this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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That's a pretty cool attitude to have about it. What's the situation for the last time this happened to you?
It should happen every time you do a literature review. It's part of the process! If you already knew everything, you wouldn't be doing research. :3
The most groundbreaking moment in this sense for me was when I was writing course notes for an introductory course (level 300 on my specialty, I was ready). On a small topic, I had my references lined up, until a colleague shared that the obvious, well-known, widely referenced result had been disproven a couple of years prior. The new proof is far from simple, does not belong in a level 300 class and made me scrap the whole section.
For the interested: the course was Introduction to Numerical Analysis, the topic was the order of convergence of the bisection method. Widely known but wrong result Ironically, I can’t quickly find the paper disproving it.
Last time this happened to me, more or less, I was trying to find the original source of some commonly (in the field) understood thing. After digging deeper and deeper I came out at Einstein or some similar physicist from the early 19 hundredths. That was wild and unexpected, as it was decades earlier than what I expected. The experiments they did to get us here is amazing.
it's really impressive how smart people were back then. we completely tend to underestimate that.
in a similar vein: i think people tend to think that the medieval ages were "dark times" and the people back then were stupid. that's very far from the case. there were significant cultural developments back then. we just completely underestimate the value of that.
I took a class on Medieval Law and it was an amazing insight on how crafty and smart the pesantry was, especially as they fought for their rights. The professor was awesome and kept emphasising how smart they were.
we have approximately the same brain they have, so anything we could come up with, they could come up with.
Ooh, did you read Grágás? It's a shockingly entertaining read for a legal code. The section on Wergild is great, and you can learn a lot about the attitudes the Icelanders held toward different behaviours. Also, it strongly implies that there were at least a few people in Iceland who were training polar bears (which they must have either imported from Greenland, or found stranded on passing ice floes), and those trainers must have lobbied pretty hard, because it was specifically illegal to import trained brown bears from Norway.
There are a lot of gems in there. Simultaneously insightful and very metal.
Honestly, it has been so long. I cannot remember that one in particular so I assume not. We were looking mainly with the continent and Rome. Here are the two textbooks I remember (and still have!):