yellow bile) temperament.
- Yellow (Influential, optimistic, expressive) - descended from the Sanguine (blood) temperament.
- Green (Steady, calm, cooperative) - descended from the Phlegmatic (phlegm) temperament.
- Blue (Compliant, analytical, meticulous) - descended from the Melancholic (black bile) temperament.
While these modern behavioral tools are highly useful and popular for building communication within teams, it is a delicious irony that their fundamental archetypes and color schemes are directly inherited from a 2,400-year-old, medically absurd theory about bodily juices.
Act II: Epicycles & The Copernicus Sabotage
How bad models accumulate patches until they look like religion.
Act II: Epicycles & The Copernicus Sabotage
How bad models accumulate patches until they look like religion.
In the ancient geocentric (Ptolemaic) model of the universe, the Earth sat statically at the center, and all celestial bodies revolved around it in perfect circular orbits. But there was a massive problem: planets occasionally appeared to slow down, stop, and temporarily move backward across the night sky (retrograde motion).
To explain this anomaly without abandoning the “sacred” geocentric circle, astronomers invented epicycles - smaller circular orbits centered on the larger orbital path. As astronomical measurements got more precise, the math broke down again, forcing scientists to stack epicycles on top of epicycles (sometimes dozens of them) to force the data to fit their dogmatic model.
The Copernicus Sabotage:
When Nicolaus Copernicus’s groundbreaking heliocentric book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was printed in Nuremberg in 1543, a theologian named Andreas Osiander added an anonymous preface without Copernicus’s consent. Fearing backlash, Osiander claimed that the heliocentric system was “merely a useful calculating tool” rather than physical truth. While this temporarily saved the book from instant rage, it didn’t last. In 1616 - exactly 73 years after Copernicus’s death - the book was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books during the trial of Galileo Galilei, where it stayed for over two centuries.
And what about the planet Vulcan? In the 19th century, astronomers noticed that Mercury’s orbit was wobbling in a way that Newtonian physics couldn’t fully explain. To preserve Newton’s laws, they proposed a hidden, invisible planet called Vulcan hiding behind the Sun’s glare. They spent decades searching for it, only for Albert Einstein to step in with General Relativity and prove that gravity bends spacetime, perfectly explaining Mercury’s orbit without any imaginary planets.
Act III: Caloric and Frigoric
When heat was treated like a fluid and cold got its own mythology.
Act III: Caloric and Frigoric
When heat was treated like a fluid and cold got its own mythology.
Before we understood thermodynamics, scientists believed heat was a physical substance. They called it Caloric - a weightless, invisible, self-repellent fluid that flowed from hot bodies to cold bodies.
While caloric was universally taught, some physicists proposed a counterpart fluid called Frigoric to explain the active transmission of cold. Although the theory of frigoric never achieved the same widespread, systematic status as caloric, it was a subject of active debate for much of the 18th century. Under this theory, cold was not a mere absence of heat, but an active substance that traveled in physical waves.
This culminated in spectacular scientific debates in the late 18th and 19th centuries through experiments with “rays of cold” (or frigorific rays). Notably, Swiss physicist Marc-Auguste Pictet in 1785 demonstrated the “reflection of cold” using two concave mirrors. By placing a flask of ice at the focal point of one mirror, he caused a thermometer at the focal point of the opposite mirror to drop immediately, seeming to prove that “cold” was being radiated and reflected just like light. Prominent figures like Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) actively defended and analyzed these frigorific rays. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century, thanks to kinetic theory, that we realized heat is the kinetic energy of vibrating molecules, and cold is simply the absence of that motion.
Act IV: The Shrinking Earth
Why mountains used to be treated like wrinkles on a baked apple.
Act IV: The Shrinking Earth
Why mountains used to be treated like wrinkles on a baked apple.
Before plate tectonics was accepted in the mid-20th century, geologists explained mountain ranges, earthquakes, and ocean basins using the Geophysical Contracting Theory. They believed the Earth began as a molten ball of rock and was gradually cooling down. As it cooled, it contracted and shrank. Like a drying, baking apple, its outer crust wrinkled - and those wrinkles were what we called mountain ranges.
The Tragic Pioneer & The Final Pieces:
The concept of continents moving was actually proposed in 1912 by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener under the theory of Continental Drift. However, his ideas were met with absolute hostility and open mockery. The geological establishment rejected Wegener outright, largely because he could not explain how the massive landmasses actually moved. He wrongly theorized that the continents literally “plowed” through the rigid oceanic crust like massive icebreakers, propelled by the Earth’s centrifugal forces and tidal friction.
Physicists quickly proved that such forces were far too weak and that the ocean floor was too dense for continents to plow through them without disintegrating. Wegener died in Greenland in 1930, still branded a scientific outsider.
It wasn’t until the 1960s, when extensive sonar mapping of the deep ocean floor revealed seafloor spreading and oceanic trenches, that the tide finally turned. In 1965, Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson famously put the final pieces of the puzzle together. He introduced the concept of plate boundaries and transform faults, effectively synthesizing the modern theory of plate tectonics as we know it today.
This means that the modern geophysics consensus is incredibly young. Because plate tectonics was not fully integrated into standard school curricula until the mid-to-late 1960s, there is a very non-zero chance that you personally know someone - a parent, a grandparent, or an older schoolteacher - who was officially taught in geography class that mountain ranges are literally just the “wrinkles” of a cooling, shrinking planet.
Act V: Spontaneous Generation (Abiogenesis)
The long, humiliating death of the mouse-by-shirt theory.
Act V: Spontaneous Generation (Abiogenesis)
The long, humiliating death of the mouse-by-shirt theory.
For millennia, humanity believed in Spontaneous Generation (historically referred to as Generatio aequivoca or a form of Abiogenesis). Aristotle himself codified the theory, asserting that life could arise from non-living matter if it contained “vital heat” (ancient Greek antiquity). He believed that flies came from rotting meat, frogs from Nile mud, and lice from human sweat.
It wasn’t just vague philosophy; it was treated as exact, actionable science. In the 17th century, the respected Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont published an actual, literal recipe for creating mice: you take a soiled, sweaty shirt, place it in the open mouth of a jar containing grains of wheat, and wait exactly 21 days. Van Helmont claimed that a “ferment” from the human sweat would react with the wheat germ, active chemical forces would take over, and the raw matter would be transformed into fully formed, adult mice. He even noted with scientific pride that these spontaneously generated mice would be identical to naturally born ones.
The battle to debunk this lasted for centuries. In 1668, Italian physician Francesco Redi proved that maggots didn’t spontaneously appear on meat if flies were kept away using fine gauze. Yet, the theory simply retreated to the microscopic world. In the 18th century, John Needham boiled mutton broth, sealed it loosely, and when microscopic organisms grew, he declared victory for spontaneous generation. It wasn’t until the 1860s that Louis Pasteur conducted his famous swan-neck flask experiments. By allowing air into the flask but trapping airborne dust and microbes in the curved, gravity-defying glass neck, he proved that sterile broth remained pristine indefinitely. The “vital force” was a myth. Life only comes from pre-existing life (Biogenesis).
