I went to a Christian private school.That list would take down the website for days!
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Oh hey, I have one for you! I was taught that the Christian flag was the oldest flag in the history of the world.
out of curiosity, what is the Christian flag? I can only think of St George’s cross - England’s flag - or maybe the Vatican’s yellow/white one?
Only if an incompetent made the site. User input is a drop in the bucket compared to aggregation, searching, and now “AI”.
Quickly need to query half a billion results…
Cool concept, but the facts given are a very basic start.
Pretty sure a Redditor coded it in a morning in response to this tweet.
Whois lookup says this. Doesn’t discredit the “hastily thrown together in an hour” idea, though.
Created: 2023-10-02 02:12:17 UTC
It says right at the bottom of the page that it was inspired by a tweet. With the same wording as this post.
I want to say 2-3, it was a quick job for sure ;-)
damn what a shit website.
Some of these things are just like, shit we’ve known since the 60’s repackaged as “hey we’re pretty sure this isn’t that anymore”
Damn, impossible to read from a mobile phone
Got em!
Antibiotics aren’t for viruses. Cold air doesn’t make you sick. Tongues don’t have “taste zones.” Muscles don’t have memory.
And because you threw up for one day, you didn’t have “the 24hr flu.” You ate something bad or someone didn’t wash their hands. The flu is short for influenza, which is a respiratory virus, which typically does not make you throw up and shit. More likely it was the dodgy gas station sushi.
Let’s keep going…
Anyone who has taken FDA mandated food safety training can confirm that food borne illness is the cause of most “stomach bugs.”
Also, there’s poop on everything. Wash your hands.
or don’t. you’re just going to get more poop on your hands.
(of course you should wash your hand before cooking or eating finger foods etc. but don’t overthink it before you end up as germ fobic)
gas station sushi.
One day I WILL buy sushi from a gas station. I just want to be able to say that I have done it.
I like how everyone bitches about gas station sushi, but the hotdogs being kept bacterial-paradise-warm on rollers until the end of time are A-OK.
Hotdogs have so much salt that bacteria can’t live on them. Science.
Bacteria have standards!
just make sure not to black out and wake up in a sewer
But this big rat wants to teach me karate
Why not, i wanna be surrounded by fish. Horny fish.
Stomach flu is a thing, different from influenza
It’s just a stomach virus, not a flu.
Cold air doesn’t make you sick
I hate this one. Doesn’t matter how many times I’ve had to hurry to catch a bus to get to college over the past 3 quarters, my mom will always tell me how I’m gonna get sick from having wet hair because I don’t have enough time to dry it after I shower. So far I have yet to have any negative consequences for those (in)actions.
To be fair, cold air can contribute to making you sick. I got more misled by being told getting a cold had nothing to do with temperature because it is a virus. It is indeed a virus, but you’re more likely to get infected if you get cold.
Isn’t it more that cold weather makes people gather together in enclosed spaces.
It’s a combination of different factors. Cold weather makes it harder for your airways to defend themselves. There are I believe some cold viruses that are viable for longer or are stronger in cold weather, but since the cold is many different viruses I am not sure how much difference it makes.
True. Influenza viruses don’t like heat. You can potentially reduce the amount of active cells substantially by going to the sauna. 60°C is already sufficient to reduce it by 4 orders of magnitude.
It’s because your immune system is less efficient at lower temperatures. So being cold doesn’t directly make you sick, but it can indirectly contribute to getting you sick.
Well your spine has memory tho kinda or is that also wrong?
That’s the difference between gray matter and white matter. Gray matter readily communicates with it’s crowding neighbors and can retain information, while white matter is myelinated so it can send messages over distances. Gray matter extends from our brains down our spinal cords.
Muscles are dumb meat who take their orders from the nervous system. They have no capacity for memory. But training can create reflexes at the spinal cord level which some refer to as “muscle memory,” except it’s not the muscle that should get the credit here.
I never thought muscle memory was “stored” in the muscles. The same way a memory of a smell is not stored in the nose. I was quite confused to see this as a common misconception but it makes sense from the name
Yeah heard about that misconception here for the first time.
Same, do some people think it literally means the muscles have memory rather than you have the memory of what to do with your muscles?
