What were you wrong about for a long time? How did you realize you were wrong?

DandomRude@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 196 points –
169

Raised conservative christian, took a disgustingly long time to lose some of my shittier takes

I recently saw a shirt for sale online that says, "I'm sorry for everything I said when I was evangelical," and that really just about sums it up.

Fellow former conservative christian here, and I share that pain. I eventually came around thanks to a LOT of patience from friends who understood my background.

I try to pay it forward by putting myself out there and extending a hand to anyone looking to understand and accept others. I have had decent success with anyone who asks in good faith.

Don't beat yourself up. Seriously.

I was able to break free early partly due to how absurd the hypocrisy became. My mother was going to hell, not because she's a cold narcissist, but a Jew and a 'practitioner' of new age bullshit. And my father saw nothing at all wrong with this type of belief.

Not to mention he was pretty racist (though in a 'subtle' way), while helping raise my adopted Korean sister.

I was lucky that he and my mother were such atrociously bad examples of how to deal with others, that I vowed to never be like them.

I didn't figure my way out until I was in my 30s. Been out of it for over a decade.

I was brainwashed, my head was full of carefully crafted indoctrination. My extended family will almost certainly never be free of it.

We were subjected to an evil process from an early age. It's not our fault. Losing the hate and guilt is also a process. Go easy on yourself. Takes a tough person to change their entire worldview. Only a few of us make it out.

That my dad cared about or respected me. After a family dinner, my wife asked me if he always talked about me like that and it just kind of clicked. Things like telling my kid, "If you play too many video games, they'll melt your brain like your dad" or "why would anyone pay you that much" when I told them that I broke a six figure salary. She made me realize that this wasn't normal and I didn't have to sit there and listen to it just because of who he is.

I haven't spoken to him or really any of my side of the family in almost two years now. Good riddance.

Some parents forget to support your goals when it's not in-line with their goals for you; despite probably having the same childhood.

Always be looking for the opportunity to forgive them if it should appear. Not before, but be ready in case they clue-in.

Not sure if forgiveness is the way to go. At least, I think that forgiveness is important but I think there needs to be some understanding and respect from the parent towards their child too. Without that, forgiveness just puts the child in an unnecessarily vulnerable position.
My advice is to try therapy, if you want to get back in touch with your parents at all

Being Mormon.

They always told us that people who gave us anti-mormon literature just made stuff up and it was Satan's way of tempting us. They said to never take any anti-mormon literature and if someone did give it to you then to throw it away without reading.

But at the same time they taught us that the Mormon church was the true church. And they also taught us truth was absolute. Well, i figured if truth is absolute, and if the church was THE true church then it would be able to withstand any criticism. So i read anti mormon literature, like the CES letter. From there i did my own research about various things and found that the Mormon church made up a lot of stuff and did lots of gaslighting.

There was some specific issues that i also had been struggling with, like their treatment of women, gays, and black men/women. That also helped push me to want to make sure if the Mormon church was really true. And it wasn't. Now i can love my friends unconditionally.

Good on you for challenging beliefs and forming your own opinions. Not easy to pull yourself out of these things.

Marshmellow is not correct. It's marshmallow. I learned by spell checker. Only took nearly 21 years.

I'm still reeling over cemetery not being spelled cementary and it's been 20 years.

TIL, I guess. I always thought it was spelled with an 'A' too.

That misspelling means you’ve been mispronouncing it, too. (Not in a way that would be noticeable.)

The consequences of not growing up with first you take the graham, then you take the mallow!

For the longest time I was under the impression that everybody has unlimited potential, that you can essentially take a homeless junkie of the streets send them through college, give then a job and have a functioning intelligent person come out at the end. That is absolutely not true. based on my own experience we all have limits and glass ceilings. Yes, we all live on the same clock, but some of us have to deal with so much behind the scenes just to stay afloat while others can breeze through life like its nothing. There are people who are incredibly academically gifted but absolutely inept in personal or household stuff, some people are thick as a rock but incredibly charming, etc. We all have our strengths and weaknesses but sometimes of course all the marbles roll into the right holes and you get somebody who's good at everything they touch and are almost doomed to success.

There are just things that I will never able to grasp, or habits that I will never able to form because I tried my whole life and it never worked out. I consider myself as a fairly baseline dude, so its safe to say that if I have these experiences the majority of people will have them as well.

