What weird false belief did you have as a kid?

dullbananas (Joseph Silva)@lemmy.ca to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 169 points –
203

There was a place by the beach called Helenback.

My siblings and I in the car: Where are we going?

Mum (shouting): Hell and back!

I was an adult before I realised it had another name.

When I was very young, my dad told me we were going to Miami. I thought he said "my Ami", which I assumed was a word for some kind of relative, like Auntie, Granny, etc.

That there's a loving God.

Now it seems clear that even if he did exist, he's just above average asshole

I would argue that they would be fully evil depending on your definition of god.

In my case, the abrahamic one. Narcissistic asshole

Ya that one is evil.

I would argue that if God exists, they aren't intentionally being an asshole. They are being completely hands off so as not to corrupt the experiment, or override free will. After all, the only reason any god would need a prime material plane of existence is to see if they can create a peer of themselves, and at least as far as most of the major religions seem to be concerned, if someone created this universe, they decided that we have free will, so it's kinda hard to directly intervene. They could send avatars from time to time to attempt to intervene, but they kinda tied their hands in the act of creation.

You can absolutely intervene without affecting free will and that is assuming we even have free will. I am not convinced that we do.

Also why would you presume to know what a being (that as we imagine it) with unlimited power and knowledge would want or even need?

If you are a god and you see 25,000 people (10,000 of which are children) starving to death every single day and you have the power to stop that and you don't then you are an immortal monster.

I was a real piece of shit for a good handful of years when I was a kid because I believed I was destined for hell. I figured if I'm going to spend eternity being tortured I may as well enjoy life to the max, even at the expense of others. Because I'm already going to hell, so why not, right?

Religion is fucking toxic, man. I hurt a lot of people and made a lot of decisions I can't recover from.

That Everyone the Police arrest is a bad person.

"The police are your friend". Maybe they where right, as im white.

I'm so white that Casper the friendly ghost calls me a cracker. The thugs with badges are noones friends, except the owners. They never help any situation, and can literally only destroy more lives, and make every situation they come in contact with worse. This will always be true as long as they are profit motivated, which they are, at least in the US, and many other countries that copied us.

I thought that dogs were boys and cats were girls. No idea why.

Its funny, my niece made it to like 8 thinking that aunts were adults and uncles were kids. She had one young uncle, and me. Called me "Auntie Phanto." I still haven't lived it down.

Dogs = boys due to energetic, clumsy and loud.

Cats = girls due to classy, well-behaved and quiet.

I'd guess it would be a trend similar to saying girls play with dolls and boys play with action figures.

my niece made it to like 8 thinking that aunts were adults and uncles were kids

This fits well with the accidental mild misandry in Catholic school when we learned about differences between men and women. One of the books we had to read said something like "men consistently outperform their female counterparts at making almost miraculously stupid decisions"

That prayers appease god to make things better.

it still blows my mind on a daily basis, the arrogance of humans to think they not only know what their creator-god wants but can sway "Him" with some fucking magic words

I mean... If I was playing like The Sims and one of the Sims was like "yo can I get a new bike?" I might be like sure bro. From their perspective I'm a god that exists outside time and space.

That's not really how Christianity talks about its God though, usually. But also like the story of Job does seem like a kid and his friend fucking with their game.

The more complex computers get, the greater probability that we are actually living in a simulation!

I don't think we could classify it as "false belief" since we can't verify that statement.

Sure you can!

Get a coin, and flip it 100 times. Record each time it lands on heads/tails.

Now get a devout believer, and have the believer continuously say devout prayers petitioning God to make the coin read heads. Then, flip the coin 100 times, and record heads/tails.

Do statistical analysis to see whether there is a statistically significant difference between the control group and the prayer group. Pretty easy to verify if true.

That line of thinking led to the "docudrama" 'What the bleep do we know?' and the extended version "What the bleep, further down the rabbit hole." Both of which can appear to be rational to most laymen, but are basically religious BS forced on a quantum physics foundation.

