I could throw a site together if the community is willing to help curate the data.
From what I read here are some keys to follow:
Year Taught: Year of irrelevance: Country: Fact:
I could throw a form together for submissions to feed this site. Thoughts?
For America, you’ll also need to have a drop-down for states. I graduated from high school in California in 2009, and I’m currently working on a medical degree, so I’d be delighted to contribute to this. I’d especially like to help with a sex ed section for Americans.
I’m not sure I’d want to get that granular because of the same fact was taught across the country there’s no need for the redundancy. Also trying to make this a global website helps removing that level of granularity from the states as well.
The differences in curricula across states mean that some states would have gotten the correct information while others may not have. I know the science and history classes in my state were pretty different from some other states.
Thats not just the case in the US though
That’s part of my point. My American education was pretty limited on the internal politics and civics of other countries, but my husband who went to high school in a different state did get a decent amount of information about how modern/current European countries are structured. So I guess it’s safe to assume that other countries will also have differences across regions.
Design it so that it can get that granular later(when someone else wants to do that work)
As long as it’s got the capability it can grow into that later. Assuming unexpected and explosive popularity/growth it would be great if wikifoundation acquired it someday as a dataset if nothing else, but having a structure that can be expanded globally at a granular scale baked into it from the beginning would be awesome
Sorry I’m not great with computers or i would offer more of a technical opinion not just design commentary
I graduated from high school in California in 2009
Hey, me too
You’d probably need to verify all submissions
Unless you throw an LLM into the mix
Or maybe there’s already some resources giving you all debunked facts with their dates
LLMs are not magic, otherwise one just have to request that any submission will have references to reputable sources.
I would probably start out by proofing or approving them before they post to the site. It say I get a notification read it do a little reading over it and get to a point where I can use a large language model to siphon the submissions.
You believe an LLM can be used to distinguish facts from fiction? I wonder up to which year that misconception was taught in school.
The whole point of LLMs is, to convince their users that the “facts” they generate are actual facts.
LLM is plausible deniability!
They can browse the web, and I never meant it would be 100 accurate just easier. Don’t think this is going to be a mission critical website
That just it, these “facts” won’t be on the web for stuff approximately 2005 and before. No where on the web is the racist and homophobic shit I was taught in the 80’s and 90’s listed on some wiki.
LLM’s are mostly useless anyways at distinguishing real information, they are just shit summary tools and poor search engines.
Actually, this is a really really amazing idea.
Set country as an option, and private/public school (different lies…)
It’d be great to let us all face our biases _
different lies
A Japanese person asks, “What did my school get wrong about Japan’s involvement in World War II?”
is given an exhaustive history of the World War II Pacific Theater
Hard to call it a bias when that was the accepted convention for a large portion of the population.
Can’t really blame someone for being taught something than never having it come up again.
Yeah like the food pyramid. That’s not my bias, that was the government fucking up
That was big business fucking with the government on purpose.
Yup. Sucks ass how many of us they conned
Biases? Ignorances, is that the word you meant?
A little of column A and a little of column B.
There are 9 planets…
I’m torn on this one, cause recently they’ve been finding evidence of a ‘new’ 9th planet, way beyond Pluto’s orbit. So I’m on the fence of “there are 8 planets” and “there are 9 planets.” 🤔
I’m of the believe that we made up the word planet and it can mean whatever we say it means.
I’m of the opinion we made up all the words, but those mouth sounds must have a strict meaning whenever possible. Words are important, they’re how you communicate concepts. Everyone should be precise with their words to the best of their understanding, if you have to redefine the word planet in every conversation the concept is diluted and you waste a lot of time
In this case, if Pluto is a planet, we have at least 13. We might discover another 10 or 20 if there’s no planet 9 hiding behind the kyper belt and it’s all dwarf planets… Ain’t no one got time to remember 30+ planets
30+ planets should be pretty easy. They name them after mythology. The 50 states aren’t difficult to remember, and those don’t have any sort of naming convention.
That’s pretty much how it is. In ancient times, planets would have been objects that were distinguishable from stars in ways they had the ability to differentiate from. For example, with a telescope, any object that doesn’t shine like a star, that moves across the sky at a different rate than the stars, or maybe has visible rings.
Then once science found things that past science couldn’t account for, they redefined what a planet was, according to its size/gravitational pull or other factors, and which Pluto didn’t fit. Apparently due to Pluto’s small size, it’s not even a dwarf-planet, and by that measure is basically just a really big asteroid (we even know of asteroids that are bigger than Pluto).
The issue is, as I understand it, we either have 8 planets (or 9, if there is an exoplanet), or a whole bunch of planets, depending on how narrowly we define them.
Yeah this is the correct take. Either Pluto (and by extension, any object of similar size) is a planet, which would mean there’s thousands of Pluto-sized planets in the solar system; or pluto is ‘too small’ to be a planet. Which is the answer they (Sci community) settled on, because if every comet/asteroid is within the threshold definition of ‘planet’ then there would be no point in distinguishing planets at all.