For me it was that other people think in the same manner, basically. But it turns out that brain usage is very different for people. So some people use more of their visual cortex for maths, making them see color in numbers.

In this video Richard Feynman explains it better then I could.

https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y

Feynman explains most things better than most people can.

This video was really interesting! Thanks!

Yeah that's his talent, such an amazing man. If you haven't, read his biographie.

The video is part of a longer series 'fun to imagine' is really with it watching them all.

A large majority of that is winning the luck lottery of which family you were born into. Most people who have “trouble staying afloat” are also those who are economically disadvantaged… as in, in the lower-90% of the economic population who are desperately just treading water. Most of the people who “breeze through life” have the intergenerational family wealth that permits this behaviour.

Yes, that has also been my experience. But this also evens out fairly well with age. I've come across very well put together people in their 50s and 60s whose childhood all the way through late adulthood has been literal hell. But this might be survivorship bias.

So you're telling me we can't just steal a baby from one of those secluded amazon tribes and force them to learn the quadratic formula so I don't have to? there go my weekend plans :(

As a non American who has never been to the US, but grew up well within its sphere of cultural influence.

I thought that about half of the population was black, maybe 40% minimum. I was surprised to learn that it was just above 10% in reality.

They tend to be concentrated in a few areas. There was one place I lived where none of the dudes living there had ever even seen a white dude in person other than cops and social workers.

I was wrong about who I was for several years. A pretty unexpectedly intense DMT trip set me right

EDIT: This isn't really the ideal place to elaborate on my experience, but thanks for the interest.

That if you weren't part of "our" religion (my family's religion, Catholic), you were basically living your life wrong and were an awful person. When I went to college I met people who believed different things, including in nothing, and I realized they were not, in fact, terrible, almost subhuman, people. I quickly changed for the better and that's one of the best things to ever happen to me. It's amazing how accepting you can be when you just accept people for who they are

It could easily have been the same for me, as my father is a Protestant pastor. Fortunately, my family has always been very tolerant and open-minded. That's how my parents brought me up, for which I'm still very grateful to them today. It's good to hear that you've found your own path, which certainly wasn't easy. Respect, my friend.

Three of my cousins are sisters in the same family. All three are vegans, just one of them militant.

While we enjoy the two happy vegans and their great families and their joy at sharing their chosen lifestyle, we get no judgement from them; unlike the militant sister who reminds us we're all going to a kind of hell on earth of our own making and we deserve to be sick for eating creature-flesh, etc.

Your comment reminds me that beliefs other than religious can be used by over-eager proselytists to judge and belittle people. And yeah, she's so off my friends list.

I thought I'd live a comfortable stable life pursuing the sciences for the sake of knowledge. I learned in the past year or two through studying political economy and climate science that this is pretty unlikely. These days idk what to do. I want to do something more useful, I want to help people but it all feels quite hopeless. It often feels like revolution is the only option but I fear it may even be too late for that. We are already past the point where hundreds of millions will die and be displaced. We are already past the point of inevitable severe famine and societal collapse in many places. We aren't even accomplishing damage control and it feels like most people don't even dare acknowledge it.

If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it's from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that... Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet... The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It's going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.

You are vastly underestimating what will happen if we allow things to continue as they are. We are already at the point of severe famine and 100's of millions dying and global emissions have continued to increase at essentially the same rate as before every year. Every day that we do nothing the list of dead grows longer. If I were to do nothing but watch then I would consider myself complicit. I think the worst part is that we all know exactly who is responsible but still somehow do nothing about it. I'm genuinely honestly shocked that we don't see them all as the mass murderers they are. This cannot be a sane world.

Despite this, I do appreciate the condolences.

No, we are not past that point. Stuff can happen fast. Christianity becoming a world religion after being some strange hippy cult for few generations, the collapse of communist eastern europe without a war, noone saw that coming. I agree it looks grim and I'm not optimistic, but I refuse to give up just a few years after grasping global warming. It is not too late and becoming a doomer is not helping.

Just go into a high paying field, and move somewhere that won't be affected as badly. The apocalypse is BYOB, so start prepping.

It often feels like revolution is the only option

Well, first of all, that's never gonna happen.

