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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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