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>Trying to think of knowledge as house of cards is stupid because it somehow implies that knowledge is inherently unstable, which is not true.

Not to be a pedant, but actually to be a pedant : Are you sure? I think the list of absolutely true things 200 years ago and the list of absolutely true things now are probably pretty divergent!

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Nassim Taleb's Black Swan is also a great read on the instability (or in his words, fragility) of knowledge. A single observation is quite often enough to break what has been considered solid knowledge for years.

Eh, you also have to discern between individual bits of knowledge and systems knowledge when considering systems stability.

You can have complete knowledge of a component, but that may not be helpful when attempting to determine the affect of that component in a system where you have incomplete knowledge of other components.

Nonlinear systems that trigger at thresholds are a good example of this.

That's fair. But is it helpful to anyone to think about knowledge shifts on timescales that are longer than two lifetimes?

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