As a massage therapist, unfortunately not only are there massage therapists who have been poorly educated and taught that this is true, but I’ve had countless clients repeat it back to me over the years enough times that I feel the need to attempt to reeducate if I think the person will be receptive to the discussion.
From my experience many people “learn” this because someone well meaning wanted to dumb things down a bit too much and the information wasn’t conveyed very clearly, or there’s practitioners of a variety of flavors that explain how “traumatic experiences are stored in the body’s tissues” and that’s why they have to (insert their brand of therapy.) Another group is surrounding athletes and trainers, who use the term as blurry language and people take them literally as they are then as experts.
It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal until you get a client who thinks that if you hurt them enough with an aggressive massage that it’ll “fix” a past trauma. I wish I were joking.
Your spine has neurons, so kinda.
Wait the flu doesn’t typically cause nausea?!
…that was food poisoning I got as a kid, wasn’t it.
If flu can’t case nausea someone needs to tell our health service https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/flu/
I don’t see nausea mentioned anywhere on that page you linked.
“feeling sick and being sick” That’s the more usual term for it in England.
•feeling sick and being sick
This cat is sick, that doesn’t mean it has the flu
The NHS adjudges that cat as having flew.
This is UK English. It can just mean feeling unwell here, though it can also refer to throwing up. It’s quite a vague term.
You think the NHS website is going to list a symptom of some illness as feeling unwell?
I’m from the UK too. I’m fairly certain that they mean nausea and throwing up.
Dude idk this is the one thing that makes me scratch my head.
Kids seem to throw up often when they are sick. When the adults catch it from their kids, they very rarely have any GI issues but especially not nausea/vomiting. This is absolutely anecdotal evidence, but I anticipate a lot of parents and childcare workers will find rings true enough.
Or maybe it’s my really shitty family genetics and we are all more likely to puke lol
Pretty sure there are strains that can cause nausea. I had one back around 2011 or so that nearly killed me after a week of puking non-stop. I reached a point of just sipping broth, not sleeping for like 36 hours towards the tail end. It’s what made me realize the times I thought I’d had it before were probably just food poisoning
Kids seem to throw up often when they are sick.
The explanation I heard was that kids bodies are still learning how to pilot and maintain their meat ships so their stomachs will sometimes get upset and purge when they don’t need to/shouldn’t
Source: foggy memory of I think it was a SciShow video like 5-10 years ago?
This is why I said “typically does not” instead of never. Some people’s immune systems will go ape shit and get every possible symptom under the sun, and children’s immune systems/reactions can be more stressed till they build some strength and have more exposures through life so their bodies learn how to handle them.
But if someone has a bad day that they’re throwing up/have diarrhea (no stuffy nose, congestion, or other respiratory symptoms) then chances are they consumed something their body is trying to reject.
Tongue taste zones I clearly remember learning about in third grade or so. Also the food pyramid. Saw a video on that recently - what a joke.
There are all such things as antivirals though.
Better still there were a bunch of facts that were false when they were taught to you but for some reason were still taught to you.
Like the obvious one, the tongue doesn’t actually have different regions on it for tasting different things, a fact that you probably didn’t believe even back then because anyone with a sugar cube and 5 minutes can disprove that.
My 6th grade science teacher taught us that blood is red but that some people think it is blue until it touches air because our veins look blue under our skin. He explained how the different wavelengths of light are absorbed differently and they was why it looks that way. Two years later my 8th grade science teacher taught us that blood is blue until it touches air. She was not happy when I told her she was wrong. I even explained it and told her to go talk to the other teacher if she still did not understand. She still would not listen to me. Over half the class was in the same sixth grade class as me but I was the only one that either remembered or was willing to stand up to the teacher. I finished losing faith in the education system on that day.
Well my 6th grade science teacher told us that Chernobyl was fortold in the book of revelations and it meant that the world will end soon. Public school. In New England. In the 90s. The 1990s.
Yup, because people 2000 years ago knew exactly what a nuclear reactor is and that one would explode 1900 years later. How the hell do people come up with this?!
These stories are so crazy to me …… sometimes it seems looks I got a better secular education from my religion school in the 1970s, with nuns. For many years the science teacher was the only lay teacher, never mentioned religion and we were certainly never fed any of that creationist crap from anyone.
