Unironically, that sounds like a great task for AI.
Can you think of any now?
Submitted 6 months ago by LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/2l/Vt/2lVtS7OeYhBiPfn.jpg
Comments
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 6 months ago
SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
Great for automatically generating falsehoods; this is true.
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Well, I let you be the judge. Here’s a list of outdated facts that were commonly taught before the year 2000 but have since been updated, courtesy of ChatGPT:
Science / Space
Pluto is a planet.
Back then, Pluto was still the 9th planet. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as a “dwarf planet.”
The universe’s expansion was slowing down.
Many textbooks still suggested the universe might eventually collapse in a “Big Crunch.” In 1998, evidence of accelerating expansion was found, but it hadn’t fully filtered into school curricula by 2000.
Dinosaurs were cold-blooded and scaly.
In 2000, the “feathered dinosaur” revolution was just starting. Today, we know many theropods (including raptors) had feathers and were likely warm-blooded.
The continents “drift” slowly but are mostly stable now.
Continental drift was taught, but the understanding of plate tectonics was less developed in school-level detail. We now know tectonic activity reshapes Earth far more dynamically than was often taught.
Biology / Medicine
The human genome was incomplete.
In 2000, the Human Genome Project had just released its first draft. Many textbooks underestimated how complex genetics really is — for example, they suggested humans had ~100,000 genes, but it’s actually about 20,000.
Ulcers are caused by stress and spicy food.
That was the classic teaching. By the 1990s, scientists had already shown that ulcers are often caused by H. pylori bacteria, but the update wasn’t in most classrooms yet.
“Junk DNA” does nothing.
The idea that noncoding DNA was useless filler was common. Now we know much of it plays regulatory or structural roles.
History / Social Studies
The internet is a fad.
You may have heard skepticism about the internet being overhyped. Few predicted how deeply it would transform society in just two decades.
Christopher Columbus “discovered America.”
By 2000, it was still widely taught that Columbus “discovered” the New World, though evidence of Norse settlements (like at L’Anse aux Meadows) was already known — just not widely emphasized. Now, school curricula are far more likely to teach about Indigenous civilizations and earlier arrivals.
The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space.
This “factoid” was common in classrooms, but it’s false. The wall is not easily visible from orbit without aid, while cities, roads, and airports often are.
Soktopraegaeawayok@lemmy.world 6 months ago
[deleted]SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org 6 months ago
So straight up timeless facts only?
yabai@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Oh I’ve got a good one. Learned in the American south. Supposedly the American Civil War was not fought over slavery, but differing railroad track widths. Slavery was a minor detail that was a scape goat for the north to force the south to use its standard railroad width.
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s not just about slavery. There was also state’s rights (to slavery), and the economic disparity (turns out free men work harder than slaves?!), and a clash of religious ideals (people that interpret the Bible as pro-slavery vs people that believe benevolence requires abolition). There were even one or two spots where water usage rights and federal funding were in controversy.
kunaltyagi@programming.dev 6 months ago
The American South will attempt to make any minor issue as the root cause of the Civil War, except for the slavery issue.
Afterall, slavery and racism wasn’t that ingrained in the society. If you look past the court cases, extra judicial killings, lynching, riots, coups and massacres.
Magnum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
lol
MrSulu@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
“Yeah, but they ain’t disproved my beleif in the flat earth” (sarcasm because crappy day in work)
Adalast@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Hope things get better man, or whatevet idiot manager you have gets caught with his hand in the boss’s daughter’s cookie jar.
MrSulu@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Cheers mate. Much appreciated.
missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
I was taught that serious academics favored Support Vector Machines over Neural Networks, which industry only loved because they didn’t have proper education.
oops…
bluemellophone@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Before LeNet and AlexNet, SVMs were the best algorithms around. People used HOG+SVM, SIFT, SURF, ORB, older Haar / Viola-Jones features, template matching, random forests, Hough Transforms, sliding windows, deformable parts models… so many techniques that were made obsolete once the first deep networks became viable.
The problem is your schooling was correct at the time, but the march of research progress eventually saw 1) the creation of large, million-scale supervised datasets (ImageNet) and 2) larger / faster GPUs with more on-card memory.
missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
HOG and Hough transforms bring me back. honestly glad that I don’t have to mess with them anymore though.
