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 once believed that six times one is one.
I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but for whatever reason numbers became relevant and I clearly and directly stated my false belief. It was late, we were driving back from a long hard chess tournament, and I evidently wasn't thinking clearly. I said the words "because of course six times one is one." Everyone thought for a second and someone said "no it's not." Predictable reactions occurred from there.
The reason I like the anecdote is because I reacted exactly the same way I would today if someone corrected me when I said that six times one is six. I thought the person who corrected me must be joking; he knows math and couldn't possibly be wrong about something that obvious. A second person said that he's definitely not joking. I thought back to the sequences, specifically the thing about evidence to convince me I'm wrong about basic arithmetic. I ran through some math terminology in my head: of course six times one is one; any number times one is one. That's what a multiplicative identity means. In my head, it was absolutely clear that 6x1=1, this is required for what I know of math to fit together, and anything else is completely logically impossible.
It probably took a good fifteen seconds from me being called out on it before I got appropriately embarrassed.
This anecdote is now my favorite example of the important lesson that from the inside, being wrong feels exactly like being right.
The belief was minor, but the story is entertaining:
A while ago a guy walked into the bookstore and asked me for a copy of The Art of War—by Machiavelli.
I've developed the habit of being polite when customers are mistaken about details, taking (and often inventing) every possible opportunity to help them save face, so I handed him a copy of Sun Tzu without comment—though you can be sure that internally I was feeling all kinds of smug at the chance to display my superior knowledge of extremely common classic books. He glanced at it and left—mortified, I imagined.
A few months later, I looked it up and discovered that Machiavelli did, in fact, write a treatise called The Art of War.
But that isn't the embarrassing part.
The embarrassing part is that, in the moment I went to check, what I was thinking was not "Hmm, I wonder if I could have been mistaken"; it was "Heh, I wonder if anyone else has made the same mistake as that idiot!" My error was corrected only incidentally—in the course of my efforts to reinforce it.
I wonder what the chances of the guy actually asking for the Machiavelli tract are relative to the chances of him being wrong about the author? When I run into a namespace collision like that, I try to be extremely clear about it precisely so that I don't run into situations like you described -- i.e. "Machiavelli's Art of War, not the one by Sun Tzu".
You're absolutely right. Anyone who knew about the existence of both books would also be aware of the need to clarify which he meant (unless he was deliberately testing me so he could feel smug at his superior knowledge). The chances he was simply mistaken are still pretty good.
Had I considered that possibility, and rejected it on grounds of low prior, maybe I would have been entitled to a Rationality Cookie; but alas, what actually happened was that I didn't think at all.
Before I started tutoring I believed that anyone can learn first year math and science if only they put in the time and effort. Before I went to grad school I believed that I can learn all the advanced math and theoretical physics topics I was interested in. Neither belief survived experimental testing.
I am interested in this -- what exactly happened? Feel free to reply in private if you wish. Was it the case of:
(a) Morale breaking (this is not meant to be judgmental, this happens very often in graduate school, and certainly happened to me). Morale management is really hard.
(b) You felt lots of people in your program were much faster/smarter than you? (Also very common..)
(c) You felt you could learn [topic], but it would take unreasonably long (e.g. not 4-6 years it takes to get a thesis out)?
(d) You felt that literally you just could not get something, regardless of time investment? Could you give an example of such a topic?
All of the above, but the root cause is limited aptitude. I know you don't believe that, but you probably will the day you hit your own limit.
Music is a good example. You can aspire to play the hardest and most exquisite music pieces with the best, and compose new masterpieces, but without the talent you will not progress much farther than "twinkle twinkle little star" (i'm exaggerating a bit).
Or sports. Not everyone who wants to makes it to the major leagues.
In math and sciences I have frequently observed a really motivated person learning something with extreme effort, doing the exercises, then coming to the next session with half the newly learned skills gone, and having to start nearly from scratch. As a result, the effort which is linear for many is exponential for them. Or worse.
I was in a similar situation. A couple of grad courses were easy, some harder, and one or two nearly impossible for me. I was able to do well enough on them, but it was hell. There would be no way for me to get to the level where I could do research in the area. Yet some other students just kept going, mastering the new material at the same rate as the old. (And others were forced to drop t...
(see also 99.5% of programming job candidates fail the FizzBuzz test, though this seems a stretch).