Kinda like how we have dwarf-stars and supermassive stars 1000x bigger than our sun. If they were all the same size there would be no point defining them beyond ‘star’.
Pluto being too small isn’t actually the grounds on which it got demoted. The size requirement is just being massive enough to reach hydrostatic equilibrium - that is, be heavy enough that it’s round. Pluto does meet this one
The one it fails is clearing its orbit. This basically means being much heavier than everything else in the same orbit. Be gravitationally in charge of your orbit. The other eight are all hundreds if not thousands of times heavier than everything else in their orbit (not including moons, since they’re gravitationally bound to the planet anyway), whereas Pluto is less than a tenth of the total mass in its own orbit. Ceres is actually more gravitationally dominant over its orbit than that, although still nowhere near the eight planets.
This one sounds a bit weird at first, but I kinda like how it has such a massive delineation between the things we instinctively think of as planets and everything else.
It’s also the fact that Pluto doesn’t have its own orbital slot. It is clearly something that escaped Uranus at some point, that’s why their orbits intersect. A planet doesn’t just have to have a certain size, it also has to have its own distinct orbital path.
Recently? I’ve been hearing about a possible large trans-Pluto object since before Pluto lost its status as a planet.
I must not be on the more scientific news places then, I didn’t start hearing about it until around last year–maybe the year before–, well after pluto got thrown out like last night’s trash.
Happy cake day!
There’s been “planet X” theories since the 50s
There are at least 9
Pluto is a dwarf planet. Planet. You wouldn’t say that a dwarf person isn’t a person.
Speak for yourself
You wouldn’t call a person a dwarf, period. So don’t do that. If you ever meet a little person, they’ll probably refer to themselves as a little person. You should just follow their lead
A dwarf planet is not a category of planets. It is a category of sub-planetary objects. This is how the term “dwarf planet” was adopted by the IAU in 2006. It did used to mean “type of planet”, but there are just too many of them, and they’re really too different from planets, so it literally does not mean that anymore. At least to astronomers.
Whatever a red car is still a car.
It’s dumb to say it isn’t a planet just because it hasn’t yet cleared its orbit. The decision to make it “not a planet” was also made by astronomers, not by planetary scientists. Like people with “Star” in their name know more about planets than people with “planet” in theirs.
Anyways it’s extra silly because if you have “real planets” and “dwarf planets” then what is the higher group containing those two? “Things that orbit the sun”? No, they should both be planets.
I’m not going to argue with astronomers about how they define planets. I do my job, they do theirs!
What about Uranus
Edit: or is that a moon 🤣 I crack myself up!
I’m sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Oh…what’s it called now?
Urectum.
Lmao I love Futurama
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
There are just two years to select and “two facts” in total? Or it doesn’t work on mobile as expected.
The site was design mobile first. What is seen is what has been submitted. It is a community driven site.
lol, I have never been more confused that looking up “Edging is not skibidi and or goated”. Thanks for the submission.
The Y2K issue was real, but a lot of people spent a lot of effort to fix it before it became a problem. The dire warnings were exaggerated, it was never going to end the world, but the problem really did exist and it really could have led to some pretty serious issues especially with financial institutions.
Sorry, it was just a place holder while testing the database. Once I have an entry or two I’ll remove it.
Get back on your shit!
??
You can do this with AI now, except the computer still thinks they’re facts
I’ve actually seen a website that is exactly this.
Can’t remember the URL, but can confirm it exists (existed?) and it was an interesting website to read.
Same, I want to say it was a NYT page? Or something like that. Not a dedicated site.
Could be, it’s been a while. Or maybe there’s been multiple sites.
Likely, yep!
I went to a Christian private school.That list would take down the website for days!
Oh hey, I have one for you! I was taught that the Christian flag was the oldest flag in the history of the world.
out of curiosity, what is the Christian flag? I can only think of St George’s cross - England’s flag - or maybe the Vatican’s yellow/white one?
deleted by creator
Only if an incompetent made the site. User input is a drop in the bucket compared to aggregation, searching, and now “AI”.
Quickly need to query half a billion results…
This assumes that your teachers were up to date
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?
Or you get common misconceptions that were never facts. Like you only use 10% of your brain. I don’t think science ever said that, but man the idea is/was really common.
There are also plenty of things in science that are taught that are technically incorrect, but give you a working model that you can build on later. The atomic model being a rather typical example.
Oh. Yeah. That’s a good point. When I taught a dead language, I would tell my students that all grammars lie to you, but some of the lies are useful.
The Wittgensteinian Ladder. The pedagogical expedient misinformation.
That’s fair: abstraction. The technical wrongness of “orbiting electrons” as in the whichever-model serves a purpose: the truth is hairy, and more importantly not practically relevant if you’re calculating sliding boxes around planes and that sort of thing.
On the other hand, “10% of the brain” and similar nuggets of common “wisdom” are just flat-out wrong, often stupidly so. There’s very little use in that.
RIP Pluto
I think that already exists? I remember seeing it on Lemmy some months ago. I’ll try to find it.
I remember seeing one on reddit a few years ago exactly like this.
