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No Justification For Ignorance or Incompetence
With the knowledge of the world available, some still choose to remain ignorant.
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:
- Ask someone you knew
- 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!)
- Make something up
It’s easy to imagine the scenario:
“Mom, I hate carrots!”
“Too bad, they’re good for your eyes.”
It was just what she was told by others her whole life.
My favorite response on the Reddit post was someone saying, “I didn’t know why something happened, so I asked my aunt and then just called that true and told other people confidently for the next 20 years.”
In 2024, I (and you) can look up the answer to anything for any reason, especially stupid ones.
Last night, as I lay in bed, I suddenly thought, “How do they get cream cheese into skinny sticks to put in sushi?” Because cream cheese is squishy and messy, I figured maybe they froze the block first or rolled it into snakes with their hands.
Instead of having to wonder, make something up, or try to look up Iron Chef Morimoto in the white pages of the new phone book that got thumped on the front step last month, I Googled it. Not even 10 seconds after I had the initial thought, a video showed me…
