https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
The history list was most interesting in my opinion.
Obligatory “there’s a xkcd for anything, isn’t it?”
I think the biggest one that was drilled into us constantly, especially about WW2 and Nazis was
“ Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It”
This was a load of shit as evidenced by what is going on in the USA right now and other parts of the world. The real lesson should have been to push back the second a nazi takes an inch as they will take more if you play the nice and tolerate. Not everyone is well intentioned.
1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.
‘‘You won’t have a calculator in your pocket all the time!’’
A short list of things you didn’t realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):
- “The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic.” – It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
- “You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water.” – This doesn’t work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- “Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another.” – They don’t. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
- “…but I saw it in a Disney documentary!” – Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/
I actually learned the lemmings thing from the windows 95 era PC game “Lemmings”. This is also how I learned that lemmings have green hair!
fun fact, lemmings was developed by a little studio called DMA designs, which later changed name to Rockstar North, and is nowadays most known for the GTA games.
That is indeed a fun fact!
My favourite DMA game was Blood Money.
Good old times!
Thanks for bringing that memory up!Huh. TIL.
Yeah I saw lemmings die all the time growing up!!
They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️
I’m not sure if “skilled” is the word, but they get by
Let’s go! Door creaks
PC game “Lemmings”
Best game of all time IMHO. “I’ll just try one more level” followed by the sunrise.
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I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it’s become a bit of a meme nonetheless.
More extracts from that same podcast:
In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.
That’s one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.
The lemmings thing never made sense to me until I found out what the film crew did to them. There’s just no way a species that susceptible to mass suicide could survive long term. They would have gone extinct long before the invention of bored documentarians.
I don’t think there’s a time when everyone knows something
TIL Lemmings are an actual creature and not just from the PC game Lemmings! I’m guessing that’s why it’s named “Lemmy” and then has a logo of a rodent. I just thought it was a random name and a drawing of a mouse this whole time.
The War of the Worlds broadcast didn’t cause mass hysteria, but it did cause some people to go outside and shoot at the nearest water tower.
What about the BBc documentary with the spaghetti trees?
On the lemmings one, have you never seen hexbear?
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The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.
See, I was told that too, but no one bothered to explain what that means. I still have no idea what that actually means. What is a powerhouse?
A mitochondrion (pl. mitochondria) is an organelle found in the cells of most eukaryotes, such as animals, plants and fungi. Mitochondria have a double membrane structure and use aerobic respiration to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is used throughout the cell as a source of chemical energy.[2] wickerpedia
Cells can’t use the energy from sugar directly. The mitochondrion turns the sugar into another molecule that other organelles can use for energy.
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a nucleotide triphosphate[2] that provides energy to drive and support many processes in living cells, such as muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and chemical synthesis. Found in all known forms of life, it is often referred to as the “molecular unit of currency” for intracellular energy transfer.[3] John “Wick” Peta
Friendly neighborhood microbiologist here. You’re right except for one thing: most cells can use sugar directly through anaerobic respiration. Mitochondria facilitate aerobic respiration, which utilizes oxygen and is far more efficient, albeit a bit slower, and produces carbon dioxide as its end product.
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
I can get as nerdy as you want if anyone has any questions.
Edit: another cool one! Part of the process that regenerates ATP from ADP is ATP synthase. Look it up! It’s literally a little biological waterwheel that utilizes a chemical gradient, established by the mitochondria, to smoosh ADP (adenosine DIphosphate) and a phosphate back together into ATP (adenosine TRIphosphate).
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
Maybe the way you do it. I lost 5 pounds this morning, you wouldn’t want to breathe.
On that (brown) note: most of the solid part of shit is actually (dead) gut bacteria, not food waste
This is why partially why fiber helps with bulking and pooping. Fiber is “fiber” because it’s made of things we can’t digest, but our gut microbes can. One of the byproducts of their utilizing it is SCFAs, short chain fatty acids. These confer various benefits like reduced inflammation and enhanced mucous production, which helps you drop a deuce.