But more importantly, the boring shit is working. China's greenhouse gas emissions probably peaked this year. The US peaked ages ago. The world isn't far behind china. Taxes on fossil fuels and investments in renewables will see us through this. By 2026 at the latest, every year will see decreasing global emissions.

I was certain that a gander was a group of geese. Why? Because apparently everybody who has ever used the phrase "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" around me was using it wrong. I just learned this week that a gander is a male goose. So based on misuse, I thought that the phrase meant that what's beneficial for one is beneficial for the greater group, but what it really means is that what's acceptable in the case for one should be equally acceptable for others in the same situation.

I'm nearly 36 and I would say that I'm smarter than most people, but this was a gaping hole in my knowledge that was pretty damn humbling to learn of and correct.

Oh wtf, this one got me.

Is this just a "happy wife, happy life" variation?

No, it's more like "if Larry gets a 10% grade reduction for turning his paper in a day late to you, then I shouldn't be getting this 20% grade reduction for turning this paper in a day late to you." It's more of a call for things to be fair and give everybody equal treatment.

There was a recent court decision regarding Donald Trump that, more or less, appointing a special counsel for the purposes of DOJ impartiality is not constitutionally acceptable. As a result, Hunter Biden, who was investigated and prosecuted via special counsel in order to maintain impartiality from the DOJ since his father is the sitting president, essentially argued that "what's good for the goose is good for the gander." Meaning that if Donald Trump should have his case dismissed under the pretext of special counsel being an invalid idea, then so too should Hunter Biden. That decision was already generally seen as fucking silly, but the silliness was put on full display for partisan hacks and their audience.

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Alanis Morisette is not the artist that did the "I'm a bitch I'm a lover" song. Meredith Brooks is the artist.
I found out because I had the song stuck in my head and I looked it up on yt. The comments section showed me that I wasn't the only one who thought the song was by Alanis Morisette
Llllink

Alanis Morissette did the song named "Ironic" in which she gave a bunch of examples of things that were not actually ironic, which in itself is ironic.

Fun fact. Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins met when Foo Fighters were on tour with Alanis Morrissette. Taylor was drumming for alanis at the time.

I always think of "You Oughta Know" when i think of her.

I still think/hear "cross eyed bear that you gave to me" instead of "Cross I bare"

Hah! Up until this exact moment, I thought it was "The cross eyed stare that you gave to me"

I'm not gonna click on that link because there's no way this is true. You can't fool me.

Thinking the words, "just calm down" in the heat of an argument with my wife will actually work if I just try it enough times. Mathematically it should but it seems math doesn't care about that.

My gorgeous wife's ginger hair and flashing green eyes warned me off that tactic early on. And I'm alive to tell the tale.

Yes, I'm still learning that. Also giving emotional support instead of trying to fix everything instantly is difficult.

The longest was probably the vegetarian → vegan pipeline.
My position was that 'employment' of animals was humanely possible, if you genuinely treated them like you'd want to be treated.

It was until I read how cows need to basically be kept continuously pregnant, that I realized there was just no way.
I believe, you could have a bite of cheese every year or so, if we don't do forceful impregnation, but at that point, why even bother?

I mean maybe eggs, if allowed to roam and given their shells back. But modern chickens are just absolutely genetically ravaged by centuries of breeding for absurd egg output and massive growth.

Before domestication they'd lay about a dozen a year. Now they lay once a day or so.

Chickens always gave a lot of eggs. That's why they were popular since ancient times. As long as they had surplus food, they start laying eggs. A dozen a year is just misinformation - that's only in the wild, during spring because that's when they have a surplus a food. If humans feed them every day, then they lay eggs because they always have extra food.

We raised free roaming wild chickens. The hens had a high up coop we'd close to keep safe from predators that they'd return to on their own at night.

A dozen a year is just misinformation - that's only in the wild,

That's likely true, but I also have serious doubts that a chicken completely untouched by human breeding would output like the breeds bred to lay even if given unlimited food. I also doubt their bodies are made for such production.

They still lay about 24 eggs a month, sometimes more sometimes less depending on the temperature and if there's a rooster around. Again, we had the wild breed of chicken (Gallus gallus). We also had guinea fowl and ducks.

