31–40 of 133 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an extremely good analogy that I must remember (if case anyone quotes this myth to me again, which hasn't happened in a couple of decades... :)
I don’t think anyone except Luc Besson still thinks this is true anymore tho..
Left brain vs. right brain thinking is another myth about the brain that seems to be much harder to dispel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi...
And human brain, mammal brain, lizard brain, stacked.
Both have the issue that the popular interpretation of them are great oversimplifications of models that themselves do seem to have some limited use in neuroscience, but only if you add enough caveats.
So unlike the situation with, say, flat earthers, there's some kernel of truth to it that can be misinterpreted or willfully presented in a misleading way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely true, but there somehow seems different quality to them. The myths of old seemed to be little factoids that were not easy to verify and were taken at face value, then just spread until they became "common knowledge". The new ones seem to have an almost religious quality to them. Flat-earthers for example, if someone told me 25 years ago that this would be a thing I would have just laughed.
> if someone told me 25 years ago that this would be a thing I would have just laughed. Wikipedia says In the modern era, the pseudoscientific belief in a flat Earth originated with the English writer Samuel Rowbotham with the 1849 pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy. In 1956, Samuel Shenton set up the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), better known as the "Flat Earth Society" from Dover, England, as a direct…
It's amazing to think how common these sorts of myths used to be before the internet. If you heard something like this and wanted to challenge it, you would have to get on the bus and spend a couple of hours at the library and return with some photocopies. Now you can pull up Wikipedia on your phone.
There are plenty of post-internet myths that are humming along just fine. :D It's a crazy phenomenon to watch play out.
As an extreme example, pre-internet, a conspiracy theory-inclined person might randomly run across a handful of full-blown conspiracy theorists in his day-to-day life. This makes it easier for him to question his leanings, since he only observes a small minority of people going all-in on the conspiracy theory. Nowadays, a conspiracy-inclined person can easily find online communities comprising all other full-blown conspiracy theorists everywhere the world. This quickly reinforces his belief in the conspiracy, since he sees an apparent majority of people in this online community believing the myth.
https://www.6seconds.org/2022/06/20/10000-hour-rule/
Related Freakonomics episode with Anders Ericsson among others about how to become an expert: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-become-great-at-just...
Completely differently, I heard that the brain is an antenna.
Another similar myth is the one Malcom Gladwell made up about how it takes 10 000 hours of doing something to become an expert at that thing. It was based on research that used 10 000 as an average for 20 year old violinists. The original researcher, Anders Ericsson, focuses much more on deliberate practice than sheer quantity. https://www.6seconds.org/2022/06/20/10000-hour-rule/ Related Freakonomics episode with And…
A prerequisite of becoming a Doctor for example is learning how to read, but that’s not considered part of the time commitment. Recursively when considering how long it takes to be an expert Heart Surgeon there is a tendency to ignore how long it takes to become a Doctor.
It was in the 80's in France where we had a photocopied page with "the most dangerous additives". The worst was E330. 40 years later, I still remember it.
My parents had a copy from sime friends and these well educated people (dad is an engineer and mom a lawyer) checked everything against the list. Just because it was "from the Villejuif hospital".
It was a fake and E330 is citric acid, a benin product. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid
The famous list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villejuif_leaflet
Another similar myth is the one Malcom Gladwell made up about how it takes 10 000 hours of doing something to become an expert at that thing. It was based on research that used 10 000 as an average for 20 year old violinists. The original researcher, Anders Ericsson, focuses much more on deliberate practice than sheer quantity. https://www.6seconds.org/2022/06/20/10000-hour-rule/ Related Freakonomics episode with And…
10,000 is a round number representing a large fraction of a young person’s life, ~20 hours a week for 10 years. It seems significant because we assume talented young people can be experts if they spend a lot of time on something, but it really just reflects the criteria chosen for defining experts and time on a subject. A prerequisite of becoming a Doctor for example is learning how to read, but that’s not considered…