This is misleading. Bad programmers spend more time interviewing before being hired, thus the pool of job interview candidates is biased towards bad programmers.
99.5% of programming job candidates fail the FizzBuzz test
This cannot be right. I have a variant of this (using an excel spreed sheet) on a technical interview for data analysts, which is a pretty low level position (the average candidate has an associates degree and "some knowledge of excel"). 60%-70% of the applicants, with no claimed programming experience, can make an excel sheet do the fizz buzz thing.
Before I started tutoring I believed that anyone can learn first year math and science if only they put in the time and effort.
Weirdly, I had the exact opposite conversion via tutoring, where "anyone" = "college students."
EDIT: I should clarify, I was a mediocre tutor. However, the head of the tutoring center was incredible. He regularly had people who were failing college algebra and science for non-majors and turned them into chemistry majors. In the sessions where he tried to mentor me, my students were obviously learning more than when I was by myself.
I used to think Narwhals were fictional animals. And people telling me they were real were just joking. It wasn't until HS that I was convinced they actually existed. My mental process was like "No way are there aqua unicorns."
Semi-political: I used to believe the correlation between economic freedom and economic growth was much stronger than it is. (I know there is no canonical choice of measurement for either variable). This realization had pretty important consequences for me.
My estimates of public opinion surveys were totally wrong. On almost every issue (sexuality, morality, politics, etc) I was completely wrong about the distribution of beliefs. Given my history of failure in this domain I no longer really on my own "intuitive" estimates of the distribution of group beliefs. Instead I seek explicit surveys.
correlation between economic freedom and economic growth was much stronger than it is
Here is a list of countries ranked by economic freedom:
http://www.heritage.org/index/
The top 10 are all very prosperous countries. In particular, [...]
Princess_Stargirl is talking about the correlation with economic growth, which is not going to be the same as the correlation with economic prosperity. This looks like a confusion of a variable with its rate of change.
It is informative to see what happens if I (1) correct this by correlating the economic freedom index with GDP growth, and (2) use as big a sample as is available instead of focusing on particular cases. I copied the freedom ratings from that Heritage web page and real GDP growth rates ("estimates are for the year 2013 unless otherwise indicated") from Wikipedia. The correlation between the freedom index and real GDP growth turns out to be negative: the Pearson correlation coefficient is -0.19 and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (which allows for nonlinearity) is -0.35. Plotting the data and a loess curve with R's default settings:
Some outliers are evident. Perhaps they're disproportionately skewing the freedom-g...
That site has a nice slightly-interactive map where you can pick out individual components of their "freedom index". Mostly they correlate with prosperity (I have no idea what the actual causal relationships are) ... until you click on "Government Spending" and suddenly it goes exactly the other way round -- the allegedly-worst government spending figures are for the US, Canada and Western Europe, and the allegedly-best are for severely messed up central African countries and China (!) and India.
If they stopped counting government spending as opposed to freedom -- it seems to me only marginally a matter of freedom -- the correlation between "freedom" and prosperity would become even more impressive.
(Note 1. The cynic in me says: Of course that's out of the question because a central part of the reason why the Heritage Foundation exists is to argue for lower government spending and hence lower taxes. If it advocated less forcefully for that, it would become less useful to those who fund it.)
(Note 2. It seems like there are lots of other things that could go into a "freedom index" with about as much reason as government spending. Two examples: ...
False belief: That in the U.S. the death penalty was cheaper than life in prison.
Believing this wasn't rational. I didn't take such basic steps as looking up the costs surrounding executions or life imprisonment. Executions get much more appeals, trials and legal attention.
False belief: That in the U.S. deaths by firearm are generally homicides, not suicides.
Believing this also wasn't rational. I didn't take such basic steps as looking up available death statistics.
Actually, looking through things potentially on the list for me, a lot of them seem to have the following general form:
1: Something is asserted.
2: I think: 'Yeah, that sounds plausible.'
3: I don't bother to look up any data about it, I just move myself to the believe column.
4: Later, someone else reports data about it.
5: I'm surprised that my earlier beliefs were wrong.
I've since became more skeptical of believing things based on just assertions, (I can even recall a recent instance where an assertion popped up on TV which my wife believed, but which I was skeptical of and which upon looking it up we found data didn't support it and that they were massively overstating their case)
But I can definitely recall beliefs that I have had in the past that were fundamentally just assertion based and the followed the above pattern.
