What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

Punoxysm

What is something you used to believe, preferably something concrete with direct or implied predictions, that you now know was dead wrong. Was your belief rational given what you knew and could know back then, or was it irrational, and why?

Edit: I feel like some of these are getting a bit glib and political. Please try to explain what false assumptions or biases were underlying your beliefs - be introspective - this is LW after all.

"I don't think that can be right, it doesn't make evolutionary sense or something on those lines. "

A single punch can be lethal, so why doesn't a special case (albeit myth) of it make evolutionary sense?

I used to believe that altruism was generally faked.

What convinced you otherwise? I think the same person can profess either genuine or faked altruism depending on the situation. Figuring out the proportion of those throughout humanity without some kind of experimental psychology would be quite difficult I think.

10lmm12y

A single punch can be lethal, but not with anything like the frequency that you could be subject to this kind of impact - it's an obvious place to punch someone, and very similar to what happens when you fall on your face. We know that skull shape is something that evolution can and does change in relatively short timeframes. There's no "technical debt" explanation, particularly if the claim was that this is something unique to humans. [...] Mainly moving from a situation in which I faked it to one in which I genuinely enjoyed being altruistic - but also observing changes in I guess how behaviour seemed to change with observation, which seemed to suggest that my peers also underwent the same change.

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What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

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What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

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