Human beings believe a lot of funny things.
For example, of the 9,535 reported deaths in London in the year 1632, thirteen (13) of them were allegedly caused by Planet.¹
As in, “the planets were aligned” or “misaligned” or “Mercury was in retrograde.”
This “death by Planet” belief was thanks to the pseudoscience of astrology, which was popular and accepted as fact at the time. Court astrologer was an official position. Queen Elizabeth I even had her own personal astrologer. A man, John Dee, who was basically paid to make stuff up.
If you're out of work there are lots of well-paid jobs still available in this "make stuff up and get paid" field. See: Deepak Chopra, who earns millions peddling his own charlatanous brand of misinformation and baloney.And, of course, two of the big beliefs from our past: - The Earth is flat. - The Sun revolves around the Earth.
You don’t believe any of that now because you know better. Because we’ve learned some things that our ancestors did not know.
As a result, we think those formerly normal beliefs are silly now.
The more mistakes we make the more we learn. The more we keep fearlessly making mistakes and learning from them the more we’re going to look silly to the people of Earth 2414CE. Just like the beliefs people had 400 years ago make those people look silly to us today.
Which brings me to:
What beliefs do you or I hold today that are going to make future generations think we were idiots?
I can hypothesize a few. You?
¹ Thanks to John Gaunt’s vital statistics work in the 1600s for the data.