I always found SVMs a little shady because you had to pick a kernel. we spent time talking about the different kernels you could pick but they were all pretty small and/or contrived. I guess with NNs you pick the architecture/activation functions but there didn’t seem to be an analogue in SVM land for “stack more layers and fatten the embeddings.” though I was only an undergrad.
do you really think NNs won purely because of large datasets and GPU acceleration? I feel like those could have applied to SVMs too. I thought the real win was solving vanishing gradients with ReLU and expanding the number of layers, rather than throwing everything into a 3 or 5-layer MLP, preventing overfitting, making the gradient landscape less prone to local maxima and enabling hierarchical feature extraction to be learned organically.
wer2@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
When I was in school, we were taught that vaccines work. /s
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
When I graduated highschool, the idea that some dinosaurs had feathers and evolved into birds was still “fringe science”.
Srootus@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
In my moc-GCSE year(s), my science teacher was so confident that blood was blue in the veins, I called her out on it but she was so adamant about it.
Professorozone@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Sure, some are still taught. Like you can catch a cold from being in the cold.
Alteon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I always understood it as your immune system gets weaker from being in the cold and makes it easier for viruses and such to propogate in your body. We’re constantly fighting off minor infections and disease, and thankfully our immune systems are pretty strong…cold does not help it.
I’d say this one is sort of true…in the right context.
Professorozone@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My wife likes to say that so she can keep believing that you can catch a “cold.”
No cold virus. No cold.
bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I thought the opposite. That when you’re cold, and your body releases Norepinephrine, that it re-enforces your immune system.
Which makes sense to me from a personal experience. I like to run around in the snow in tshirt and shorts and embrace the cold. I very rarely catch colds and always thought it was genetics and not a product of environment
Srootus@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
My mum says this all the time, haven’t the heart to correct her though
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
School experiences are too varied for such a site to exist. Examples:
Climate change was universally agreed upon to exist and be caused by people 30 years ago. For some reason it no longer appears to be.
Leif Erikson was taught to us back then but you’ll find people today that celebrate Columbus.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Climate change was universally agreed upon to exist and be caused by people 30 years ago.
It certainly wasn’t
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
The Leif Erikson one is very subjective though; you could celebrate:
- The first humans to cross the Bering Strait, which is a long extinct lineage
- The earliest ancestors to settle the Americas, whom we don’t even know the descendants of
- The first Europeans to reach the Americas, ie Leif Erikson (Polynesia did it much later)
- The first people to cross an ocean to get to the Americas, most likely Polynesians but possibly Columbus
- The first Europeans to form a permanent settlement in the Americas, ie Columbus
- The founders of the forerunner to the US, ie Walter Raleigh & co
- The founding fathers for founding the US
And plenty more I’m sure you could come up with
humorlessrepost@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The Leif Erikson one is very subjective though;
you could learn all the words to De Colores
Etterra@discuss.online 6 months ago
People believe enough random bullshit to tickle their memories with their classics list.
Schlemmy@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
‘‘You won’t have a calculator in your pocket all the time!’’
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I didn’t graduate highschool though
BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen goes a long way to accomplish this. At least it did for me.
bebabalula@feddit.dk 6 months ago
USA is a democracy
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Wrong. It’s a republic.
Stupidmanager@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Don’t worry friend. We shall let you go on vacation to learn the truth of the history you should really know. Also, it is not vacation.
drath@lemmy.world 6 months ago
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 6 months ago
The quote isn’t
those who remember the past won’t repeat it
Thinking it does is falling for the ol’ Oracle of Delphi phenomenon of misreading the claim.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Not sure it is about remembering as much as how one’s brain works as some are more emotional than intellectual.
thejoker954@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That quote is being proven true right now though?
People don’t really remember what happened with the nazis. Most of the people who actually lived that past are dead now.
And the vast mojority of people lack enough empathy/understanding to be able to ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ as it were and extrapolate the horrors from the most readily available histories.
AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I had this really awesome kind of angry and nihilistic history teacher in H.S. who offered an elective course that studied the repeated patterns through history leading up to genocide. It covered Armenia, Rwanda, and the Holocaust.
I don’t know if it was just the fact that we looked at the repeated overlaps between human behavior vs just memorizing historical events, but if more people took a course like Crimes against Humanity maybe they would be able to spot the clear patterns of human behavior that somehow happen over and over again.
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.
Yep, the Holocaust didn’t happen overnight. It’s always starts as a slow slide into genocide, but once it picks up steam it turns into an avalanche. It drives me nuts that people keep pretending we should be entertaining any of this as just normal politics. The reaching across the aisle bullshit was insane a year ago (and really 10 years ago), but at this point it is literally enabling this shit to happen. You’re a collaborator.
