$308 billion is pretty widely regarded as an over-spend on a problem that fizzled out.
According to the cite a Wall Street Journal editorial called the Y2K bug an "end-of-the-world cult" and the "hoax of the century".
It's really hard to tell whether money spent on prevention was worthwhile, after the fact. We would certainly be complaining if we'd spent $308 billion and everything did crash.
The Wall Street Journal editorial would be more impressive to me if it wasn't written in 2003. If it's so bloody obvious to them, why wasn't that editorial written in 1996?
The Y2K problem might have been solved in a more cost-effective manner if folks just fixed things as they broke, but lots of chaos would have ensued in the mean time. It's not like it was a non-problem. More like noticing you're spending more than you optimally should on car insurance.
Today I received some shoes in the post, which included a couple of packets of silica gel. I don't think I have ever seen a packet of silica gel that didn't have "DO NOT EAT" printed on it, and it's always bemused me. It doesn't look edible, or smell appetising, and isn't even especially harmful to ingest in most circumstances. Chances are that if I ever did want to eat silica gel, I'd probably have a damn good reason, and a lifetime of being told to not eat it is an obstacle to that.
This has started me thinking about all the other things we internalise as serious hazards contrary to reality. As a child, I was told that picking my nose and eating it would have some sort of cumulative toxic effect. This was obviously a lie manufactured by my parents (or maybe their parents) to get me to stop doing it, but a couple of decades later I felt positively scandalised when I read about an Austrian pathologist who claimed the practise was beneficial to the immune system. (Although this is mentioned in the delightful Wikipedia page on nose-picking, the reference links are dead, so I'd actually treat this assertion with caution, but feel free to munch away on your own dried nasal mucus anyway).
Although nose-picking and eating the packaging that shoes come in are pretty trivial examples, I do wonder how many of these prohibitive false dire consequences I'm still labouring under, invisibly making my life more difficult. I also wonder how many full-grown adults still don't accept sweets from strangers.
Do you have any examples of an authority figure, or a prevailing piece of cultural conditioning, giving warnings of dire outcomes you later discovered to be false, misleading or based on an agenda you were naive to at the time?