Feeding your microbes also means you grow more of them, which makes your turds bigger and easier for your intestines to push along.
Yet another fun fact: ruminants like cows ferment otherwise indigestible plant matter in their guts, breaking it down and growing absolutely huge quantities of microbes in the process. Then they digest those microbes. That’s how they get enough protein. A cow is a mooing, shitting house of horrors if you’re a microbe.
Well tough guy, this morning was an oatmeal surprise swirl, with carrots, two inches above the waterline. In a Crane Galaxy #3251D701100, you do the math.
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
BRB. Hyperventillating to test a theory…
(Going to assume this just results in a smaller quantity of calories processed per breath before anyone get’s all sciencey on me.)
It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
What would happen if I got ATP injected directly in the blood stream? And what about the stomach? Skin?
Depending on the concentration, it would hurt as it’s a bit of an acid, plus ATP outside of the cell is one of the mechanisms that drives inflammation, but it won’t give you extra energy or anything.
ATP is used to transfer energy more than store it, more like a wire than a battery. The average adult has about 250g of ATP in their body (for my fellow Americans: about one rather chunky hamster) but it’s recycled about 200 times a day, so would require 50kg (6 watermelons or two average labradoodles) if it was used and discarded.
ATP has been around since the beginning of life or near enough, and evolution is a deranged, cat-piss-soaked hoarder that makes use of whatever is already lying around, so ATP also does several things beyond energy transfer. This also means where ATP is allowed and in what quantity is fairly controlled. To that end, there’s a class of enzyme called ectonucleotidases that’s found on the outside of cells. One of the things it does is keep the level of circulating ATP and things like it low, so whatever was injected would get chopped up pretty quick.
Cells can’t use the energy from sugar directly.
Well, they can, but it’s not very efficient. They produce 4 atp at the cost of 2 atp. The mitochondrion generates 34 atp from pyruvic acid at the cost of 2 atp.
Keeping in mind those numbers are vibes and not exact
They were a 1980s superband with Robert Palmer, I think.
*Power Station
No that was The Power of Love by Huey Lewis.
It just means it’s the system that turns food molecules and oxygen into energy for the cell. The cell itself doesn’t know how to do this which is quite spectacular when you think about it. So if the mitochondria died the cell would die.
There are human cells without mitochondria, and plenty of energy chains outside of mitochondrial action.
There are, in fact lots of them: your red blood cells, for example.
Mitochondria are more efficient at energy production, not the only source. Red cells use glycolysis.
You as a human organism would die pretty fast because you need that more efficient energy production but a lot of your cells would be fine until the effects of the system collapsing around them go into effect.
Don’t think about that metaphor too deeply.
When cells devide there’s a top cell and a bottom cell, the bottom cell is where the powerhouse is generated
Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
No one tell them.
Oil and gas is the powerhouse of the cell - Exxon Mobile
T H R I L L H O
Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!
USA is a democracy
Class of 2003.
Food wheel was taught in elementary school. As were the taste bud “zones” and the American Dream.
We had the Food Pyramid here in Canada, which is very similarly a lie pushed by the dairy and grain industries and not linked to any real health benefits.
I now refer to the [https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-eating-pyramid/](Harvard food pyramid) that seems to be meaningful
When I was in school, we were taught that vaccines work. /s
I don’t care if it’s wrong, Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself
The United States is a constitutional Republic/democracy with 3 co-equal branches of government…
The one that immediately springs to mind doesn’t exactly fit the criteria, because it wasn’t even true at the time that I was taught it in public school in Texas. But my history teacher taught me that no real historian called it the “American Civil War,” and that it was correctly called “The War of Northern Aggression.” And, of course, although the Confederacy did want to keep slavery legal, their actual central reason for seceding was “states rights.”
Like I said, both of those are simply lies. Only propagandists call it “The War of Northern Aggression”, and it was always explicitly about slavery.
The sad thing is that I believed and repeated these lies for years after that. Note that, like most people, I didn’t have access to the internet to easily check things myself. Since at the time I had zero interest in reading about history, it was difficult to correct my knowledge.