It was not a Jesuit school but they really left a great impression of the long history Jesuit pursuit of knowledge and science
You unlocked a childhood memory of my insane conspiracy theorist father ranting about “wormwood” in connection with Chernobyl.
Wormwood, aka Artemisia absinthium, is the active ingredient in Absinthe.
Found it. Seems it’s also an angel from Revelation? Guessing this is what that 6th grade teacher was on about, too:
https://www.endtime.com/articles-endtime-magazine/chernobyl-third-trumpet-revelation/
(Warning: brain worms galore)
tldr:
Is it merely a coincidence that the name of the memorial complex remembering those that died fighting the nuclear fires of Chernobyl is the exact same name of the fallen star called Wormwood referred to in the third trumpet prophecy of Revelation 8?
A teacher not able to fathom being corrected by a student. Terrible and terribly common. Afraid to lose their authority, perhaps? I had this happen to me at around 8 or 9yo : I corrected my teacher on a specific conjugation (the infinitive of a verb), but she wouldn’t admit she was wrong. That day I swore I’d respect anybody in a discussion, even when I thought I was right and they were wrong. I would consider their take at the minimum
My 7th grade science teacher told us that air is a perfect mixture. I raised my hand and said “how is it a perfect mixture when some cities have smog alerts, and the ozone layer hole?”
I want sent to the principal and told to never question teachers, they know more than I ever will. It was then I kind of gave up and saw behind the veil on education.
This is also crazy to me - correcting the teacher was at worst a way to get extra homework and present the facts to the class.
Except computers. Those teachers were lost and welcomed any help
My first grade teacher also taught us blood was blue hahaha
Just billionaire blood. Prove me wrong
Anyone know where i can get a billionaire to test this?
First thing I did when I read that was to put rub something all over my tongue just as a sanity check. When I tried to tell someone they went bonkers trying to defend the school book. From that point on I never took anything school books or adults said as fact without evidence.
I remember when they taught me this in kindergarten didn’t believe them for a second
Some classics:
- lactic acid buildup makes your muscles hurt after a workout
- blood that’s returning to the heart and lungs is blue, blood that’s leaving your heart to go do it’s thing is red
- sugar makes kids hyper
All three of those things have been thoroughly debunked, and are demonstrably false, and yet we teach them all the time. Sometimes it’s even SCIENCE TEACHERS that are repeating these things, and sometimes it’s right in the textbook!
Don’t forget how chocolate, even in tiny amount, will kill a dog. My mother told this to my kids, and they were all confused because our dog ate a bunch of chocolate easter candy and she was fine.
Dogs, and cats although they’re unlikely to actually eat it, cannot eat artificial sweetener as their livers cannot break it down and it becomes toxic to them in moderate quantities. It is often used in a lot of cheaper chocolate, particularly American chocolate. Sugar’s fine though, other than the obvious issues with it.
Somehow dogs cannot eat large amounts of artificial sweetener, got changed into dogs cannot eat small amounts of sugar.
I thought the problem with chocolate is theobromine, same effect as you describe, but bitter and comes from cocoa, so less sweet / more expensive chocolate with higher amount of cocoa is actually more dangerous.
But still, as with any poison, the dose is important, this veterinary page says “One ounce of milk chocolate per pound of body weight is a potentially lethal dose in dogs”, so a dog would need to eat 1/16th of its own weight for it to be deadly, even for small dogs that’s more than a whole bar.
I think it CAN be harmful to some dogs though!
It was a mistranslation of a German paper. Somehow it stuck
That was fuckin’ awesome, thank you!!
I knew I’d heard of a site that did this already. Couldn’t remember the name, though. Thanks!
Actually, this is a really really amazing idea.
Set country as an option, and private/public school (different lies…)
It’d be great to let us all face our biases _
Hard to call it a bias when that was the accepted convention for a large portion of the population.
Can’t really blame someone for being taught something than never having it come up again.
Yeah like the food pyramid. That’s not my bias, that was the government fucking up
That was big business fucking with the government on purpose.
Yup. Sucks ass how many of us they conned
Biases? Ignorances, is that the word you meant?