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
What you were taught “Flu shots give you the flu”
What we know now A common misconception…
“Updated understanding emerged around 2020”
Updated for whom? Anti-vaccine idiots?
ulterno@programming.dev 6 months ago
They were just a little wrong, “Flu shots give you a flu”.
There are 2 types of these shots essentially:
- the pathogen is put into some other thing that creates stuff that fights against said pathogen. That stuff is then extracted and given in the shot.
- the pathogen itself is processed and given to you. This causes your body to make stuff that fights against the pathogens. Your body then vaguely remembers how the pathogen felt and hence, increases the reaction your body does to any attack from a similar pathogen that comes the next time. This is the one corresponding to the above quote.
Of course, if your immune system is weak, the processed pathogen can be enough to give you quite a bit of a problem.
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
I know there are different types of vaccines, but really, experience should be enough to prove this assumption wrong many times over. I guess people just don’t get their flu shots…
echodot@feddit.uk 6 months ago
Well some shots do work like that. But you usually don’t get symptoms unless you are immunocompromised and it’s a live (but weakened) version of the virus.
hayashifty@lemmy.world 6 months ago
1992 Bumblebees defy aerodynamics !
shortypants@lemmy.world 6 months ago
1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.
sharkaccident@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Don’t get me started. He did not invent the lightbulb. Did he “perfect” it? Maybe? But only after trial and error of 100’s of filaments including human hair.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
Can it even be said that it was perfected when later we switched from carbon filament to tungsten, and from there to halogen-surrounded tungsten.
And on the other side, Edison’s lamp wasn’t even the first one to be mass produced and commercially sold.
There’s a certain style of education that really wants to draw a hard line between “before the thing” and “after the thing”, and credit its invention to a single guy. But in really the line is quite wide and fuzzy.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Edison being a giant dick of a patent troll is one of the main reasons Hollywood exists. I’m not sure Musk has anything that impactful on his resume.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’d say PayPal was a pretty big deal but I’m not sure what his level of involvement was
JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Intellectual jokes like this are one of the reasons I’m on Lemmy.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
AND he electrocuted an elephant.
blargh513@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Oh, it wasn’t just elephants. He did it with dogs, monkeys, etc. This wasn’t a one-time thing, he provided this “demonstration” on a variety of occasions.
All because he wanted the world to adopt his standard for electrical transmission, direct current (DC) instead of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC).
Tesla was a brilliant engineer and inventor. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing (though later he did get a little nutty). Edison just yelled at engineers he hired to do work for him.
I am so sad that Tesla’s name has been ruined. He was wildly intelligent and though he was a prominent figure in his prime, he died broke. It’s not bad enough that he went out like that, now we have a fucking clown pissing on his grave by using his name to sell his bullshit nazimobiles.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 months ago
He was trying to prove that electricity was dangerous. Even at the time though a lot of people pointed out that the voltage used was not the voltage used in mains electrics so it was basically a pointless thing to do and people quite upset about the elephant. He did receive a fair amount of bad press for it.
TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I did too many drugs in high school. I don’t remember a lot.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 6 months ago
I went through the two websites posted here for graduation year 2008. The only incorrect thing I was taught that I still believed was:
“Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn”
False. Huh.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 months ago
My brother had to do that for the military at one point. I don’t know what the point was because apparently nothing ever came of it they just did the tests got their results and then apparently everyone forgot about it, because everyone carried on getting trained in exactly the same manner anyway.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 6 months ago
Oh yeah it never was applied. I just remember one of my high school English (Language Arts) teachers talking about it.
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
I just picked up a book on this! There is, of course, an incredibly racist history to the use of these concepts.
multifariace@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Those were disproven long before then. They are interesting to think about as different sensory inputs to engage, but are complete nonsense as far as learning styles.
RedFrank24@lemmy.world 6 months ago
…So what learning styles are there?
ghen@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The fact that we thought Pluto was a planet seemed absolutely insane at the time but none of the kids could question the adult in the room when the stupid rock is literally not even staying in its own lane
echodot@feddit.uk 6 months ago
It doesn’t help that planet has such an incredibly vague definition. Earth is a planet but so is Jupiter but other than being spherical they don’t have anything in common. In terms of similarities, Pluto is much more like Earth then Jupiter is like Earth, at least Pluto has a solid surface.
ieGod@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
It’s not vague at all. It’s a classification that needs to meet three criteria. The lack of this classification is why it was taught that pluto was a planet, but once these things were formalized in 2006 it became clear that pluto no longer met the criteria.
fodor@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
That’s a definitional question, though, is it not? I don’t think any facts actually changed.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 6 months ago
Yes. Ceres was considered a planet when discovered in 1801 and around the 1950s began to be classified as an asteroid. It is now considered a dwarf planet like Pluto. It’s the largest thing in the asteroid belt but is still sort of planet shaped.
ghen@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Okay then maybe the electron shells model of an atom. That was taught as fact and it’s definitely not true even though it’s still useful
etherphon@midwest.social 6 months ago
Work hard and you will be rewarded and taken care of. LOLLLLLLLLLL.
