A fun fact about taste for you - there is actually no such thing as a ‘taste map,’ or the idea that different areas of the tongue result in you tasting different things. At most, there’s just different regions of sensitivity to taste!
Always thought this was weird and didn’t make sense to my tongue.
You might’ve been taught that lemmings are known to commit suicide because they’re just that unintelligent. Turns out, this isn’t true - they’re smart enough to stay alive!
The game was made as it was because of the myth perpetuated by the documentary. On Linux, there was no lemmings game, it was called pingus and it was penguins you killed instead (there may have be a lemmings for Linux, but the first version of Linux I installed myself had pingus already installed).
Your reply is nonsense. AlI said is that I didn’t see the documentary, and clearly indicated that my long since corrected personal misunderstanding about such a thing was directly due to a childhood video game. If you or others insist on being ignorant douches about that, I can’t stop you.
The theory of a taste map had no scientific basis, i remember funnily enough writing in a school paper that the taste map didn’t exist and got a lower grade for getting my answer wrong even though in hindsight i was the one who was right and i got forced to believe in a medical myth.
I was just far too skeptical for my age and it caused me to have worse exam performance usually having me go from an A to a B- just for defying the teacher. School is more about following authority than anything else I believe.
True. I didn’t openly question things in that class too much for some reason, but I definitely got in trouble for being argumentative in other classes.
I think it’s ridiculous that you can lose a full grade just for being disobedient. I get that school is made for the child to grow up to have a good job but this stops people more inclined to innovate to get far academically.
I had nosebleeds a lot too and everyone always told me that it lets the blood clot better. I’d always tell them I’d rather it just bleed then. So I thought it was true, I just didn’t care, it was uncomfortable.
spoilerWhen I was younger i suffered from a lot of nose bleeds and my parents argued with my schools nurse to not get me to tilt my head backwards because the blood kept on getting stuck in my throat.
One thing that’s kind of funny to me about this is the 1940s, which has a lot of the ones from modern times…
You were probably taught at some point that we’d never be able to map out the entire human genome due to its complexity. However, in 2003, we documented the first 92%, and in 2022 we documented the remaining 8%.
I could be wrong (and I’d be super interested to hear if this was the case), but… Were we teaching kids about the human genome before we even knew the structure of DNA and before we knew that DNA carried genetic information? I know we knew DNA existed, and it was probably hypothesized that it could play a roll in genetics before the Hershey-Chase experiments in 1952, but I’m not sure whether most schools would talk much about anything resembling the human genome in the 1940s? What would have been in the curriculum then? It’s actually kind of wild how much the scientific landscape has changed since then.
From what I could trace, the 1940s myths were most likely spread around then (a lot were circa 1930s), just perhaps less commonly. I can definitely attest that at least in the scientific literature then, that was a common enough idea to be inaccurate since, so I’d assume that it was taught to students when approaching biology too. If I’m wrong on this though I can remove this from the site
Cool, I’ll have a further look at it tomorrow when I’m home.
Open source is defined differently by different people. Some define it by the code being open to see for the public. Some define it by it’s license. In your case both the code is open and an open source license is used.
blank.docxi added this file by accident how do i delete a file in github
I can see you’re a bit new to it 😁. There is a button with … dots with the option to “delete” the file. Keep in mind that it will stay be retained in the history.
Haha yeah, I ended up figuring out how to delete it but kept the original text because I thought it’d be a good bit. And thanks for the info! Glad to know its like that either way
Honestly I don't recall my schools ever having a "school nurse". I assume most of the teachers were trained in first aid. I went to school in Ontario. Are school nurses an American thing?
Update with context for you all since this post is unexpectedly taking off,
This was a small project I made in 5 hours as just a “huh, this would be neat to make!” and as a first coding project. I mostly shared it expecting a little bit of feedback but nothing too major, clearly I underestimated what to expect from it lol.
There’s been a lot of really good suggestions for how to improve the site and make it better, so thank yall for that! Things I’m planning on doing are:
-Making open source so people can edit. Its just basic HTML and JavaScript so nothing too complex there
-Suggestions box on the site
-Some type of regional variations listed on the site
-If possible, more obscure myths and more tied to the curriculum of schools
-Optimizing the site for mobile
Probably more to come as well, but no estimates on a timeframe since I’m very much so new to this haha
Edit: Additional clarification, yes this site is only viable for Americans right now. Would love to help make it work internationally but I’m sure not the person to try and say what people in other countries were taught in school, so if someone wants to help with that lmk!
It should work better on mobile devices now, but if there’s any repeated issues let me know and I can try to fix them.
It should also be public on Github, check out the description tab on the website for more info. My first time making a project open source (or even having one at all) so lmk if there’s any issues!
