Totally untrue things you were told as a young child ...

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that school years are the best of your life, best of your life if you're the same as everyone else maybe, but if you're different then they're the worst years of life

tell that to women and they'll be all over you

"Your uncle is traveling , he'll be back in a few months maybe " .. he was in jail for DUI offenses.

Most people seem to really love clinging to their fantasies, and get highly offended if people point this out to them. People who are smarter than they are, scare and offend them. I have always thought it is a waste of life to spend it ignorant of reality. There is a wondrous, complex and beautiful universe all around them, and they have no interest in learning about it.

But then, that is caused by childhood abuse -- the abuse of destroying children's appetite for learning, by getting angry at them for asking questions, or giving them fake quick answers to make them go away. If it doesn't happen at home, it happens in the public "education" system, which is more a system of measuring how good students are at being unquestioning automatons, memorising useless and often incorrect "facts" to be forgotten after the exam.

On average it seems that adults remember about 5 to 10% of what they learned in school. This is not "learning" the way I view learning. To me, if you learn something, then you understand how it functions at a base level, something that is never forgotten. The only things that are forgotten are things you didn't understand or care about in the first place.

As a child, I studied body language people used, including when they were lying or joking, and was almost never tricked by my peers.

As an example, my sister and her friend use to tell us that they "rode their bicycles off to Candyland" each day one summer. I was not sure if this was possible or not, so I wanted to go with them to see if it were real, before I would believe them. Once it became clear that they would not take me and my friend there, I lost interest.

As I see it, if there is no way for something to be demonstrated and understood, then it is pointless to waste my time concerned with it.

I made a major discovery at age 14, which was that people may fully believe what they say, and it can still be completely incorrect.

At that point I made a conscious decision to modify my brain programming and never automatically believe what anybody says, even if I detect no deception from them. Since then I have not believed anything anybody has told me, or anything written in a book, on TV, in a documentary, etc. without first personally analysing it to see if it makes logical sense, and preferably hearing the same fact from numerous unrelated sources.

The way I modified my brain for making sure my facts were reliable, was adding a citation to every fact I store in my brain, which tells me the source of that information, and if I have analysed it yet. Then, when recalling a fact later on, if I can't remember the source of it, or if I haven't had a chance to analyse it to see if it makes sense, I simply discard the fact as unreliable before saying it out loud to someone.

This has proven to be an invaluable form of data integrity check for myself. Human brains modify memories each and every time they are recalled. Memories are additive. Whatever you are thinking about when you recall a memory, gets slightly connected to that memory. The only way to maintain accuracy in brain storage is therefore to implement systems of conscious checks and balances, so when the data changes form over time, this change is consciously perceived.

I regularly catch myself with this simple anti-bias programming, and have spent the years since developing new types of anti-bias routines for other situations (such as emotional bias).

Growing up after this, people often found it rude when I wouldn't automatically believe them about things they believed in, so after a while I just stopped letting people know when I didn't agree with their "facts", to avoid them getting angry at me. I simply keep quiet, or use a nondescript response such as a nod of the head or a grunt, without actually saying that I agree. But when I do already agree with their fact, then I actually say so. In this way, they never catch on that I am not automatically believing everything they say, and they stay happy.

The exception is when I know that a person won't be offended by me being myself, in which case I will offer my differing opinion. Or chatting online, where I am usually free to [mostly] be myself, as people GETTING ANGRY USING CAPS LOCK AND SWEARING is much easier to calmly deal with than someone yelling at me in person.

You bet. I actually took her advice and started to throw stuff away when they be in the wrong spot. I would clean and toss things out that were in the wrong spot to teach my family to keep things put away. My parents even had to go through the garbage before taking it out in the garage in the big trash can.

I was in my teens when I finally realized it was a bluff my mom did and I took it so seriously.

I was 18 when I found out that wasn't true.

There is no reason to be afraid of urine.

If you are worried about bacteria, there is almost none to be found in public pools -- it can't survive with all that toxic chlorine in the water. Meanwhile, you are sitting at a computer typing on a keyboard, which you are probably not afraid of. Yet, in the average clean home or office, the keyboard has more live bacteria than anywhere else. Sweat builds up from touching the keys + never being cleaned = bacteria heaven. Even your toilet has less bacteria on average than your keyboard, as you [presumably] clean it regularly. When was the last time you removed all the keys on your keyboard and cleaned it? Even if everyone at the pool were to urinate directly onto you, the chance of you getting sick from bacteria would be almost zero, unless you had open wounds and/or a compromised immune system.

If you are afraid of the urine because of the actual chemical composition of what is contained in it, there is no need to be, the moment someone would urinate in a pool, the water disperses and separates the chemicals in the urine. This is why oceans are so useful to the Earth -- they separate all the toxic things and spread them so thin that the toxicity is minimised.

All that's left is being told that "pee is dirty" by parents, with no factual basis. From the body of an average person (who drinks less water than they should), urine is still well beyond 99% pure water.

You are much more likely to slip and have a fall at the pool, than having any negative consequence from being exposed to urine over the course of your entire lifetime.

Hyenas are scavengers.

There are advantages to being a woman. Why do I wish to be a man, than?

That would be gender bias for your own gender. It is the most basic form of sexism, one which few people can ever see past.

While I personally enjoy being a male, had I been born a female, I would also have enjoyed that life.

Or being a different cellular structure, such as a plant or non-human animal. It's all good. However, I am extremely thankful to have had the opportunity to experience a human neural network, and a lifetime to spend tweaking it to my liking.

If I had the choice to go back in time and choose my own gender, I might choose being female, as I think it would be an interesting experience growing a human in me. There are definite societal advantages to being male, but those are all things I could have easily worked around as a female.

Regarding the original point of "there are advantages of being a woman", yes, there are. But there are also advantages to being a male! It goes both ways.

Last edited by Raven_Morris on 16 Jul 2011, 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"Ring a round the rosey" was about the plague.

Christopher Columbus discovered the would wasn't flat after all.


And various other historical "facts" teachers shared.

Babies come out of the mom's belly button.

The two most ridiculous ones I can recall are:

'If you swallow gum, it will wrap around your heart and you will die.'

'If you tell a small lie, an angel gets sick. If you tell a big lie, an angel dies.'

I was told that it stayed in your stomach for 7 years. I proved that wrong though.

I think almost every child has heard the "if you chew bubble gum, it stays in your _____ for years". I never took that idiocy seriously, and often swallowed my bubble gum.

Another classic, which many adults still believe, is that if you go out in the rain without a jacket, you will "get sick".

Sorry, water doesn't make you sick, and being outdoors doing physical activity increases your health and immune system, so it makes you *less* likely to get sick, not more. I've gone out in the rain tens of thousands of times in shorts and a t-shirt, and I have yet to get sick even one time from it.

I thought the most common amount of time was 7 years.
I ALWAYS swallow it, but now I find that gum has gelatin...and, I have to read the package before I eat it.

Yes!