It has demonstrated, to me at least, the importance of keeping propaganda away from children. The more you lie to children, the harder it will be for them to become functioning adults.
“The atomic bombings were necessary” was something we were expected to internalize as an indisputable hard fact, like gravity and oxbow lakes.
Whereas the actual phrase should be “the atomic bombings were necessary to force an immediate total surrender and scare them damn commies before they could take any credit for the Pacific theatre”
Is it not just the misinterpretation of the fact that the US wanted to end the war quicker to prevent sending more soldiers into a meatgrinder?
You can certainly call that “necessary” to prevent further deaths of US soldiers.
The narrative of the Pacific theater still being an intractable or unbeatable long-term conflict in 1945 was hugely overstated, and also leant heavily on racist notions of the Japanese being “brainwashed”.
Also, most wars could be ended more quickly by committing war crimes, we don’t allow it as a justification when it’s done by the losing side. There was also the option of using them on purely military targets, instead of the middle of a major city, murdering a six-figure number of civilians.
The “brainwashed” thing is somewhat true, at least from the perspective of an outsider, not due to a racial thing, but there is a cultural aspect in addition to the tendency for all sides to be brainwashed by their own propaganda.
But the Japanese propaganda told their soldiers to fight to the death, because if the Americans captured you, it would be worse than death. So, from the outside, they did appear to be brainwashed in that regard. Of course, Americans had similar propaganda making Japanese seem as evil as possible, often in the most racist way, so you’d have to say that Americans were brainwashed, too.
Also, culturally, I think American culture emphasizes each person more, while Japanese emphasizes community more, which means things like kamikaze are easier to sell. And that sort of thing also appears like brainwashing to the outside.
I mean, kamikaze pilots did exist, so there had to be a certain level of what you’re calling “brainwashing”.
And unless it’s also a myth (completely possible), but weren’t there Japanese soldiers found on an island years after the war had ended who were convinced that it was still going on?
I’m pretty sure the largest consideration was keeping the Soviets from claiming land in Asia the same way they did in Europe.
Also, we had this shiny new toy and a war was on; we weren’t going to not use it.
I’d be curious if you listened to this what you would think. It does a really good job of laying out the timeline of decisions. I don’t think the atomic bombs were nessecary to draw the war to a close.
I think there might be an argument for the first bomb, but the second was completely unnecessary.
Not true.
Even after the second bomb, Japan almost faced a military coup in order to keep the war going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
They were not going to surrender without a massive show of force because of their culture.
They had literally agreed to surrender before the first bomb dropped, their only condition being that the emperor remain, which the US agreed to anyway.
Can you read?
In our timeline, after two nuclear bombs were dropped, a coup almost happened that would have blocked the surrender of Japan. Would it have been different without the bombs?
Similarly, in the US Northeast, I learned about the civil rights movement as a solved problem, and that slavery was basically the only (and long gone) system of oppression we’d had. “Black and brown people have their equal rights now, carry on!”
I had a college professor, Honors US History, teach us that the Civil War was about trade, an agrarian society against an industrial society. Which makes sense and is true in part, but I wish I had known to bring up the various state letters of secession naming slavery as the #1 concern. LOL, Mississippi’s is a doozy.
I was taught it was about states rights, too. In Kentucky, they were less forceful about calling it the "war of northern aggression.
Did you get taught that some slaves liked being slaves because it meant all their needs were met and they didn’t have to worry about anything?
I don’t recall specifically being taught that, but I do recall believing that was a fact at the time, so it is very likely that I was taught that in class.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple of slaves like that, but even so, it’s a misleading statement. I actually think that using the truth to lie is a worse sin than just outright lying, because it’s easier to mislead more people like that.
Somewhere Bibi is frowning sternly at you
The texas schooling system is horrendous.
Most texans are genuinely dumb as shit because of how they’ve been hamstrung by their “education.”
