this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Or you get common misconceptions that were never facts. Like you only use 10% of your brain. I don't think science ever said that, but man the idea is/was really common.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

There are also plenty of things in science that are taught that are technically incorrect, but give you a working model that you can build on later. The atomic model being a rather typical example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

That's fair: abstraction. The technical wrongness of "orbiting electrons" as in the whichever-model serves a purpose: the truth is hairy, and more importantly not practically relevant if you're calculating sliding boxes around planes and that sort of thing.

On the other hand, "10% of the brain" and similar nuggets of common "wisdom" are just flat-out wrong, often stupidly so. There's very little use in that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Oh. Yeah. That's a good point. When I taught a dead language, I would tell my students that all grammars lie to you, but some of the lies are useful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The Wittgensteinian Ladder. The pedagogical expedient misinformation.