A little of column A and a little of column B.
different lies
A Japanese person asks, “What did my school get wrong about Japan’s involvement in World War II?”
is given an exhaustive history of the World War II Pacific Theater
Even just the map of the world is outdated pretty much by the time it’s taught.
In 2023 Micronesia made a fairly minor change from the former name, “Federated States of Micronesia”. But, in 2022 Turkey now wants you to use its metal name: Türkiye.
Then there’s the new country of South Sudan, Bougainville on its way to splitting from Papua New Guinea. And Kosovo shows another problem – whether its an independent country or not depends on who you ask. That includes regions like South Ossetia, Transnistria, Catalonia and Taiwan.
Then there are things that students are taught that we’ve known are wrong for over a century, but the fully correct version is too complex for anything below a university course. Like, Newton’s laws are appropriate for high school, but they’re known to be incorrect and are simplifications of Einstein’s refinements. But, they’re close enough for most purposes, and understanding Einstein’s stuff is pretty hard. Same with models of the atom.
And, history is another subject where the deeper you dig, the more the generalizations you’re taught are shown to be wrong. The names and dates might be the same, but the reason X happened is often a whole lot more complex than the simple reasons given in high school.
I went to visit my mum and dad last year and I found a globe in my sister’s old bedroom from our childhood. It was interesting seeing the handful of countries on there that have since changed.
My globe has the USSR, a very different looking Europe, Ceylon, Formosa and tons of colonies on it. Thanks for that thing, grandpa.
In high school, (mid 90s,) I tracked down when the odd globe we had at our house was produced. It must have been made in 1952 according to the encyclopedias. Tons of countries that no longer existed. Strangely enough this particular globe showed the major water bodies as black, not blue.
I don’t think outdated maps is as important as other things. Because two reasons. Maps are expensive to replace, and maps are politics. So no matter how you print the map, someone will think it’s wrong.
Now if they thought you this knowledge about the maps, that would be really cool.
The interesting thing is that these days the maps people most use are digital ones. They can be updated instantly for everyone who uses them. But, even in that world you have problems.
In many countries it’s a legal requirement that the maps reflect the country’s definition of its borders. That means that in some cases Google Maps has 3 versions of a map, the one shown to users in country X (say India), the one shown to users in country Y (say China) and the one shown to users in the rest of the world, where the border is marked as disputed.
Like, Newton’s laws are appropriate for high school, but they’re known to be incorrect and are simplifications of Einstein’s refinements. But, they’re close enough for most purposes, and understanding Einstein’s stuff is pretty hard.
There is difference between good enough approximation and completely wrong. Some of stuff was last.
Same with models of the atom.
Not same. Physics textbooks for I had had planetary model, while chemistry textbooks explained quantuum mechanics model.
Yep. Newtonian physics got us to the moon. If quantum mechanics had been involved with the technology of the time, nothing would have gotten built.
GPS looks sadly at your comment
That’s just everything that looks at me.
I remember a teacher very excitedly explaining the outdated nature of the map mounted on the wall and showing us the current map. Us 4th graders were not super impressed, but as an adult I’d be just as excited as the teacher
“When and where did you graduate”
Texas: 2024
“… How can you even read this?”
Because they used Texan hieroglyphics!
🥩 🤠 🥩 🐮 🔫 👢 🔫 🤠
So I’m super liberal overall, but I’m also Texan, so I do in fact love shooting guns and being on the ranch…
Dammit you nailed me.
Though I don’t love cowboy boots. They’re just too uncomfortable and difficult to get on and off for something that costs what my first car did.
Hence the dictionary changes
Just read the wikipedia list of common misconceptions
list of common misconceptions
The Middle Ages were not “a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition”; the Church did not place religious authority over personal experience and rational activity;
Like hell it didn’t.
and the term “Dark Ages” is rejected by modern historians
Because it’s a prejudicial term, not because the past isn’t fucking shitty.
Because it’s a prejudicial term, not because the past isn’t fucking shitty.
If that were true then what do you call the classical age? The darker ages?
We generally say ‘Antiquity’ and ‘Late Antiquity’ anymore.
Ooh present-tense anymore! Really don’t see that very often, but it’s got a nice ring to it
Edit: it’s a positive anymore not present-tense. Thank you @oktux@lemm.ee!
