1d ago

Can you think of any now?

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A short list of things you didn't realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):
"The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic." -- It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
"You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water." -- This doesn't work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
"Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another." -- They don't. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
"...but I saw it in a Disney documentary!" -- Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/
- I actually learned the lemmings thing from the windows 95 era PC game "Lemmings". This is also how I learned that lemmings have green hair!
  
  fun fact, lemmings was developed by a little studio called DMA designs, which later changed name to Rockstar North, and is nowadays most known for the GTA games.
  
  That is indeed a fun fact!
  
  My favourite DMA game was Blood Money.
  Good old times!
  Thanks for bringing that memory up!
  
  Huh. TIL.
  
  Yeah I saw lemmings die all the time growing up!!
  
  They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️
  
  I'm not sure if "skilled" is the word, but they get by
  
  Let's go! Door creaks
  
  PC game “Lemmings”
  Best game of all time IMHO. "I'll just try one more level" followed by the sunrise.
- I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it's become a bit of a meme nonetheless.
  
  More extracts from that same podcast:
  In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.
  That's one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.
  
  The lemmings thing never made sense to me until I found out what the film crew did to them. There's just no way a species that susceptible to mass suicide could survive long term. They would have gone extinct long before the invention of bored documentarians.
  
  I don't think there's a time when everyone knows something
- TIL Lemmings are an actual creature and not just from the PC game Lemmings! I'm guessing that's why it's named "Lemmy" and then has a logo of a rodent. I just thought it was a random name and a drawing of a mouse this whole time.
- The War of the Worlds broadcast didn't cause mass hysteria, but it did cause some people to go outside and shoot at the nearest water tower.
- On the lemmings one, have you never seen hexbear?
- What about the BBc documentary with the spaghetti trees?

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