What is something many people believe but is not true?

That the 13^th amendment outlawed slavery.

That the first amendment and free speech are the same thing

That trans women on hormones have a significant advantage in sports

That they're right. You should be able to question your own opinions. A lost art, it seems

At the risk of upsetting people, most if not all religions. They can't all be right.

You have to completely decharge batteries before recharging them.

That by not being ridiculously overtly bigoted, they have actually interrogated and rejected their own bigotry. The former is basic and mostly relies on social conditioning. The latter requires reading history and people who are criticizing things with which you may identify and therefore take very personally. The latter is not taught in school and school does not provide the tools (outside of literacy) to do so, so it's a difficult, painful, abd regrettably rare thing to see, usually requiring sone trauma to change.

I know it's low hanging fruit, but religion.

That looking too closely at the screen will blind you or damage your eyes. This myth originated decades ago in the 1960s from an advertisement by a television manufacturer. Basically in 1967 General Electric reported that their color TVs were emitting too many x-rays due to a factory error, so health officials recommended keeping children and pretty much anyone else at a safe distance from the screen. The problem was soon resolved, but the myth endured.

If you ask me I would say that x-ray radiation has little to do with going blind, I have no idea if radiation can actually make you blind, but it's funny how somehow eye diseases got in the way as the only possible consequences in the myth just because we use our eyes to watch TV.

I always think about when I was taught about taste and the human tongue back in grade school, they had these diagrams about zones on the tongue corresponding to sweet, sour, bitter, etc. like a "taste map". I'm not sure how many generations were taught about it but turns out it just isn't true at all. So, not like it's important but you got a lot of misinformed folks out there in regards to taste lol

That the average person will swallow 8 spiders a year in their in their sleep.

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That learning styles exists

That there are heroic countries in the world.

The government is looking out for your best interests

That humans use 10% of our brains. We use 100%. Intelligence is correlated with the type of brain matter present.

That people were killed in Tiananmen Square itself, that the soldiers were the first ones to kill, and that the death toll was something like 10,000. It gets played up on Reddit because of red scare propaganda and plain old chauvinism.

I wasn't going to say that at first [simply because it's a bit obnoxious] but since other people are courting drama and I was collecting links from another conversation so it's convenient to do, so I'll repost them here:

There was a great deal of violence and many students (along with other protestors, as well as the militants and soldiers) died, so I'll mark each link with an appropriate content warning, though that's mostly because the last one is rough, while the ones before it are unlikely to cause people issues.

First, here are video interviews with some of the former student leaders, the first one with Chai Ling actually being before the incident took place. There is some gunfire and yelling that a western news program uses for "ambience", but nothing is shown. Chai Ling describes a bloody scene, though that specific scene is patently fictional (this is established by the others who are interviewed).

Next is an article which discusses the subject, partly quoting student leaders above. It describes violence in broad strokes but doesn't have any pictures. It also talks about statements made by a British reporter who was there.

Third, here is secondary reporting leaked on documents from the US Embassy in Beijing and the actual report from a Latin American diplomat that was leaked. The latter revealing contains in its summary: "ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE." (source text is all caps). There is very little description of violence, just mention of gunfire being present, people being wounded, etc.

{Caution} Lastly, here's an article written arguing that the event is misrepresented in mass media. I link it mainly because it includes photographic evidence that is very difficult to argue with for reasons beyond it being difficult to look at. Graphic depiction of stripped corpses of soldiers that were strung up after death.

Obviously there's more than this, but these were the links I collected recently. Chai Ling says things that are even more unhinged in footage I think they excluded from that excerpt of the interview.

That cold water will boil faster than warm water.

It's a confusion. You should always cook with cold tap water, not hot, because hot tap water can contain excessive amounts of lead.

There are several instances where hot water can freeze faster than lukewarm water. I believe people saw this on shows such as Bill Nye and then forgot the specifics.

Americans: You’re not tired after eating Thanksgiving dinner because of tryptophan in the turkey, you’re tired because you ate a lot of food.

That you own your PC

Birds!

That ivermectin is a hazardous medicine..

It's actually donated by Merck since 1970's to African countries to fight river-blindness! The safety profile is well established and it's safe. https://mectizan.org/

The Russiagate https://jacobin.com/2020/04/russiagate-christopher-steele-dossier-trump-election

edit: all the people being mad and downvoting just goes to underscore that once people internalize nonsense, no amount of evidence will change their minds