I was gonna say, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this exact website before
I didnt graduate highschool though. Quit at 16 to go to work full time got my ged at 29
So many would say “Pluto” and I would cry.
We could call it thefactsbook
factsbook
oh I get it, my grandma goes on there so often, she must be trying to get true information
I started a subreddit called facefacts at one point, was gonna debunk Facebook bullshit with a JS bookmarklet, but got too busy with work, then Trump flooded the zone and deleted my Facebook and twitter accounts.
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.
Some classics:
- lactic acid buildup makes your muscles hurt after a workout
- blood that’s returning to the heart and lungs is blue, blood that’s leaving your heart to go do it’s thing is red
- sugar makes kids hyper
All three of those things have been thoroughly debunked, and are demonstrably false, and yet we teach them all the time. Sometimes it’s even SCIENCE TEACHERS that are repeating these things, and sometimes it’s right in the textbook!
Don’t forget how chocolate, even in tiny amount, will kill a dog. My mother told this to my kids, and they were all confused because our dog ate a bunch of chocolate easter candy and she was fine.
I think it CAN be harmful to some dogs though!
Dogs, and cats although they’re unlikely to actually eat it, cannot eat artificial sweetener as their livers cannot break it down and it becomes toxic to them in moderate quantities. It is often used in a lot of cheaper chocolate, particularly American chocolate. Sugar’s fine though, other than the obvious issues with it.
Somehow dogs cannot eat large amounts of artificial sweetener, got changed into dogs cannot eat small amounts of sugar.
I thought the problem with chocolate is theobromine, same effect as you describe, but bitter and comes from cocoa, so less sweet / more expensive chocolate with higher amount of cocoa is actually more dangerous.
But still, as with any poison, the dose is important, this veterinary page says “One ounce of milk chocolate per pound of body weight is a potentially lethal dose in dogs”, so a dog would need to eat 1/16th of its own weight for it to be deadly, even for small dogs that’s more than a whole bar.
My 6th grade science teacher taught us that blood is red but that some people think it is blue until it touches air because our veins look blue under our skin. He explained how the different wavelengths of light are absorbed differently and they was why it looks that way. Two years later my 8th grade science teacher taught us that blood is blue until it touches air. She was not happy when I told her she was wrong. I even explained it and told her to go talk to the other teacher if she still did not understand. She still would not listen to me. Over half the class was in the same sixth grade class as me but I was the only one that either remembered or was willing to stand up to the teacher. I finished losing faith in the education system on that day.
My first grade teacher also taught us blood was blue hahaha
Just billionaire blood. Prove me wrong
Anyone know where i can get a billionaire to test this?
Well my 6th grade science teacher told us that Chernobyl was fortold in the book of revelations and it meant that the world will end soon. Public school. In New England. In the 90s. The 1990s.
You unlocked a childhood memory of my insane conspiracy theorist father ranting about “wormwood” in connection with Chernobyl.
Wormwood, aka Artemisia absinthium, is the active ingredient in Absinthe.
Found it. Seems it’s also an angel from Revelation? Guessing this is what that 6th grade teacher was on about, too:
https://www.endtime.com/articles-endtime-magazine/chernobyl-third-trumpet-revelation/
(Warning: brain worms galore)
tldr:
Is it merely a coincidence that the name of the memorial complex remembering those that died fighting the nuclear fires of Chernobyl is the exact same name of the fallen star called Wormwood referred to in the third trumpet prophecy of Revelation 8?
Yup, because people 2000 years ago knew exactly what a nuclear reactor is and that one would explode 1900 years later. How the hell do people come up with this?!
These stories are so crazy to me …… sometimes it seems looks I got a better secular education from my religion school in the 1970s, with nuns. For many years the science teacher was the only lay teacher, never mentioned religion and we were certainly never fed any of that creationist crap from anyone.
It was not a Jesuit school but they really left a great impression of the long history Jesuit pursuit of knowledge and science
A teacher not able to fathom being corrected by a student. Terrible and terribly common. Afraid to lose their authority, perhaps? I had this happen to me at around 8 or 9yo : I corrected my teacher on a specific conjugation (the infinitive of a verb), but she wouldn’t admit she was wrong. That day I swore I’d respect anybody in a discussion, even when I thought I was right and they were wrong. I would consider their take at the minimum
My 7th grade science teacher told us that air is a perfect mixture. I raised my hand and said “how is it a perfect mixture when some cities have smog alerts, and the ozone layer hole?”
I want sent to the principal and told to never question teachers, they know more than I ever will. It was then I kind of gave up and saw behind the veil on education.
This is also crazy to me - correcting the teacher was at worst a way to get extra homework and present the facts to the class.
Except computers. Those teachers were lost and welcomed any help
I remember when they taught me this in kindergarten didn’t believe them for a second
First thing I did when I read that was to put rub something all over my tongue just as a sanity check. When I tried to tell someone they went bonkers trying to defend the school book. From that point on I never took anything school books or adults said as fact without evidence.
It was a mistranslation of a German paper. Somehow it stuck