I can't believe we're still talking about that shitty propaganda! I remember anticipating an interesting documentary about quantum implications, then went to see it with some other physics nerds and being disgusted by the hamfisted mix of fundamentalist religion framed as "science". What have they done to us? WHAT DID THEY DO TO US

Even a recent book advocating the efficacy of prayer in treating disease (Larry Dossey, Healing Words) is troubled by the fact that some diseases are more easily cured or mitigated than others. If prayer works, why can’t God cure cancer or grow back a severed limb?

– Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World (1995)

See also https://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com/

I’m completely on board with that, except for the “wish fulfillment”. I don’t know how it got twisted around that you could presume to tell God what to do or that he would - it seems so entirely inconsistent with anything else about religious beliefs

So we have this all powerful and all knowing supreme being , right? And he’s got a plan for the entire universe and all of time, right? But he'll disrupt all of that to grant you a favor if you wish hard enough? Or you can blame him if something bad happens to you specifically, out of all the universe over all time? What hubris, what ego could make us think we’re in control and can use it for personal gain?

That our blood was blue, but turned red when exposed to air and light. All because a teacher told us so.

I heard this one from a teacher as well when I was very young! And it may well have been the same teacher telling us that blood was made of white blood cells and red blood cells, and I knew from my deep work in relevant fields (paints and crayons) that this combination did not result in blue.

We were told that the arteries carry oxygen rich blood, that was red because of a high iron oxide content, away from the heart and lungs to the extremities of the body. At that point capillaries get involved, and it's really best not to worry too much here. Then the veins carry the oxygen depleted blood back to the heart and lungs to be reoxygenated, and that that blood appears blue through your skin. I think copper may have had something to do with the blue coloration, but that blood is also red in color, even if you managed to pull it directly into a vacuum tube. It just appears blue because of your skin or something.

Oxygenated blood is bright red, whereas deoxygenated blood is a darker red. And it looks blue because blue light doesn’t penetrate the skin as deeply as red light. The ones closer to the surface appear blue while deeper ones are purpleish due to the red light reflecting deeper.

That America was the greatest country in the world. And truly, not trying to be political, but honestly the propaganda in Midwest America was real. I didn't know anything about other countries - except for we were better. We figured it out, we built the best system ever and everyone else wanted to be like us.

Now those are the people I see overseas who are about to get punched in a pub.

That midwest propaganda is still around, just chewed out a coworker who said they'd be fine with everyone in Ukraine dying so that the US can 'have more money' and 'be independant'

Good. Americana think they're so much different from everyone else and we're literally not. I hold a form belief that everyone just wants to go to work, get off work, they'd rather get a pizza for dinner but they're going to try to eat something better, are looking forward to their next day off, and when it comes they're going to go to their target equivalent for a boring errands run. I think about 90% of the people are in this category, just average working people, and that makes me feel a little more connected with them.

Yes, many millenials have been mentally fucked up by being constantly told that they were special or they would grow up to be special or achieve to become special. Now they're not special, they're average, just like everyone else, but they can't handle it or accept it. They grow depressed, of get a bloated ego or vote for Donald Trump et al.

I personally think it's a liberating feeling to just be average. Make the best of your life, no pressure. I've made some lasting (positive) impressions on a handful of individuals and that gives me loads more satisfaction than being a world changer and loads less stress.

I know I failed out of my first year of college simply because all through school I was told I was so smart. So I got to college and was bitch slapped by what actual work looked like. Luckily I turned it around. However I had someone who was sort of my counter part who was in the same advanced classes as me, same thing happened and he works at a gas station in the middle of nowhere now. You want to think your kids are special and want to encourage them, but no.

We need to teach that special is earned, not a given.

Gen X had the same messaging. We were told we were all special, and then reality set in and we couldn't do shit about anything. That's literally the plot of Fight Club. Late stage capitalism is a bitch and we've been here for at least 15 if not 20 years.

Definitely heard this all the time and went with it blindly. I grew up in Ohio, now live on the other side of the planet with zero intention of ever living in the US again.

I used to think that hair grew when it was watered - like a plant - and therefore showering was what allowed your hair to grow. No one ever told me that, I just assumed it to be true at a young age.

