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Not that it matters. Children everywhere will still be taught that there are exactly, precisely, unarguably nine planets, because My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, and why else would she have done that?
It really doesn't matter. Whether Pluto is a planet or not, it's still the same ball of ice rocketing around our sun. And no matter if we start calling those thingies out there planets, they won't suddenly become larger or fancier or worth noting, no more than they already are. Nothing about them is going to change just because we change their designation. And nothing about the solar system is going to change - we aren't going to "gain" planets just because we call them differently, though somebody just today made that mistake to me, trying to tell me that we had "found" new planets. Of course we didn't, we already knew they were there!
When I was a kid, I couldn't get a diagnosis of autism. Lots of people who can get that diagnosis now could not have gotten it then. But the diagnostic criteria changed, for a lot of things, in one fell swoop.
The same logical error I mentioned above applies here as well. Just because we have more people diagnosed with autism now than we did ten or so years ago does not mean that the actual autism rates have gone up. There's no way to compare the real numbers from then and now, because the diagnostic criteria have totally changed (among other things)!
But we still get to sit around and listen to boring rhetoric about plagues and epidemics.
Don't fall for it. What we're looking at is diagnostic tinkering, nothing else. It's useful, good for people to have accurate labels - but it's not a cause for alarm. Think a little, would you? That's all I ask.
It really doesn't matter. Whether Pluto is a planet or not, it's still the same ball of ice rocketing around our sun. And no matter if we start calling those thingies out there planets, they won't suddenly become larger or fancier or worth noting, no more than they already are. Nothing about them is going to change just because we change their designation. And nothing about the solar system is going to change - we aren't going to "gain" planets just because we call them differently, though somebody just today made that mistake to me, trying to tell me that we had "found" new planets. Of course we didn't, we already knew they were there!
When I was a kid, I couldn't get a diagnosis of autism. Lots of people who can get that diagnosis now could not have gotten it then. But the diagnostic criteria changed, for a lot of things, in one fell swoop.
The same logical error I mentioned above applies here as well. Just because we have more people diagnosed with autism now than we did ten or so years ago does not mean that the actual autism rates have gone up. There's no way to compare the real numbers from then and now, because the diagnostic criteria have totally changed (among other things)!
But we still get to sit around and listen to boring rhetoric about plagues and epidemics.
Don't fall for it. What we're looking at is diagnostic tinkering, nothing else. It's useful, good for people to have accurate labels - but it's not a cause for alarm. Think a little, would you? That's all I ask.
