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Punoxysm comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong
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One of the smartest people in my high school spent a class arguing that a there were 4^20 possibilities for a sequence of 4 amino acids, when in fact it was 20^4. Not quite as elementary as yours, but our brains all play tricks on us.
Wikipedia says there are 500 known amino acids. I take it you were talking about a domain involving fewer potential amino acids?
The 20 amino acids involved in protein creation.
Presumably the slightly greater than twenty that form the universal basis of biological protein polymers. In other words, the amino acids explicitly coded for by DNA.
I once spent about 20 minutes in class trying to justify the claim that a cubic meter of water weighs one ton, not 100 kilograms.
As you may note, this is not a false belief; it's relevant because I spent a significant fraction of this time wracking my brain trying to jog it free to see if I was being dense (pun intended) like you're describing (I have pretty strong reasons to believe I didn't remember this incident backwards as a case of self-justification by retcon)
You just made me sufficiently confused to quickly google the volume of a cubic meter and the weight of a litre of water. I suspect this is a good habit to reinforce but I can't help feeling silly.