Can you explain please ? I don’t understand their sentence as it is. What’s surprising to me isn’t the present tense, it’s the fact that it isn’t negative.
It sounds odd to me too, but I found a wiki article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore
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Might work for some countries, but the problem is that schools in the USA completely lack centralization: each school district is its own separate governing body. Jason was taught that Pilgrims to America were persecuted Christians seeking adventure and made treaties with Natives, while Derek was taught about socioeconomic nuances of 17th-19th Europe leading to incentivized settlements particularly attractive to hardcore religious extremists who then waged relentless war on the Native Americans.
There are no Universal Lies that everybody was taught, except for Dark Matter.
What’s wrong with dark matter (and energy)?
There’s a big debate now about whether dark matter really exists or there’s a better explanation for how most of the mass of the universe seems to be unable to be perceived. Related to gravitational waves lately I believe.
Take this for what it is I’m not a scientist I just occasionally read science articles.
I think you’re getting confused with dark energy. There is very little debate about dark matter–it’s an observation that many many many people have made.
Dark energy is the name for whatever is causing the
explanationexpansion rate of the universe to increase. There’s quite a bit of debate about whether the expansion rate even IS increasing. And the amount of increase is different according to how you try to observe it. So yeah, there’s a lot of debate about whether dark energy is actually a thing, but there is very little debate on whether there’s more matter than we’re able to observe, something that we call dark matter but which we don’t really understand. Similar names, but totally different concepts!I thought the only observation we have of dark matter is via cosmological models.
It’s an interesting idea, but it assumes that physical forces are getting WEAKER over time, and that’s a pretty big assumption. It’s not very parsimonious.
I’m not a subscriber to this particular theory, but I do think model error is a more plausible explanation than magical, undetectable mass.
The mass is definitely detectable–it’s just not visible. And it’s detectable in several different ways that all match, that’s the key here. This is definitely an observation.
That was just a bit of snarky commentary, no need to read into it.
Dark matter fits what we observe the best out of all of our models, but we’ve never observed it despite the many massive detection chambers we’ve built or probes we’ve sent out.
It’s long been stated by astronomers it’s an ad hoc theory until they figure out what’s going on.
Dark energy yes. But lots of cosmologists seem convinced dark matter is proven fact. Why are they so certain?
I went to religious school. Graduated thirty four years ago. That list would be mighty long.
I went to religious school. Graduated thirty four years ago. That list would be mighty long.
The list: Everything we taught you.
Pretty much
Funny thing, I think back to how batshit that education was, and I’d say it was way more moderate bordering on sensible compared to the horseshit they teach today.
It’s getting worse, not better.
I help my kids with their schoolwork. It’s pretty reasonable, and also offers plenty of opportunities for me to talk with them about deeper issues that schools don’t have time or expertise in teaching. However even the basics they offer are okay, without any parental kibitzing.
Full disclosure: I live in Holland.
Good schooling in Europe? Big shocker 😅
Full disclosure: I live in Holland.
Well, it’s not Finland, but I guess is good enough. And teachers probably have better work enviroment and pay than in Russia.
Fun fact: we do have bad schooling and overloaded teachers in here… Not to mention the bullying problem that even the ex-president was worried about. The quality is dropping because +300 students are being crammed under the same roof. And the politicians are only making it worse by not letting the teachers do their job and are cutting costs. (Constantly shifting how to do their job) This will not go down well for any students that have even minor difficulties in learning…
Bleh, sounds familiar…good luck :(
bordering on sensible compared to the horseshit they teach today.
Hey! Horseshit isn’t as bad as what they teach today!
- Colorful Ponies Association
In the beginning…
But at least you only have to identify everything once and every other student for the last 30 years can help you remember…
Back in my day the only planets we knew of were the ones in our solar system.
And there were nine of them!
That’s still very much the case. All planets are, by definition, in our solar system. Any planet-like bodies not in our solar system are called exo-planets.
You make it sound like exoplanets are not planets, but they are, unless you have a recent source that contradicts my education.
Sure, how about this https://www.dictionary.com/e/exoplanets-and-planets-the-truth-is-out-there/
Did you hear about Pluto? That’s messed up, right?
the human named Jerry has something to announce…!