I’ve never understood this obsession. Odds are you’ve never heard of Ceres, but it was once called a planet. It’s now considered a dwarf planet, like Pluto. Pluto is also less massive than Eris, so if you include Pluto you should also include Eris. None of these have cleared their orbit though.
I understand it’s frequently just a joke, but it’s always rubbed me weird because some people actually became science skeptics because “suddenly Pluto isn’t a planet” or whatever. Really the reason is because the list would get really long if we included everything.
Earth like? No. They’re too small to hold any reasonable atmosphere. That doesn’t rule out life, but it’s unlikely. They’re also likely too small to have subsurface oceans or things like that without being tied to a planet and having strong tidal forces squishing it, in which case it’d be a moon not a dwarf planet.
There’s a good chance when you were younger, you heard classical music in the classroom to try and make you smarter. However, this is a myth - there is no such link between music and intelligence (or that we can measure intelligence for another matter!)
I’ve never heard anyone claim classical music makes you smarter. I have heard people say it makes you focus better, which is true to some extent. This was one of the first things my therapist recommended I try after being diagnosed with adhd. I can’t imagine it isn’t applicable to people without adhd, although probably to varying degrees depending on the person.
The only thing I take issue with is the specification of classical music. Some people have told me this is because classical music doesn’t have words in it, which would distract you instead of help you focus. Not only can classical music have lyrics, but every other genre of music is perfectly capable of not having lyrics. I’m not sure if its even true that the lyrics would distract you in the first place.
Its pretty clear to me that the only reason people play classical music specifically for this purpose is because it makes them feel smart. You could argue that feeling smart might actually help you get things done, but I dislike the perception of classical music as smart people music in general. It’s just a style of music, like every other. There’s nothing that makes it superior or more sophisticated, its just what Europeans liked a few centuries ago.
I guess its more prevelant than I thought, or at least it used to be. Its very confusing to me how people could fall for that. How little do you have to know about music to think a specific type of it will literally increase your intelligence.
I don’t think it’s completely ridiculous on its face. Obviously we have some connection to music (as in, we like rhythms, we like making specific sounds with instruments or our voices, we seem to get into the beat etc.), so why shouldn’t it be possible for music known for its complexity to have an effect on us?
It seems it doesn’t, but I don’t think it’s something where you know so “little” about music if you consider it a possibility.
Just FYI. Thanksgiving is the original blatant Cultural Appropriation. Thanksgiving was one of 13 harvest feast that the Native Americans in the area would hold each year. That’s one of the reasons that Canada and The US celebrate it on different days.
We also stole most of their constitution, except the bit about “no law shall be passed that doesn’t directly benefit all the children of the next 7 generations.”
They had existed relatively stabley for 25,000 years, and we fucked it up, stole what we wanted, and trashed the rest.
This is just more misinformation, actually. Thanksgiving festivals were common in Europe before the colonization of America. See Lammas and Horkey. The settlers just continued their traditions in America. The native Americans had similar traditions, but the idea wasn’t anything new to Europeans. Canada’s Thanksgiving has moved around a lot over the years, but its current day was chosen to separate it from Remembrance Day. Its timing has nothing to do with Native holidays.
I don’t who “they” are to really respond to the rest of your comment. You’re kind of painting the Indians with an extremely broad brush. Almost nothing will be true about all the cultures of an entire continent. The Pilgrims primarily interacted with the Wampanoags, but they didn’t have a written language and there’s certainly no evidence their tribe existed for 25,000 years.
There’s a common belief among the Iroquois that it should be considered how actions will affect the seventh generation, but the idea that that’s in their constitution is a common myth. The Iroquois Confederacy itself was only formed about 1450. If you read the Great Law of Peace, it bears no resemblance to the US Constitution. Calling it plagiarism is ridiculous. There are not even any significant references to the Iroquois by Congress in the 1780s. This is another modern myth which originated in the last hundred years. The Iroquois constitution wasn’t even written for a democracy.
Yeah, that was my big issue with the sites content. I wanted to find a list of obscure things taught wrong by decade, but all I could track down were a few myths that were shared across many different decades, so it led to the current (and imperfect) result.
I want to try and update the site to be more focused on what you mention - things that were taught and later revised, but the only way I can think to do that so far is track down old textbooks and compare them to what’s known now, which I’m not sure the best/most efficient way to do that, or even where to find textbooks by year.
All this to say, hopefully I’ll be able to improve the site in due time to make it better represent different facts and whatnot
You were probably taught at some point that people in the time of Christopher Columbus all thought the world was flat. However, this is a myth that pervades history - most people knew the earth was a globe! (Source)
Goddamnit! I’ve heard that so often already.