That my parents never had parents. Sure, I had grandparents and saw them daily, but I somehow never realized that they were my dad's parents.

My mom told me that Dad went to work to make money, and I actually expected to see money making machines when I visited him at the office.

Plot twist: OPs father actually works at the United States Mint (but in an office job)

Unfortunately, he worked in a school district setting the routes busses take.

Oh dear. I hope for his sake that he understood polynomial expressions, otherwise he was constantly being berated for "his stupid decisions," by parents that also didn't have any data to back them up.

I imagined work as a building with a big neon sign out front that said "work".

I thought that women drank tea and men drank coffee, because that was what my mum and dad did.

My mom still drinks tea

I don't drink coffee, and rarely drink tea. Caffeine and I don't really get along, and I think coffee tastes bitter.

My mother drinks coffee, and tea. My father drinks tea.

One morning I got up before my mother did, and decided to make her a pot of coffee because of Folgers commercials, and wanting to be nice. I think I was 7 at the time. I thought that one scoop of coffee grounds = one cup of coffee, and the coffee maker clearly said that it made 12 cups of coffee.

My mother wandered into the kitchen smelling fresh coffee and prematurely thanked me for making coffee for her. She added the cream and sugar that she always did, and took a sip. Her eyes shot wide open, and she sat the cup on the counter before asking me how much coffee grounds I had added to that pot.

Apparently she only used 1.5 scoops of grounds, so I accidentally made something akin to cappuccino, except not. All I know is that because she taught me how to make coffee properly, I can still make a good pot of coffee for all the coffee zombies in my life, and my ADD wakes me up earlier than anyone that drinks the stuff.

It’s an important skill to have, even if you don’t drink it. Actually, a coffee maker was one of the first things my parents made sure I had when I left home. Even though I didn’t drink coffee at the time, it’s common enough to be an important amenity.

Of course now I’m addicted and the one thing I no longer have is a drip coffeemaker. However I have a variety of k-cups you can use at any time, some cold brew in the fridge, or a couple choices I can make in my French press

I swear a social studies teacher told us that most rivers tend to flow north to south. Young impressionable child I was, I of course filed it away as a long-term core memory -- right there next to PEMDAS, FOIL, and so on.

Then I mentioned it in college and got fucking embarrassed.

Similar, I had one declare rivers flow towards the equator. Which is slightly better than claiming they all flow N to S, but still inaccurate.

Rivers flow downhill. That's it. In case anyone else needs to check their mental model of the world.

I was taught the same. I got extra credit for memorizing that the Nile River was a "notable exception".

While I didn't go to school in Texas, our school district used material developed there. It figures.

I believed that peas were the pupa of something similar to a butterfly or a moth. I refused to eat peas for years because I felt so bad eating little baby critters. I think my aunt might've "encouraged" me to think that.

They are suspiciously similar in color and conceptually to Metapod the Pokémon

Had to watch a YouTube video about Metapod to know what you were talking about. I don't think Pokemon existed when I was a kid but Metapod isn't a million miles away from what I imagined.

I thought that apt-get was a wrapper around the apt command

Wait... Someone explain things to me!

Dpkg is the low level tool for Debian packages.

Apt-get is the original frontend for dpkg. It is a full featured tool that lets the user give commands to dpkg, along with apt-cache, which displays information to the user.

Apt is a high level tool for user friendliness. It combines some features from apt-get and apt-cache, as well as adds progress bars and other quality of life features. It also strips down some features the average user doesn’t use.

So neither is a wrapper for the other. They are two similar tools that do the same job. Apt-get is better for scripting due to being a more rigid tool while apt is nicer for end users.

Amazing! 16 years with Ubuntu, and now I know!

When I started on Debian, there was only apt-get. (And dpkg if you manually pulled .debs from somewhere).

Then a little while later, there was aptitude, which was nice.

apt the command didn't show up until 2014.

I thought that if you swallowed your gum, it would stay in your stomach forever, so you had to make sure to never do it because eventually there would be no room for food anymore.