It's just that I've never heard anyone talk about gun control and suicide, so it wasn't something that I ever considered related to the issue of gun control.
Heh. That's conclusive evidence that you've ever heard only one side of the gun control debate.
The anti-gun side widely uses "gun deaths" numbers which, as you just found out, contain suicides. The pro-gun side subtracts the suicides to get to actual "homicide using a gun" numbers. That's a very early and basic point in the debate.
You've just found that a major component of this debate was completely foreign to you. Now you've quickly decided that it's so silly you should make fun of it. Use the Try Harder, Luke.
One of the slides of my physiology 102 course consisted of the claim that women blink twice as much as men. I put that as a fact into Anki. Now it turns out that when I google around it isn't true.
In general the heuristic of believing things I'm told in science university lectures isn't completely bad, but it seems that there a category where lectures want to mention interesting facts and then tell students interesting facts that aren't necessarily true.
For some fun examples, see wikipedia's list of common misconceptions, (although several entries seem like misconceptions about misconceptions.)
My own example: I used to be a pretty strong believer in the strong crisis version of peak oil. This was mainly because I was around people who were; I went along with fairly naive trend extrapolation (exponential resource use increase, hard to develop new resources).
Eventually, around 2012 or so after oil prices had spiked then dropped then risen again and shale oil was a thing, I tempered my ideas, and took the much more rational view that oil wouldn't have a crisis-like peak, more a plateau. I believed that extremely high oil prices could drive massive adoption of much more advanced drilling methods. Therefore there would never be a crisis of extraordinary oil scarcity, but we could very well face $200/bbl oil (which we'd learn to live with like $140/bbl oil). But I didn't believe oil would really drop; I was bullish on almost all resource prices and on developing nation growth driving them.
While this was founded in a better understanding of economics and the petroleum industry, it was still grounded in false assumptions of continuing high-pace developing world growth and pessimism about alternative energy. Oil has now plummeted to $80/bbl, which I never expected to see again in my lifetime.
I once believed that most people have a basic understanding of how Solar system works. My belief in humanity shattered when during a discussion with with several graduates of physics (!) I discovered that most of them do not know what is the orbital period of Moon. An impromptu survey revealed that about 8 people from 10 thought it was one day or one week. One knew, one even asked if I want to know sideric or synodic period.
I once walked around a university campus convincing people that it's impossible to see the Moon during daylight hours. I think it was about 2/3 who believed me, at least until I pointed up.
I believed until sometime in high school that the phases of the moon are caused by the shadow of the earth. Don't ask me how I explained the gibbous phase.
I believed that the composition of a rational rotation of a sphere and another rational rotation of a sphere will be rational. (By a rational rotation I mean a rotation of a sphere around some axis which in radians is a rational multiple of pi, and thus will end up putting the sphere back where it started if you apply it enough.) Counterexample: Two 30 degree rotations each around a different axis with the two axies perpendicular to each other. I believed this because I was too used to thinking about the two-dimensional case, where it is trivially true.
Until very recently, I was convinced that it was extremely unlikely that any form of adiabatic quantum computing would have any chance at working at providing speedups, either asymptotically or practically. This belief came to a large extent as what was in retrospect an irrational reaction to the junk and bad hype that has been repeatedly coming from D-Wave. I changed my position when Scott Aaronson made this comment (comment number 25).
More mind-killing territory: Until about 3 days ago, I was convinced that claims that mass shootings were increasing in the US were due purely to media scare tactics and general human tendencies to ...
there really is a substantial fraction of what self-identifies as the "social justice" movement, primarily in an online context, that really is toxic, and that the rest of the left and the serious, sane part of the SJers aren't doing enough to call them out on it
Minus the online bit, this is fully generalizable against any political group, (and a lot of non-political groups as well). Which groups do you choose to lambast for "not calling out toxic members of that group"? Presumably the groups that you don't like. This is the art of politics.
"I don't have a problem with X group, but you have to agree that the subset Y of them are really horrible so lets continue to talk about how horrible they are" is Dark Arts to the max.
I was convinced in 2008 that Obama was going to be good for civil liberties. I don't think I need to discuss in any detail why that was wrong or how I got convinced otherwise, since the reasons should be pretty obvious.
I also made this mistake (although, to be fair, on the issue of torture, Obama genuinely was an improvement.)
