We recently wrote a post about Maciej Cegłowski’s essay Scott And Scurvy, a fascinating account of how the cure for scurvy was discovered, lost, and then by incredible chance, discovered again. At the time we said that this essay is one of the most interesting things we’ve ever read, and that we hoped to write more about it in the future. It was, we do, and here we go.

In the other post, we talked about what the history of scurvy can teach us about contradictory evidence — stuff that appears to disprove a theory, even though it doesn’t always. In this post, we want to talk about something different: the power of concepts.

First we’re gonna show you how bad it can be if you don’t have concepts you need. Then we’re going to show you how bad it can be if you DO have concepts you DON’T…