Also, old CRT TVs had this static electricity sort of fuzzy feeling on the screen, and if you ran your hand over it, it would dissipate. I thought that by doing that, you were absorbing the TVs power and if you did it too much, it would eventually stop working.

Lastly, I believed with all my heart that all the pets you ever owned were waiting for you in heaven and it made me mad when my (very devout Catholic) grandma told me that pets and animals don't have souls and so they didn't go to heaven. I said if that was true then I didn't want to go to heaven! I'm atheist now, so I don't even believe that anyone goes to heaven, but if anyone deserves to go, it's all the kitties, puppies, and various rodentia I've loved in my life.

At my Catholic high school, one of the teachers who was a Dominican sister told us that animals can't go to heaven but it's possible for them to be recreated in heaven.

I feel fine as long as my rabbit didn't go to purgatory or hell, but non-eternal souls are hard to relate to

If you could instantiate soulless virtual beings in heaven for your amusement at will, it would be way less boring. You could recreate Mortal Kombat

My stomach one was watermelon seeds. My brother told me that if you swallowed them they would grow in my stomach and of course I believed him. There's plenty of water and nutrition in there and every time I open my mouth they could be getting sunlight.

The Rainbow Bridge, is part of Catholic Dogma according to Pope John Paul II

Then in 1990, Pope John Paul II reversed that thinking and proclaimed that animals do have souls and are “as near to God as men are.”

Side note: At that time in my life, one of the schools I regularly attended as a non-Christian was a Catholic school that was called Pope John XXII, and I was legitimately confused as to how there were only 2 Pope John Pauls, while there were at least 23 Pope Johns. I think I thought that since a pope doesn't have term limits, that there must not have been too many more popes than British Prime Ministers. Having grown up, I can safely say that while I wasn't exactly incorrect, I was still criminally underestimating the sheer number of people that held both titles.

That people with a beard where poor people. I always felt sorry for them not able to afford a shaving kit.

I mean, it's a reasonable correlation if not a connection. Inaction is often cheaper than action, in time, effort, and money, and beard basically grows itself.

Oh yeah I had a few.

  • That the moon you see during daytime is actually Mars (I then repeated that to my big sister and she believed it for an embarrassingly long amount of time)
  • That the "up" arrows on traffic lights were for planes

Me in the middle of my flight when my plane pauses in midair to wait for a traffic light

Well Mars and The Moon are relatively similar in size compared to The Earth. Mars being about twice the size of The Moon, therefore making Mars roughly 1/2 the size of The Earth, and The Moon roughly 1/3 the size of The Earth.

If Mars happened to be in an orbit roughly 500,000 mi or 800,000 km away from The Earth, it would appear that we would have two "Moons" the size of The Moon to the visible eye, giving the possibility of some absolutely crazy solar eclipse events. I don't think it would even drastically change the tides or the overall gravitational well of The Earth and its various current natural satellites all that much, thanks to the inverse squared law with gravity.

Maybe that was what was going on with several different worlds in SciFi that had multiple massive moons....

I used to think "change" you got from a store was just the business being nice and making sure you didn't walk away without any money.

Lul nice. I used to think that the cars turn blinkers were a form of rudementary GPS. You just hit the lever and the arrow would tell you what way you needed to go.

As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster's sucking hunger.

When I was young and hanging with my great aunt's church friends, we were walking to the store. I went to link arms with my great aunt and her friend was like, "Hey, that's dangerous. You can't defend yourself. Someone could jump you." From that point, I assumed that anyone who was linking arms was, like, giving a show of dominance. Like, "Yeah, we're linked up, because we can still take anybody even with only one arm." Didn't change that mindset until I was in middle school after I tried to explain to my friend how dangerous walking with her boyfriend was because "how would they defend themselves." 🙃

Traffic lights were hand operated.
The small town where I grew up had one pedestrian traffic light for crossing the main road. There was a small brick shed next to that traffic light with no windows and a little door. When I was little I was convinced that was an operation's center where someone worked to turn the lights red or green.
In reality it was a power substation for the neighborhood, but I was seriously convinced that behind that door was a man looking at a TV screen and operating the traffic light at the right moment.
When we went to a larger town nearby, where there were traffic lights without a convenient mysterious building nearby, I told myself that the traffic light people were most likely working under ground, peeping through the drains.

