this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
1658 points (98.3% liked)
White People Twitter
4492 readers
4033 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a tweet or similar
- No bullying.
- Be excellent to each other.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Wittgensteinian Ladder. The pedagogical expedient misinformation.