I ended up making a site that will let people submit facts. They will be fact checked by my till I have the filtering completed. Please check it out and let me know what yall think. It was made to be extensible
ITT: People misinterpreting the idea as "facts that your school taught wrong", when it's really saying, "things that have changed since you went to school" (either through a change in definition or by new research).
E.g. If you went to school before the early 2000's, you were taught that Pluto is a planet, while that is no longer true since it was recategorized in 2006.
The dumbest shit I've heard throughout my year was at uni, from a physics professor, no less. He, with a straight face, was telling us that highlanders live longer because oxygen content is lower at high altitudes, and since oxygen is an oxidant, it makes people corrode away(??) faster and causes aging.
He was also a Chudinist, which is pseudo-science about searching the words RUS and names of old pagan gods in random, sometimes absolutely ridiculous places, like freshly crumpled A4 sheet or on the surface of the sun, and claiming it to be a sign of existence of greater ancient slavic race.
I once got into an argument with him because he was claiming that lifting an item in hands takes constant amount of energy, no matter how fast you do it. So I challenged him to a 5 minute plank... and he kicked me out from the class. But I didn't care, as I soon flunked out of that uni because he wasn't even the most schizo prof over there.
So many would say "Pluto" and I would cry.
Better still there were a bunch of facts that were false when they were taught to you but for some reason were still taught to you.
Like the obvious one, the tongue doesn't actually have different regions on it for tasting different things, a fact that you probably didn't believe even back then because anyone with a sugar cube and 5 minutes can disprove that.
Antibiotics aren't for viruses. Cold air doesn't make you sick. Tongues don't have "taste zones." Muscles don't have memory.
And because you threw up for one day, you didn't have "the 24hr flu." You ate something bad or someone didn't wash their hands. The flu is short for influenza, which is a respiratory virus, which typically does not make you throw up and shit. More likely it was the dodgy gas station sushi.
Let's keep going...
It's kind of a fun idea, but as everyone has pointed out: every school is different, even of there is some centralized board of education, some times teachers just say dumb shit.
Also, when does a fact become a fact? Like, dinosaurs had feathers. It was theorized, then debated, then clarified, and now there are some reasonable consensus about it, but theropauds probably still aren't presented as having feathers in some books. And what teachers know this?
Even just the map of the world is outdated pretty much by the time it's taught.
In 2023 Micronesia made a fairly minor change from the former name, "Federated States of Micronesia". But, in 2022 Turkey now wants you to use its metal name: Türkiye.
Then there's the new country of South Sudan, Bougainville on its way to splitting from Papua New Guinea. And Kosovo shows another problem -- whether its an independent country or not depends on who you ask. That includes regions like South Ossetia, Transnistria, Catalonia and Taiwan.
Then there are things that students are taught that we've known are wrong for over a century, but the fully correct version is too complex for anything below a university course. Like, Newton's laws are appropriate for high school, but they're known to be incorrect and are simplifications of Einstein's refinements. But, they're close enough for most purposes, and understanding Einstein's stuff is pretty hard. Same with models of the atom.
And, history is another subject where the deeper you dig, the more the generalizations you're taught are shown to be wrong. The names and dates might be the same, but the reason X happened is often a whole lot more complex than the simple reasons given in high school.
I sent the Twitter image to chatgpt to convert the image to text and then I put that text into websim which generated a website that does exactly that and it even handles if you graduated recently and it will link you to a timeline of debunked "facts" here's the link, enjoy! https://websim.ai/c/GeEMLk9DuUC23jV9S
You can do this with AI now, except the computer still thinks they're facts
Varies too much person to person to be valuable
RIP Pluto
This assumes that your teachers were up to date
people who dropped out: "I know all"
2006
Public school book adoption is between 8-12 years (Texas). And they only have to meet 50% of the state learning objectives. I hope the point of this post of to encourage life long learning and developing critical thinking skills.