My current belief is that, rather being grossly mistaken about the character of the former Constitutional law scholar/sponsor of a bill requiring videotaped confessions, I was grossly mistaken in underestimating the corruptive influence of the concentrated power of the executive branch/national security apparatus on anyone who wields it. I no longer think real reform will come from any President of any background; if reform is ever to happen it would require the legislative branch to actually prioritize reigning in the executive branch.
I also made this mistake (although, to be fair, on the issue of torture, Obama genuinely was an improvement.)
How do you now? The Obama administration continues to ban photographing equipment which was one of the policies to suppress evidence of US torture.
Torture got outlawed in the late Bush administration. People responsible for the torture project had no problem raising in influence within the Obama administration. The Obama administration continues to run black sites.
Probably not too interesting, but after studying physics at university I was pretty sure that the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM was crazy-talk (nobody even really mentioned it at uni). Of course I didn't read Eliezer's sequence on QM (although I read the others). I mean I had a degree in physics and Eliezer didn't.
Then after seeing it over and over again on LW, I actually read this paper to see what it was all about. And I was enlightened. Well, I had a short crisis of faith first, then I was enlightened.
This all could have been avoided if I had read that paper earlier. The lesson is that I can't even trust my fellow physicists :(
I find Eliezer's insistence about Many-Worlds a bit odd, given how much he hammers on "What do you expect differently?". Your expectations from many-worlds are be identical to those from pilot-wave, so....
I'm probably misunderstanding or simplifying his position, e.g. there are definitely calculational and intuition advantages to using one vs the other, but that seems a bit inconsistent to me.
I take Eliezer's position on MWI to be pretty well expressed by this quote from David Wallace:
[...] there is no quantum measurement problem.
I do not mean by this that the apparent paradoxes of quantum mechanics arise because we fail to recognize 'that quantum theory does not represent physical reality' (Fuchs and Peres 2000a). Quantum theory describes reality just fine, like any other scientific theory worth taking seriously: describing (and explaining) reality is what the scientific enterprise is about...
What I mean is that there is actually no conflict between the dynamics and ontology of (unitary) quantum theory and our empirical observations. We thought there was originally, because the theory is subtle, complicated and highly unintutive, and because our early attempts to understand it and to relate it to empirical data promote high-level concepts like 'observation' and 'measurement' to the level of basic posits and confused the issue.
The central case for Everettianism is that it is just plain old quantum mechanics, approached with the default realist perspective that most of us have no problem adopting for practically every other physical theory.* Every other "interpr...
I'm probably misunderstanding or simplifying his position
You really aren't. His logic is literally "it's simpler, therefore it's right" and "we don't need collapse (or anything else), decoherence is enough". To be fair, plenty of experts in theoretical physics hold the same view, most notably Deutsch and Carroll.
I am skeptical of the existence of any clearly definable sense of "the probability that you will witness yourself surviving the experiment" that (1) yields different answers for Everett and for Bohm, and (2) doesn't have excessively counterintuitive properties (e.g., probabilities not adding up to 1).
Probability that any you looking at the outcome of the experiment after 1000 runs sees you alive? 1, either way. Probability that someone looking from outside sees you alive after 1000 runs? Pretty much indistinguishable from 0, either way.
You only get the "probability 1 of survival" thing out of MWI by effectively conditionalizing on your survival. But you can do that just as well whatever interpretation of QM you happen to be using.
If I find myself alive after 1000 runs of the experiment ... well, what I actually conclude, regardless of preferred interpretation of QM, is that the experiment was set up wrong, or someone sabotaged it, or some hitherto-unsuspected superbeing is messing with things. But if such possibilities are ruled out somehow, I conclude that something staggeringly improbable happened, and I conclude that whether I am using Everett or Bohm. I don't expect to go on living for ever under MWI; the vast majority of my measure doesn't. What I expect is that whatever bits of my wavefunction survive, survive. Which is entirely tautological, and is equivalent to "if I survive, I survive" in a collapse-y interpretation.
Hm, because I spend more time researching the issue than I had before? That should count for something, shouldn't it?
Also, I can actually explain things like decoherence without hand-waving now. Looking back there were some gaps in my understanding that I just brushed over. You could say it was a failure of rationality to give as much credence to the Copenhagen interpretation in the first place.
I think this was a great idea for a post. If LessWrong rationality is worthwhile, then it ought to get lots of replies on concrete facts - not moral preferences, theology, or other unproveables.
