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Thinking Straight I

Published on Jul 18 by Daniel Guidera under Dentistry

Stars

Photo by: Paolo Francolini

Between undergraduate, dental school, residency, and work I spent 10 years at UCLA.  The most important thing I learned was in the first few months.

I took an Astronomy survey course (a course for non-majors) presented by the department chairman Dr. George Abel. A recent Google search showed me that he was a renowned classical astronomer with an additional passion for combating pseudo science and misinformation. That’s my kind of guy.  In a class of 300 students he got up to lecture one morning and inserted some wisdom.

He told us a story of how he read a book years before describing how the moon used to be a part of the earth but broke off to circle it.

At the time he thought “the geology was great but the astronomy was ridiculous.”

Sometime later he had lunch with a friend of his from the geology department. During that lunch, the friend said, “I read this book about how the moon used to be a part of the earth but broke off and circled us. The astronomy was great, but George the geology was ridiculous. Dr. Abel was trying to teach us intellectual humility. This lesson is relevant to every part of our life. In our area of expertise we’re experts, outside of area of expertise we risk being morons.

So what does this have to do with dentistry?  Plenty.

I’ll discuss the importance of things such as “not everything that makes sense is true and your checkbook reflects your values” as it relates to dentistry in my next few blogs.


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