I.. was good at making up answers for myself instead of just asking my parents.

I used to believe that if you just work hard you'll get ahead in life

That my parents knew what they were doing, made good choices, and were reasonable people.

No, no, ... and no.

That I'd grow up to eat candy, collect baseball cards, play video games, and read comic books.

No (type II diabetes runs in my family), no (wtf is a baseball card anyway), no (video games were replaced with homework permanently), and — well, actually — yes.

I love a good comic book, graphic novel, and/or animated series.

I'm in my 50s and playing plenty of videogames... There's a path forward

Does the work you do, if you still work for a living, follow you home? And, if you have children, are any of them still in need of your assistance for feeding, bathing, and/or toileting?

I'm really looking forward to being in my mid-50s. My youngest will be approaching 10. By then, I should be able to reintroduce video games to my life at that point.

My work never ends and always demands more. I've just learned to shut it off and ignore it nights and weekends unless I have an ever critical deadline. Yes my child is an early tween and pretty self sufficient...that and a tough opponent in Super SmashBros. I'm in a pretty happy place

Yeah, I'm starting to ween my son off of video games. Everything that isn't video games is "boring" for the mere fact it's not a video game.

I used to think that the whole world was in black and white, just like all the old pictures and movies I had seen, then at some point we discovered color and turned it on! After that there were no more black and white pictures and movies anymore.

Its weird that this is top answer and I was about to post the same thing.

I've met a few people that believed this as a kid. My daughter actually just asked me about it a few months ago too! So we're not alone!

I used to think the poles holding up traffic lights were hollow, and there was a person sitting inside throwing switches to change the lights while looking at a watch to keep the timing fair.

I thought there was a little room under ground with people watching cameras underneath each intersection to control the lights

For a long time, i thought that people thinking that the pyramids were made by aliens was a joke and that the number of people who truly believed it was 0

We found a dead baby bird. Was told most animal babies don't live to adulthood. Knew people were animals so it was likely me and most of my friends would be dead by 21

If you happen to find a dead bird in particular, please don't pick it up. They have mites on their feathers (skin?) that will absolutely jump on you and absolutely fuck up your skin. You can literally jump in the shower once the itching starts, and you will be in for something like localized poison ivy where those little microscopic (probably not, but they were so tiny I couldn't see them) assholes were, or at least wherever they bit you.

I would generally caution against actually touching anything that is dead. Too many pathogens, nasty bacteria, and potential touch contracted illnesses.

I was like 6 years old when my dad randomly told me that if a player dies during a football game, the others players have to eat him before the game can continue.

I never watched sports so I didn't even question it lol

That enough hot water bath could work just as well as sunbathing for getting a tan. Hey, both things can burn your skin, it's perfectly logical!

That the Gulf War was in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the only one I knew!

That's adorable, and I now wanna know if you're referring to 1993 or 2001

By 01 I knew better!

See! Not all Americans are totally ignorant about geography! Just most of us!

/j

I was a child! I promise! As an adult I know there are many gulfs! Probably! Somewhere! XD

Oh I get it. I really didn't get why The Great Lakes weren't called Seas. I happened to have a globe in the hallway because my parents house has more bookshelves than walls.

They really oughta be called seas, those fuckers are huuuuge. Childhood me woulda agreed with you. Maybe. We did live next to the Atlantic Ocean, but I think if the argument was "Can't see the other side" me would have accepted this as what an ocean or sea should be.

That was my argument back then. Someone eventually explained to me that lakes are freshwater and seas are saltwater, so that made that make sense.

I believed that you'd only get a finite amount of words in your life. So I didn't speak much and I would think that the annoying kids in school that always were talking through the teacher's explanation, would get their punishment later in life when they'd go mute because they would have used up all their words.

Sounds like a lie parents would tell their kids to get them to shut up.

Did you think that word limits or finite space in assignments existed to help you not reach your life word limit?