And then I learned separately that even the Greeks already knew not only that Earth was round, but even its circumference at a pretty good accuracy.
These two ‘facts’ genuinely had me thinking we must have lost a ton of knowledge from the Greeks…
The real truth is that the catholic church purposefully wanted people stupid and uneducated and that’s why people started believing in the flat earth even after the Greeks. but they don’t teach you that in school!
A lot of their knowledge was from the Sumerians and other ancient civilizations anyway. Sumerians were doing trig thousands of years before the Greeks did; the Greeks’ records were just the ones that were preserved.
It just listed a bunch of myths and old wive’s tales that no one at the time thought were very credible anyway. Literally all of the “facts” they list were common chain letter/email memes that everyone trotted out at parties to sound smart and hip. Nobody ever believed what DARE told us, we always knew Christopher Columbus was an asshole, and every first aid class I’ve taken recommended against the whole tilt you head back thing.
That’s your problem. You can’t seriously argue that these myths were being taught as fact in school because they weren’t. They’re all myths spread by common idiots through word of mouth. Common public misconception on the facts can and does happen very independently of actual education, as evidenced by antivaccers lately. The only things you could honestly add to a list like this would be some scientific theory that has been definitively disproven or amended. Maybe something like changing training about CPR would qualify also.
But those kinds of things are boring. It’s much spicier to claim that people were taught that Columbus’s contemporaries thought the world was flat even though that was just an over simplified story told to 5 year olds to explain why they got out of school on Columbus Day. Meanwhile anyone that didn’t sleep through trigonometry should learn that Eratosthenes showed the world was round about 1700 years before Columbus. I would believe that there are some lazy educators out there that would teach such myths as fact, but to claim that it was at all universal is silly. The whole premise of “old generations dumb, look what they believed” is just so smug and offensive. I must be getting old.
They were. Most of the history we were taught was nothing more than pro-America propaganda.
Like for example, the true horrors of slavery aren’t actually commonly known, nor is the true extent of the effects of post-Civil War racist policies like redlining. Or that “crimes” like loitering and trespassing are actually holdovers from fucking Jim Crow laws. Or that American Mixed people originated as the rape babies of slaves.
Or even colonization. Did you know the stupid fucking goddamn Belgian government was the root cause of the Rwandan genocide? They purposefully pitted the Hutus and the Tutsis against each other by giving the Tutsis special privileges and land and shit decades beforehand, playing on their flimsy understanding of the cultural order Hutus and Tutsis already had, enraging the Hutus. And the Belgian government never owned up or took responsibility for it. It wasn’t just France. Macron legit did apologize for the French government’s role but Belgium never did.
Who here was taught about how the U.S. overthrew legit governments in South America and replaced them with dictators?
Or that Libya was bombed to hell and back not because their dictator was a dictator but because he wanted to start selling oil in gold and not U.S. dollars?
Who is ever taught the true nature of any of this shit?
@ElderWendigo@MiraLazine agree to disagree, a lot of those things I was definitely taught - if not in school then at least by adults who thought it common knowledge. Especially the nosebleeds (I had them all the time as a kid, and the amount of blood I ended up swallowing is..... A lot.) and knuckle cracking (my guess - started by teachers annoyed by kids making knuckle-noises during class)
Christopher columbus was definitely taught as an "American hero" up until he wasn't.
Pretty much all of these examples were pretty often and commonly debunked by all of my teachers, parents, and adult mentors. But that’s exactly why lists like this are garbage, both of our experiences are anecdotal. You just can’t make blanket claims about things like this about entire generations.
Columbus was more a lie of omission than outright falsehood. That item on the list was probably closest to a universal truth taught across the US, as long as you ignore any school with an indigenous student body. But, most of our teaching about any historical figures in grade school is a near obscene over-simplification of the actual people and events.
That’s like saying caffeine or aspirin is a gateway drug because you probably try those before harder drugs. That’s not the only qualification for a gateway drug: it has to significantly increase the likelihood of trying additional drugs, which marijuana in the US does not. Elsewhere it varies, but in the US, you’re not more likely to try heroin because you’ve tried marijuana.
In my country (The Netherlands) weed is defacto legal and widespread yet we don’t suffer from a crisis as severe as the US has, if anything it’s probably less likely that people go to harder substances since weed is so safe and widely available. I can even proudly say that I have never seen a junkie on the streets here.
Cool concept but your site really needs some work done. I heard in school that lemmings would kill themselves and i went in the 2010s. This is only one such example, the best thing you could have done is map out which myths are most common where instead of the decade, and it would also be useful to add a important corrections list for the more important facts which you probably were misinformed about.
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