Not really, no… it’s a comet or at best a rogue kuiper belt object. It’s smaller than earth’s moon, its orbit is wildly elliptical, and it hasnt cleared out its orbital path. Many reasons not to consider it a planet, and so it was dropped.
If Pluto was to be called a planet, then Ceres would also need to be called one, and everyone seems happy with calling that an asteroid.
Thumbs nose
You know that’s right.
ITT: People misinterpreting the idea as “facts that your school taught wrong”, when it’s really saying, “things that have changed since you went to school” (either through a change in definition or by new research).
E.g. If you went to school before the early 2000’s, you were taught that Pluto is a planet, while that is no longer true since it was recategorized in 2006.
This is the wrong aporoach.
You should build a mockup site, use it to raise 2M$ for the startup behind it you just created arguing you’re about to collect personal data about the age, education level and place, curiosity, etc. with overinflated numbers on their real values.
Then you hire a bench of students, or better: launch a competition for the best “fact you were told that turned out wrong” with a 1k$ prize that you eventually give to some biz angel’s investrent adviser’s child.
Once data are acquired, claim the company is now worth 10M$ and raise that much in a new round.
Finally, sell the company for 20M$ either to a tech company that will enshitify, paywall and crater it.
You still don’t have your website, but now you’re rich and you no longer care about these things.
Everyones first friend, Tom had the right idea. Check-in and cash-out, how much do you really need to live a happy fulfilling life? He’s chilling on a tropical beach taking pictures of sunsets right now with no intention of going back to his old career.
We could call it thefactsbook
factsbook
I started a subreddit called facefacts at one point, was gonna debunk Facebook bullshit with a JS bookmarklet, but got too busy with work, then Trump flooded the zone and deleted my Facebook and twitter accounts.
oh I get it, my grandma goes on there so often, she must be trying to get true information
I could throw a site together if the community is willing to help curate the data.
From what I read here are some keys to follow:
Year Taught: Year of irrelevance: Country: Fact:
I could throw a form together for submissions to feed this site. Thoughts?
For America, you’ll also need to have a drop-down for states. I graduated from high school in California in 2009, and I’m currently working on a medical degree, so I’d be delighted to contribute to this. I’d especially like to help with a sex ed section for Americans.
I’m not sure I’d want to get that granular because of the same fact was taught across the country there’s no need for the redundancy. Also trying to make this a global website helps removing that level of granularity from the states as well.
Design it so that it can get that granular later(when someone else wants to do that work)
As long as it’s got the capability it can grow into that later. Assuming unexpected and explosive popularity/growth it would be great if wikifoundation acquired it someday as a dataset if nothing else, but having a structure that can be expanded globally at a granular scale baked into it from the beginning would be awesome
Sorry I’m not great with computers or i would offer more of a technical opinion not just design commentary
The differences in curricula across states mean that some states would have gotten the correct information while others may not have. I know the science and history classes in my state were pretty different from some other states.
Thats not just the case in the US though
That’s part of my point. My American education was pretty limited on the internal politics and civics of other countries, but my husband who went to high school in a different state did get a decent amount of information about how modern/current European countries are structured. So I guess it’s safe to assume that other countries will also have differences across regions.
I graduated from high school in California in 2009
Hey, me too
You’d probably need to verify all submissions
Unless you throw an LLM into the mix
Or maybe there’s already some resources giving you all debunked facts with their dates
You believe an LLM can be used to distinguish facts from fiction? I wonder up to which year that misconception was taught in school.
The whole point of LLMs is, to convince their users that the “facts” they generate are actual facts.
They can browse the web, and I never meant it would be 100 accurate just easier. Don’t think this is going to be a mission critical website
That just it, these “facts” won’t be on the web for stuff approximately 2005 and before. No where on the web is the racist and homophobic shit I was taught in the 80’s and 90’s listed on some wiki.
LLM’s are mostly useless anyways at distinguishing real information, they are just shit summary tools and poor search engines.
LLM is plausible deniability!
LLMs are not magic, otherwise one just have to request that any submission will have references to reputable sources.
I would probably start out by proofing or approving them before they post to the site. It say I get a notification read it do a little reading over it and get to a point where I can use a large language model to siphon the submissions.