I used to believe that embryos pass through periods of development representing earlier evolutionary stages - that there was a period when a human baby was basically a fish, then later an amphibian, and so on. I believed this because my father told me so; he was a doctor (though not an obstetrician), and the information he had given me about other subjects was highly reliable. Most knowledge is second hand - it was highly rational for me to believe him. I now know (also second hand!) that Haeckel's ideas were debunked a long time ago - although they might well have been in a textbook when my father was at medical school.
To me, the lesson is trust, but verify.
"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"
"No it doesn't"
- graffiti in the men's room of the Life Sciences Building, University of California at Santa Cruz
When I went to the London meetup, someone mentioned the "punching someone upward in the nose can send the nosebone into the brain and kill them" urban myth, and we all nodded except the one guy who actually bothered to think about it and said "I don't think that can be right, it doesn't make evolutionary sense" or something on those lines. I think, in my case at least, this was "just" a cached thought from childhood, but it was quite humbling how many of us got something so simple so wrong.
I used to believe that altruism was generally faked. This was based on my direct experience (and perhaps some mind projection fallacy), and an assumption that personalities were consistent over time, or perhaps situation - so probably the good old fundamental attribution error. And a default assumption that high schools couldn't really just be terrible, because no-one would allow that to happen. Why did I believe that? I think not appreciating how fallible memory is, and overestimating the engineering of the human reasoning apparatus. Evolution is always stranger than you think.
I used to not believe in quantum mechanics or general relativity, because they were terribly explained. I guess again I was assuming too much good faith on the part of educators. In retrospect if I'd just found a college textbook I'd've straightened myself out a lot sooner than I did. The popular science publishing industry still seems dysfunctional, but presumably there are incentives that I don't appreciate that keep it the way it is.
A single punch can be lethal, so why doesn't a special case (albeit myth) of it make evolutionary sense?
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.
What convinced you otherwise? I think the same person can profess either genuine or faked altruism depending on the situation.
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.
I used to believe that no one would loot a large organization (especially in the first world) from the top. It took me a while to realize anyone could want that much money.
The comment has five karma points, so I may not be the only person who had that blind spot. I suspect in my case that having grown up slightly upper middle class contributed to my false belief-- it was a combination of comfort/security with limited ambition.
I vaguely recall believing when I was young that there were no real bisexuals, just gays in denial about it.
I used to think acne was unrelated to diet (other than perhaps via direct facial contact with grease).
When law enforcement first started being equipped with tasers, I thought this was a good thing, because they would use nonlethal force on occasions where they would previously have used firearms. It turned out that police continued to use lethal force as before, and instead used tasers in situations where they might actually have talked people down in the past.
After Sandy Hook, I got angry and convinced guns rights people and the NRA were nuts.
Then I looked at the data for gun deaths in the US and I seem to remember mass shootings are a statistical anomaly. Handguns in 1-on-1 killings are the bulk of the problem.
Then I considered the second amendment and how maybe it's not a terrible idea to have an armed populace should the gov't get corrupt and motivated to oppress. Also, I saw a TED talk that had me convinced income inequality was the cause of gun (and all sorts of) violence, and concluded gun ownership rates (and gun enthusiasm) weren't to blame for anything.
Then I thought an armed populace wouldn't matter against a sufficiently armed gov't. Then I was like, "What do I know about such matters??"
Then I extrapolated this revelation about my ignorance out to include everything, and I recognized I have no idea what to believe about gun rights, or anything else.
Then I went on FB and started arguing with gun enthusiasts, because they seem wrong to all the rational parts of me.
Then back to LW, to sort out my bad epistemological habits...
There's an interesting argument in favor of gun rights that the Reds rarely make, because it requires an appeal to concepts from evolutionary psychology and morality. It turns out that humans are much more egalitarian than other primates, who generally organize themselves into strict dominance hierarchies. The explanation for this (according to Jonathan Haidt) is that early humans developed weapons like spears and axes, which made it easier to kill other humans. So it is relatively easy for a larger, stronger alpha male chimp or ape to dominate weaker males, but a human alpha male bully would often end up getting speared by a lower status rival.
If you assume people won't find another way to kill themselves, and IF you consider suicide to be just as bad, and if you assume gun-related deaths is actually the right metric to judge as to whether or not you want gun control.