I always thought cigarettes contain tar, as in the substance asphalt on the road is made from. It always felt weird to me, why would they put it in the cigarettes but I figured maybe they need it so the tobacco doesn't fall out or something.

The crust on bread had more nutrients than the center. My dad didn’t want to cut my crusts off lol.

My uncle always swapped the words breast and best so my cousin mixes them up sometimes to this day. He said ‘breast friend’ at his brother’s wedding

The crust doesn't, but for the love of all that is good and scientific, stop peeling your veggies people! Carrots and potatoes especially. Almost all the nutritional value is in the skin of those two, and probably most other, other than peanuts, legumes.

Just remember to thoroughly wash the skin, and cut out any "eyes" on the potatoes or potential small scale rotting. Pesticides aren't something that your gut wants anything to do with.

Almost all the nutritional value is in the skin

Uhhhh, you might want to look that one up. For some veg, there is more fibre in the skin, but that's about it.

I'm a chef that has studied nutrition as much as I can, for green and leafy veggies that is absolutely true, but those aren't the ones that people normally skin.

The legumes that I specifically pointed out have a ton of vitamins that concentrate in the skin specifically, and those are the "vegetables" that the layman has a tendency to skin. The center is mostly starch and sugar.

Right. Carrots and potatoes are legumes now are they? The commenter replied to you summarised it for you, and you don't know as much as you think you do.

That my family cared about me and supported me.

There absolutely can, and in many cases should, be a difference between your blood family, and your adult family.

The former was chosen for you. The latter should only be chosen by you. I can easily tell you that excising certain siblings, aunts and uncles, and a specific cousin, from my life, my life has far less stress than it used to in my 20s. Now that I tell people that "this is my boundary, try to cross it at your own peril," and actually hold the line, I have far more family than what I was born into.

when i was a child, i was told that i would get worms if i ate raw brown sugar. i believed this for quite some time at least until i was 12.

Woah, that unlocked a memory of how my parents said giving sweets to our dog would give him worms. Wonder how that pervaded so widely.

That there was a disembodied head that lived in the toilet at night.

That I could dig to China

Technically you could. It would be a marvel of engineering and would cost billions of dollars, and you couldn't go through the center of the Earth, but technically it is possible

Do we have the technology to do that considering the increasing heat, gravity, and magnetic force as one goes deeper? I feel like anything we could do would involve lots of nukes that would basically destroy the planet in the process.

Nobody said how deep the tunnel has to be. Could be just below common tunnel depth.

There's a reason we don't have a tunnel between North America and Europe. Don't think we're there yet.

A Bering Strait tunnel/ bridge network has been proposed, and it wouldn't cost too much for the US to build. Only a few billion dollars, which Congress can sneeze and accidentally spend that much. The real issue is that connecting The US and Russia with the interstate highway system has political problems that seem to be insurmountable at the current time.

I personally would support the plan. That would allow the US to deploy HIMARS systems to the Ukrainian forward fronts in Siberia and Chukotka.

Edit: if such a highway network were to be completed, it would theoretically be possible to drive/ take trains to get from anywhere in North America to anywhere in Europe, Africa, and Continental Asia. Connecting South America, and Australia would be the challenges at that point.

A few billion? Vancouver BC is spending that on an new sewage treatment plant.

How could a tunnel like this be built and functional for a few billion? Perhaps hundreds of billions... maybe.

It may have been a hundred or two billion. I haven't read the proposal in over a decade, and I just remember that the number, while large, was still a rounding error compared to the US budget.

When I was six years old or so, my sister called me a "cosweb" and told me it was the worst thing ever. I completely believed her for a long time.

That all large salty bodies of water were called "the mediterranean sea."

I had real trouble understanding why "The Great Lakes," weren't called The American Seas until I found out that Seas were large salt water bodies that aren't large enough to qualify as Oceans. Some more arbitrary bullshit as far as I was concerned.

And I mean The Superior Sea, The Huron Sea, The Michigan Sea, The Erie Sea, and The Ontario Sea.

