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.
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 :(
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.
Details?
Care to elaborate?
They’ve remembered they are DB Cooper
I knew it!
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”! 😂
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.
Cyan
/ˈsaɪ.ən/
I think they said /siˈan/
no, it was when i was a cashier
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.
The consequences of not growing up with first you take the graham, then you take the mallow!
Til
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.)
Fun fact, it was originally made from the roots of the marsh mallow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althaea_officinalis
Again: Til
The word quay. I’m still mad about that haha
Such a dumb pronunciation. Cool word though.
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?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.
How about chicken?
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.
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.
I want to go there. with crackers.
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
LlllinkAlanis 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.
Um, did she at least cover it?
TIL
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.
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.
For me it was Mickey Rooney and Andy Rooney.
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.
I learned that in school, when we read a story about a proper gander.
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.
Well, I just learned something.
deleted by creator
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gaggle” still works
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.
Same. Lost a very good friend because I was too slow to change, lost my family because I did.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
The monte hall problem is easier to understand if you start with 1000 doors, then take 998 away.
I’m sorry. I hope you are alright.
Yes - the Monte hall problem.
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 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.
WHAT?! They aren’t mother and daughter? My whole life is a lie
