"Judge ideas by future context, not only present accuracy Tao points out that Copernicus's heliocentric model was actually less accurate than the geocentric model that had been refined for a millennium — it 'was a lot simpler but much less accurate,' and it took Kepler to make it more precise than Ptolemy's system. A correct but incomplete theory can look worse than an incorrect but thoroughly polished one. This means you should 'not look at any given scientific achievement purely in isolation and give it an objective grade without being aware of the context both in the past and the future,' which also applies to evaluating nascent ideas at work or in your own thinking. Source: Terence Tao, Dwarkesh Podcast, Terence Tao – Hardest Math Problems, AI's Limits, and Scientific Progress"