It's an animal that can reproduce a lot. Don't know why people find that hard to believe but don't bat an eye at the reproduction rates of rabbits.

As a vegan it gets old when people assume I still eat dairy, eggs, or fish(???).

I had to explain to someone recently that the person who told him chicken is vegan was fucking with him. He was genuinely still a little confused after.

There was a crazy amount of people conflating organic with vegan when that fur hat J6 guy went to prison and asked for a special diet too.

I generally don’t mention it if I can help it, or I just say I don’t eat animal products. But people still have a hard time figuring out basic things like honey is an animal product.

Look, I just don’t want to disturb the animals if I can help it, alright? It’s just super unnecessary for my survival.

The US government stores over a billion pounds of cheese in enormous caves. I think we can probably get away with reducing production quite a bit.

Rinsing after brushing teeth. The fluoride in the toothpaste should stay on your teeth for a while to be effective. So you should floss, then brush, and wait to rinse or not rinse

I learned last year that you're supposed to floss BEFORE you brush. I have no idea why no one ever taught me that.

Yeah you loosen up every thing and then brush it out. Actually, I floss, swish, then brush. I end with brush because the fluoride concentration in toothpaste is much much higher than in most fluoride mouthwash. I’d rather leave that on my teeth after I’m done.

I floss, rinse, then brush. The fluoride content of toothpaste is much higher than rinse, so I’d rather end having that on my teeth than a weaker dose from the rinse.

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That's only true in England, because they don't flourinate their water. In the US, you get plenty of flouride from tap water.

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Except for school I never went to any institution as a kid. No nursery, no kindergarten, no after school programs. Both my parents worked part time, so there was always an adult at home. For most my life I felt sorry for the kids who had parents working 9-5 and having to be in institutions and getting institutionalized.

I was well into my 30s before my wife explained to me why I was wrong. She was studying for these kind of pedagogical jobs, and while following her education on the side line, it really turned on a light bulb in my head: I was wrong.

While the home-raised method might have worked decently when I was a kid when more people did it, it would absolutely not work today. Most of my own issues throughout childhood and later basically also comes from not socializing enough as a kid. My own kids have been through the whole institution process because both my wife and I have had 9-5 jobs. Due to this, my kids are much better developed to tackle the world that they live in, and they have not lost any off the ability to think freely or anything that I previously believed was the negative effects of being raised in institutions. Of course there are some institutions that are better than others, but overall, their personel are a lot better educated to handle it than someone who has no education on this and only believes in "what was good enough for me..."

Even today, I sometimes meet people who want to home school their kids and such. While that might be a good idea in certain cases, it's almost always done for the wrong reasons and without regard to how difficult it actually is if you want the best for your kid.

Funny, in American English, "institutionalized" means "sent to an insane asylum".

I think this is compounded by the fact that many of the social institutions that used to exist are also greatly reduced, and children are expected to be much more structured now than they were. Used to be that kids could reasonably be expected to walk to a library or playground on their own, or play with neighborhood children, without being constantly supervised. (And yes, bullying happened, and yes, so did the Atlanta Child Murders. But the former was a much more realistic problem than the latter.) Kids were also going with parents to church, parents probably had some kind of social outlet, etc. There was, in general, more community. (I'm not bemoaning the loss of religion, since I think religion is trash, but I do miss the community that religion helped build.)

And yeah, most people I know now that home school kids are doing it to ensure that their kids aren't exposed to 'dangerous' ideas.

I thought libertarians were cool. Then I learned about the “fiscally conservative “ parts.

Throw back to when I was young and naive and considered myself an "independent" who argued both sides. Then I found out who the real snowflakes were

Libertarianism is only viable if you have the ability to effectively evaluate every option you were presented with, so as to maximize your benefit.

Unfortunately, this excludes the lower-90% of the population. Only the top-10% are wealthy enough to afford the mental headspace to do this.

It's not just thinking that's required. You also need the resources to hold out for the best option. When you're going to be homeless and starve next month if you don't have a job, you take what they're offering regardless of if they would have accepted a better offer later. Libertarianism works if there's no coercion. That's not a world that exists though, so we need the government to protect people from it.

I'm all for government not controlling people's lives, by more importantly nobody should be controlling people's lives; whether that's the state, a corporation, or someone with a gun to your head. We need government to enforce this. They should not tell people what they can/can't do, but they should protect then from other entities doing that.

