No Justification For Ignorance or Incompetence

With the knowledge of the world available, some still choose to remain ignorant.

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

I was browsing Reddit and came across a post that had a long list of things we were taught as kids that were wrong.

Examples include carrots being good for your eyes, gum taking 7 years to digest, turning the overhead light in the car at night being illegal, the dark side of the moon always being dark, and more.

Some seem like anecdotes, but there were others, too, such as how your muscles get sore due to a buildup of lactic acid (proven false), the myth of Columbus and Thanksgiving, and more.

It got me thinking about how we learn now versus how people learned even 25 years ago.

In the 1990s and prior, when you wanted to know something, you had 3 options:

1. Ask someone you knew
2. Look it up in whatever edition of Encyclopedia Britannica you had displayed prominently on a shelf (if you were lucky, your parents had all volumes A-Z!)
3. Make something up

It’s easy to imagine the scenario:

“Mom, I hate carrots!”