That, despite my feelings and emotions at the time, I would never be a girl. So, that was a fucking lie.

I do not know where I got this from, but I thought all dogs were male and all cats were female. I thought this while I had a dog named Betsy and a cat named Sebastian.

If that's not bad enough on its own, I think I was in first or second grade when I learned the surprising truth. I wasn't a dumb kid, either. I learned to read when I was about 3.5 yrs old and started 1st grade as a 5 yr old.

I'm now in my 70s and I still can't figure out where I got that from!

You can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it and try hard enough.

I mostly believe that

It's good to have a positive outlook, but it's also important to be realistic, and know when to move your energies elsewhere, I think.

I could set my mind to becoming a good orchestral composer, but all I'd be doing is wasting years of my life and a lot of money and effort, because I know I'm not at all creative in that way. My creative strengths lie elsewhere.

I could stick with it, and become at best a very derivative boring composer, but I wouldn't reach my dream or being a good one.

And I'd miss out on other dreams I could have been following that were more realistic and would bring me more happiness in the end, you know?

But yeah, you also have to weigh that against pushing yourself past your limits, because maybe you'll be great at something you wouldn't have expected!

I think in the end as with most things in life, it's about finding a balance between idealism and realism that works best for you :-)

I thought chocolate was a color

In my language chocolate is “coklat”, which is also the word for the color brown. So you’re not wrong

According to Pantone 19-0912 it is. You were just very savvy to printing industry standards as a child.

There are multiple pigment standards for paint that include the word chocolate, as well as crayons, pastels, and watercolors. Dude was just fine thinking chocolate is a color.

The big stereo speakers in my living room contained tiny orchestras

That Pluto is a planet.

That's more a function of us not having the current definition of what a planet is growing up than anything.

Pluto got "downsized," because we had to refine the definition of what is and isn't a planet. Not our fault, and also not the fault of the previous scientists.

Kinda the one thing that I hate about the public's understanding of science. Most people do not grok the concept that, "no one can ever prove a theory correct, but one person can prove that, at least in specific circumstances, it is wrong."

Einstein said that if you move close to the speed of light, you'll go forward in time. Therefore, I thought, if you go backwards at close to the speed of light, you'll go backwards in time.

Kind of a weird semiotics misunderstanding. There was this trashy tabloid news program that did sensationalised nonsense most of the time, and they advertised the show with these teasers that were like, "tune in for the shocking conclusion OMG SO DRAMATIC", it was ridiculous.

One time they were talking about a security guard who was killed, and the ad had some footage of the incident - or a reenactment -shown in slow motion with a red filter. The implication was you were seeing real footage of a lethal encounter, and OMG SO DRAMATIC.

Then later that week they were doing a piece on school bullying, and they had what was probably actors where two kids walk past each other in the halls and bump shoulders, you know, like you'd do in a TV show as shorthand for bullying. They put the same slo-mo red filter over it, and the same ominous DUN DUN soundtrack OMG SO DRAMATIC.

I thought that red slo-mo filter meant death, so I thought I was watching security camera footage of the lead up to an incident where one kid literally killed another kid. It was pretty traumatic.

I'm glad I didn't grow up on a diet of that, I just saw the ads and didn't like it. This is how people grow up to be afraid of everything they're told to be afraid of.

Around Harry Potter age, I thought they were gonna give Albus Dumbledore a testicle-titty-twister when they said they wanted to sack him before he was to be fired

Consequently, Chamber of Secrets was wayyyyyyy more horrifying and dramatic than it needed to be in this (👉🧠) movie theatre mhohoho

lol dunno why the downvotes but that's hilarious if you don't use the word 'sack' someone as a synonym for 'fire' someone where you come from!

Sack is British, where I'm from it means someone has you and twists you by the balls. I sorta got they wanted to fire him but the alternative meaning was intrusively unable to be lost on me

Nah I think it means 'chuck your stuff in a sack and get out of here'. Sac(k) to refer to balls is probably also a very old usage from French but since it's vulgar it likely didn't become the colloquialism meaning to be removed from one's job. It is a funny homonym though.