It's not just thinking that's required.

Oh, absolutely. It’s just an exclusive first step that needs addressing before anything else. As such, it becomes an insurmountable barrier for the vast majority of people long before the resource aspect comes into play.

That's not a world that exists though,

And with how Capitalism is violently coercive (“be profitable to someone else or suffer poverty, destitution, homelessness, and even death”), this also means that it will likely be impossible to achieve until we eradicate greed from our society and make wealth accumulation a mark of deep shame instead of something admirable. Because until that happens, the Parasite Class will continue to find violently coercive ways to maintain and increase that labour-free stream of wealth they have stolen from the working class.

We need government to enforce this.

And until we develop benevolent AGI that have no “skin in the game” (no ways of being coerced and no desire to pick sides) to do the job of administration for us, we will continue to have inadequate governance. Because it isn’t so much that power corrupts, but rather that power attracts the corruptible. Exhibit A: Orange siphilis-dementia’d man with the incoherent talk.

There is a lot of merits to left libertarianism (social anarchy) that I would put into the "ideal" category.

My dyslexic ass read librarian and for a whole minute I was confused why this should be connected to reading and sorting books professionally.

I thought Brussels sprouts were baby cabbages until I was 28 and I finally saw them still attached to the stalk.

If it makes you feel any better, you were actually almost right. These days the brassica oleracea has several well-known cultivars, including Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale and kohlrabi, all of which come from the same species of plant.

Also, relevant xkcd.

Shame about sex stuff, because of growing up in a Christian household. Took me until my 20s before I was comfortable with… everything.

Now I have over a grand in Bad Dragon stuff and another grand in other fun things and I’m basically asexual so I rarely use anything. BUT WHEN I DO… we get WEIRD about it.

Nothing wrong with being weird! Sometimes we all have to take Chances.

My second-latest buy is a flared Chance hahaha

I just pretend he’s a Kirin from Monster Hunter because the whole horse thing weirds me out a bit.

Very interesting textured though!

Furry butt stuff is 100% OK as long and it's with a consensual adult. 👍

Cocoa has an "a" at the end of it. I was in college and was like, "haha, they spelled it weird." Nope, just a dumbass.

A BLT is literally just bacon, lettuce, and tomato. I thought it was just the toppings on the base meat (like how a pepperoni pizza inculdes bread, sauce, etc.). I don't like bacon or raw tomato, so I never had one.

There is no bone in the penis. I swore there was one until I made it to 3D molding and, as we were going over different body parts and their movement, I asked my male friend "Hey, where's the penis bone/muscle." He looked at me like I had two heads. I assumed it could do tricks, like waving and stuff. 🤷🏿‍♀️

BLTs also have mayo, and preferably a hell of a lot of it. They are garbage without it.

Opening bananas.

Watch a nature documentary showing me a monkey knew better.

Using my thumbnail on the long thin end and no over-ripe bananas I never had problems with peeling.

As a kid I would hear “save big money” and would often show a person next to oversized money (like cartoon people next to giant dollars and coins).

I was absolutely under the impression it meant large scale money and found it confusing anyone would want that. It would be so inconvenient!

I’m not sure when I figured it out but it wasn’t an “a-ha!” moment, it just sort of gradually fell out of my brainmeat.

As a very young kid, I called pizza cutters 'Steves' because of some commercials airing in the 90s for... pizza hut? little caesars? ... which featured a pizza cutter named Steve.

Yep, here's an example:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hSnISEnX2Xw&pp=ygUdcGl6emEgY3V0dGVyIHN0ZXZlIGNvbW1lcmNpYWw%3D

I had literally never seen a pizza cutter in real life, never heard it called a pizza cutter, and when my family got one, I assumed it was just called 'a steve', rofl.

I thought Menard’s slogan was “save big bunny at Menard’s”.

The first time I went to one was around Easter, so they had bunny-themed stuff around. And the store’s speakers were shit, so it was hard to understand the ad spots playing over them.

I wasn’t sure why Big Bunny was in trouble, or what it would take to save him, but I wasn’t too worried.

Eventually, I saw a commercial for it and figured out I had misheard it. I still like my version better though.