When I went to grade school, I think it really depended on the local school district. I was lucky enough to grow up in a nice area with well-funded schools, and I have relatively few complaints about the education I received. However, in doing school activities, I had the opportunity to see schools in poorer districts, and there was a distinct difference.
At the time, I didn’t think too much about the difference, except that I didn’t feel as safe in some schools.
But looking back… Now I know why parents always shop around for better school districts, because there are some places where it would have been far more difficult to get a decent education.
That’s my knowledge from many decades ago. Maybe it’s gotten worse since then.
For me it’s the regions of the tongue thing. It never made any sense, and a 6 year old with a sugar cube could have disproved it. Yet they taught it in schools for years.
We did test it in school with different substances
I was like “I can mostly still taste it everywhere” and the teacher basically told me I was wrong
Yes. We did this experiment in school, too!
I can confirm that a six year old with a sugar cube can at least throw some skepticism at this one.
I was told I must be doing the experiment wrong.
I did get a quick preview about education, gullibility and gaslighting on that day.
The idea, to me at least, wasn’t that the regions were completely distinct, merely dominant.
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What
What chicken? Sorry I have no idea what your saying.
wow, sorry, seems I clicked reply on the wrong comment. The app I use is more fiddly than I thought 😥
Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger…
Acceleration, temperature, body configuration (positioning), pain, balance and hunger are all related to touch in one way or another.
Time, however, is legit. Along with emotion. Maybe you could call the 6th sense cognition?
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It’s only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don’t actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified “touch” perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one’s proprioception, because it’s all integrated in how it’s perceived.
Proprioception (body config) is actually feedback from the muscles.
Also they forget or were unaware of the most interesting sense: CO² chemoception. It is how our lungs tell if we need air.
And interestingly: no sense for wetness.
Getting the washing off the line…time to play “is it still wet, or just cold”
Walking/riding in a thin rain coat, the sensation of rain telling your body you’re completely soaked, while dry as a bone underneath.
Facts.
You are missing CO² chemoception. Our lungs tell us if there is a lot stale air, but not if we are in a pure nitrogen environment.
Isn’t acceleration just a sense of balance? Like you feel acceleration because the whatever fluid moves in your ears due to acceleration which is the same as balance.
I was going to say you have a static sense of what orientation you are in, e.g. you can tell standing up Vs lying on your front/back/side without relying on other senses and that feels different to the sensation of moving…
But thinking about it I guess the orientation sense is just detecting acceleration due to gravity?
I guess so, but similar to how a lot of taste is actually perceived via smell? I suppose linear and angular acceleration could be two separate senses which encompass the sense of balance.
Eh, it’s not really similar though. Yes, a lot of what we think of as “taste” is actually perceived via smell. But separately from that, there is actually a phsyiological sensation of taste that is unrelated to smell, i.e. the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury.
Whereas there isn’t really any meaningful distinction between the sense of acceleration and balance. They’re exactly the same sensation, and the mind only knows which one you’re actually experiencing by cross-referencing what your other senses tell you. If you’re in a situation where these other senses are unavailable, people generally can’t distinguish whether they’re accelerating or off balance.
This has led to a number of plane crashes in history, in situations where pilots are in dense cloud cover and can’t see the horizon. During stressful situations, if they forget to look at the artificial horizon display, they think the plane is pitching up, and therefore try to pitch down to correct, when in fact the plane is accelerating (due to already being pitched down), resulting in a crash.
well, theres the sense of taste, referring to sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. then separately theres the sense of smell, sensing what we call aromas. These are two separate senses.
Our perception of taste could be argued includes the two senses
i’d say the somatogravic illusion being a thing kind of proves you right.
it is why kobe bryant helicopter crashed. the pilot lost in a fog thought he is going up, when he was just accelerating down really fast. there is air crash investigation episode about it.
I guess the big one for me is the whole Mozart for babies thing. It wasn’t Mozart’s music making babies and young children smarter, it was a combination of more affluent parents or at least parents with college plus educations having time and income to spend on enrichment activities.