WanderFree@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The United States is a constitutional Republic/democracy with 3 co-equal branches of government…
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I mean it technically still is. de jure at least
It’s like this:
ImageWe need the “under an fascist hybrid regime with a judicial junta (aka: “supreme court”) and a mostly rubber-stamp legislature filled with cultists” to the label in the USA page.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 months ago
I’m not sure that Russia really counts as anything other than an actual dictatorship. It’s not like there’s a free and open choice and people just keep voting against their own interests like in the US, the elections are of course rigged and there are no opponents anyway. Anyone that might stand against him gets assassinated.
Of course Trump probably will try and go that route as well, but he hasn’t done it yet, and he hasn’t consolidated his power there are still people in positions of some authority pushing back against him.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
it’s all just fascism with chrome plating and a spoiler
Kolanaki@pawb.social 6 months ago
Every subject other than English and Math have tons of things that were wrong, misunderstood, or made up back when I was in school. 😩
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 6 months ago
Rome didn’t have special rooms for people to vomit in, then resume feasting.
Soviet blocking brigades weren’t machine gun nests set up to mow down retreating soviet soldiers.
Vietnam had a regular army, it wasn’t entirely a guerrilla force.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 6 months ago
Rome didn’t have special rooms for people to vomit in, then resume feasting.
This is more like not being taught anything other than that they had “vomitoriums,” without being told what they were. Vomitoriums existed. They still exist, too. It just means a large opening or passageway. Like the entrance/exit to the colluseum.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 6 months ago
No, they literally taught that the romans feasted so much they had special rooms for vomiting in. One of my aunts was incredulous that it was no longer taught, and insisted she had been to rome and saw the vomitoria, and remains convinced that it’s just some new theory by some fringe historian.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Vietnam had a regular army, it wasn’t entirely a guerrilla force.
Did they not teach that North Vietnam (and therefore the NVA) existed?
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 6 months ago
Kind of. That’s not really reconciled with the a general impression that the US won every single battle, and couldn’t find any more enemies to fight, because the Vietnamese would run away and hide in the woods or among the locals and the US only lost the war at home.
Overshoot2648@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Fruit and vegetables being separate categories: Fruits are actually a type of vegetable. Additionally cucumbers are melons.
Cyan being a light blue: It is actually 50% green.
Simple machines are fundamental: They completely ignore compliant mechanisms and aren’t atomic. Actually atomic mechanisms would be defined by the type of force, the shape, and the compliance.
The only form of Socialism is Marxism and Communism and Capitalism means markets: Look up Mutualism or Syndicalism.
Basically everything with pop psychology.
I am sure there are more, but these were just top of my head.
maxxadrenaline@lemmy.world 6 months ago
KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE!
masterbaexunn@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t care if it’s wrong, Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself
degoogler@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
In an atom, the electrons orbit around the nucleus in the same manner as the planets orbit around the sun.
That’s been debunked for many many decades but middle scool still teaches this model. At least I wasn’t told back then how misleading and wrong that is, only in high school right before graduating the physics teacher emphasized this misconception. I remember how mad she was about it lol. I have no clue how its taught elsewhere.
Adalast@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The Bhor’s model is at least a useful simplification of the atomic structure. What needs taught is that everything you learn before college and intensive narrow topical courses is simplified to the point of being incorrect with the hope that you get enough of an intrinsic understanding of the concept that the less simplified explanation you get next will make sense. I say this because it will still be simplified to the point of being wrong, but will be a step closer to the truth. This is the essence of education.
Elementary/middle school: ice is water that has frozen solid HS: ice is water that has lost enough energy that the molecules form a crystalline lattice. College: there are actually 19 or 20 kinds of water ice that have been verified, but as many as 74,963 might exist. Post-collegiate: There may be 74,963 kinds of ice, but I know one ICE we should definitely eliminate from this world.