Until I was 24 or 25 I believed that women were disinterested in sex, and that sexual relationships were wholly transactional. I also thought I was hidiously undatable.

Nope. Wrong on all counts.

I’m in my 40’s and I still vacillate on this. :)

I thought I was straight for about 17 years, thinking that also being attracted to men was just something everyone experienced.

Its nice to be allowed to have doubts about it too, without panicking, even though the final conclusion is that yes I consider myself straight. Its definitly not as binary as SOME people claim. And knowing that, I am also learned to be a lot less trusting of peoples world views and "common sense".

I saw a quote years ago about "common sense" that really changed the way I thought about it. I wish I could remember now where it came from.

"The problem with common sense is that it is common, not good."

It might be just because I'm relatively middle of the road bisexual, but I always liked the idea that most people aren't quite on the extreme ends of the Kinsey scale, but like, a tiny bit bi at least.

I am definitely thankful for having a family that was very open about everything, and didn't mind either way, though I do feel that the years spent not wanting to engage with the thought partially came down to pressure from peers, as anything other than heterosexuality seemed to be seen as alien back then. From what I hear from my brother, that actually changed a lot compared to when I was in school, and things are a lot more accepting now.

As someone at one of the extreme ends (though it can get complicated at times, male levels of testosterone make me slightly attracted to men) I also find the idea that most people are a little bi to be the case. In fact I didn’t realize I’d been attracted to men at all until I transitioned and that attraction went away.

Until well into adulthood, I assumed that Katherine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn were mother and daughter. A few years ago, I overheard some TV documentary saying that Katherine Hepburn never had any children. They’re not related in any way. I was shocked.

Reminds me of when I was a kid watching Annie, I figured since it was set in the 1930s, it was filmed back then. I got really confused when I was a teenager and saw a rerun of the Carrol Burnett Show.

I used to be kind of low level anti-pharmaceuticals. Nothing too dramatic (never antivax), but definitely quietly on the side of other forms of interventions of any kind being preferable over drugs.

I still acknowledge that in many instances other interventions can be better, but in a lot of cases a pharmaceutical intervention is the quickest, most effective and safest way for people to deal with whatever health or mental health conditions they have. And also lots of drugs are perfectly safe over the long term.

I think I was raised with a lot of ideas around purity, but when I came out as trans is when that started to change in a big way.

only ever read the word cyan and eventually learned I'd been pronouncing it wrong my whole life when i said it out loud in conversation

How were your pronouncing it?

see-EN instead of SY-en

I pronounced it like cayenne pepper until someone corrected me. But I learn a lot of words from reading them before hearing them. HEJeeMOHnee.

Related, Celtics (soft C) are a basketball team, Celts are a ethnic demographic and a Selt is an ancient kind of knife.

I also pronounced cyan like cayenne as a teen….

Except I was also cocky enough to think I was right and found out when I “corrected“ a classmate who was pronouncing it “wrong”.

Same here. I grew up in time and place where english was almost non existent for normal people. Then computers came, but they were gray bricks with no sound output outside PC speaker "beep beep". But the language was there already. For many years english was just written form with zero pronounciation for me. And once we finally got teacher that actually could speak (and who wasn't one lecture ahead of us) it was almost too late. That's why I uderstand quite well, especially written text, but once I have to speak myself... people think I came from stone age or something.

Same problem here, but with "Yosemite". As a scandinavian I have no basis for hearing it spoken, so in my head I pronounced it as if it was a very street way of greeting Jewish people.

Used to think that cis people normally think that they are girls or dislike their genitals, and that it was a phase I would grow out of. I didn't, it just got worse and it was from browsing r/egg_irl and r/traa that made me realize that I was wrong and in-denial.

Glad you found the perspective you needed

For years I thought Mickey Rooney (1920-2014) and Mickey Rourke (1952-present) were the same guy. I'd see Mickey Rooney in a movie and be like "Wow, he's looking pretty good for his age," thinking he was a man 32 years his senior and/or dead.

I finally twigged when I eventually saw Iron Man 2 (2009) and was like "How is he doing this?!" and actually looked him up.

For me it was Mickey Rooney and Andy Rooney.

When I was a kid I had hard time distinguishing between actor and role. So Kevin from Home Alone had to be that Kevin Costner the actor, right? Right!?

Then Home Alone would have been 3 hours with an epic speech about why this is the final stroke and why he will stand against the burglars beside some hobos from the woods.

The pronunciation for the name "Byrne". I was pronouncing it like "by-ernie" as if I were excitedly saying "bye, Ernie! 😃"

Then I found out it's pronounced like "burn"! 😂

You don't actually smell burnt toast when having a stroke.

Joked about it to my roommate who was in med school once that "I might be having a stroke, or someone burnt their toast again." To which he responded "WTH are you talking about?"

So I explained the meme and he debunked it for me right there haha

If you're talking about the Heritage Minutes ad about Dr. Penfield, she had epilepsy, it wasn't a stroke. Smelling burnt toast was a precursor to her seizures.

There's also a scene in Saving Private Ryan where a dying soldier talks about smelling the bread from back home.

But phosgene does smell like freshly cut grass. "Phosgene smells green!", kids.

I thought that the human body was incapable of making glucose. Learned about gluconeogenesis during a university nutrition course

I thought I was smart. I'm not. I'm clever and good at figuring things out, but there is a difference.

I know that I know nothing, said Socrates thousands of years ago. So I'd say it's beyond clever to teach yourself things and learn from your experiences. That is very smart in my book.

I thought lizards lived everywhere, and didn't know until I was 18 that Oregon was on the west coast of the US, I thought California ended where Washington started and that Oregon was inland (we did not have geography in school).

When I finally went to college as an adult I took a world geography class as an elective because I felt so incredibly ignorant. Now, even years later I can help my kids with geography, quite a bit of it actually stuck.

I've always lived in Oregon. You would be surprised how many people think it's only California and Washington on the west coast. About a dozen different people in various MMOs have had the same confusion.

I learned that the lowest point in Canada is a hair farther south than the most northern part of California

And that 50% of Canada lives below the 49th parallel

I thought the "purple" skittles were supposed to be brown (I still think they look brown). One day I looked on the package. The rest is history.

Ever done a color blindness test?

Funny you say that, I'm actually a tetrachromat, which means I'm the opposite of colorblind. The purple skittles just didn't seem purple. They chose such a drab shade of purple that, even to me (or even especially to me), rather than being recognizable as the same vibrant color as grapes, it appears to be the kind of purple you get from the sky on an exceptionally rainy droopy day.

It also helped that, after looking at such a drab sky, I ended up seeing the rainbow, thinking back to the skittles commercial, seeing what colors were actually in the rainbow, and thinking "wait a minute..."

it's not a you problem. different individuals see colour differently. artists may perceive colours differently due to practice in colour theory, lighting, and perhaps paint mixing. people from different cultures may categorize one colour into different groups. what people see as hot pink, programmers may see as magenta or simply just #FF00FF.

TIL Tetrachromacy exists in humans.

It's actually the same exact gene as the colorblindness gene, except it manifests as tetrachromacy in females while manifesting as colorblindness in males. If you have any colorblind people in your family, chances are you also have tetrachromats in your family too.

It's a rather double-edged sword, especially as an artist. For example, you lose a little of your natural appreciation of differing shades, and it doesn't transfer over to technology, so a picture of a bird you see on a device is going to have less color than the same bird if it were right in front of you. Personally I could do without the extra colors.

That Tom Brady was a product of a winning system and would be average at best if he played with another organization. What made me realize I was wrong? Fuckin ring number 7 and our (the Bills) absolute owning of New England ever since he left.

The monte carlo paradox - my brain really refused to grok it for a long time.

If you mean the Monty Hall paradox, this is how I've recently been able to understand it.

You start with a 1/3rd chance of being right. That's a 2/3rds chance you are wrong. Your first pick is likely wrong.

The host now must open a losing door. Since you likely already picked a losing door, the host likely only has one option for which door to reveal.

So since chances are best that you first picked a wrong door, then the host picked the other wrong door. Which means the one that hasn't been picked by anyone yet is likely the winning door.

Edit: Monte Carlo paradox is a thing. My bad.

The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy, occurs when an individual erroneously believes that a certain random event is less likely or more likely to happen based on the outcome of a previous event or series of events.

For this one I like the example: "The surgery fails 9/10 times. The last 9 patients have died. Does that mean you in the clear?"