If you assume people won't find another way to kill themselves
I've seen something about this that Google showed me is discussed here. It works out that one in three people who would have killed themselves with gas found another method, and the other two thirds just didn't bother. Ideally I'd find some other statistics along this line, but since I'm lazy and I don't actually care all that much about this issue, I'll just go with that. Accounting for this, and not accounting for people find another way to kill others, there's still a little more suicides caused by guns than homicides.
We have drones and nukes and yet somehow still fighting persisted for a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guerilla warfare is a very real thing.
As for nukes, What would be the point of the united states dropping a nuke on say, a rebellious Chicago? They'd be fucking themselves over. There are plenty of decent arguments one way or the other, but let's not be stupid.
Not so much a false positive belief but a conspicuous failure to fill the blanks in the world model: I didn't realize that the night sky appears to rotate until I was a teenager reading Carl Sagan's Contact, and came to the part where the character is watching the sky at night and the stars are described as moving slowly along the night. Then it was obvious that of course that's what happens, but this was the first time I'd seen anyone say this aloud, and before that I would've just assumed without thinking that stars stay in the same relative place all night.
Before coming to LW I intuitively believed in the map/territory distinction (physical realism, if you will). After going through the countless arguments of the type "Is real?" (where can be qualia, consciousness, wavefunction, God or what have you.) I gradually came to the conclusion that the term "real" is both misleading and counterproductive. If a sentence (excepting mathematical statements) cannot be rephrased by replacing "real" or "true" with "accurate", then it is meaningless.
Up next: stop believing in using parentheses so much.
I used to believe that almost nobody was really interested in anything. This was because (a) I had never been really interested in anything and (b) "Passion" was a mandatory signal, required for getting into college. When I saw people who appeared to be genuinedly interested in things (sports, music, running the school newspaper, building robots, whatever), I assumed they were just better than me at sending the required signals. When I got to college and saw people who continued to appear interested in these things, even though extracurriculars were no longer valuable, I realized I had been wrong.
Transgender people are fundamentally delusional.
This was mostly typical mind fallacy, supported by an argument that rested on an availability heuristic problem, which was this: I'm aware of no record of trans people historically, so the phenomenon was not present; therefore, the prior on being born into a male/female body is overwhelmingly that you are a man/woman (respectively), and you need an enormous amount of evidence to overcome the prior. (This isn't how I would have formulated it at the time; I wasn't familiar with Bayesian terminology and had only intermittently read the sequences, and that in small, scattered chunks.)
I used to think something could rotate around more than one axis at once. Imagine a pipe sitting in space with some jets on it. Two opposing jets on the middle angled tangent to the curve firing equally would set it rotating around the long axis. Two opposing jets on the end angled perpendicularly to the pipe would set it rotating around the short axis. I thought you could do one of these and then the other and get something that was rotating around two axes at once. Then in high school I was writing some kind of space program that had objects and I n...
I used to believe that Benzin (the German word for petrol/gasoline, with cognates in many continental European languages including my mother tongue) was named after Karl Benz.
I used to think that overweight was caused by slow metabolism, i.e. that generally speaking fat people are people who have slow metabolisms and thin people are people who have fast metabolisms.
I believed this because (1) it is the conventional wisdom; (2) it is consistent with the observation that some people seem to be thin even though they stuff their faces; and (3) it makes sense from a thermodynamic perspective that someone with a slow metabolism would be prone to putting on weight and someone with a fast metabolism would be prone to staying thin.
Put...
I used to believe that anyone, with hard work, can succeed and I realized that hardwork is no substitute for investment capital and something being on your life path. If its not for you, its just not for you and its important to gut check and know if something is what you REALLY want rather than something you are doing because its a good idea or makes financial sense.
I used to be very often surprised by the English language (constantly running into my own false beliefs) and it was frustrating, until I started to read fan fiction. Since then, my attitude changed from 'wow, it's a word' to 'ah well, if t ain't broken, don't fix it'. Not sure if it is a good thing, but it seems to help with communication.
ETA: having just read the article 'Why don't people help others more?', I begin to suspect that donating to charities is actually one of the things that I don't want to do at all, even though I allocate money for it in my budget. I always thought of myself as not stingy, and it turned out I am. Feels... odd.
"Jewish" means everybody who doesn't believe in Jesus. Ancient Pagans and contemporary atheists? Kinds of Jews.
I think I formed this belief very young, and I think I had my first conversation about beliefs with a Jew at 15ish, so lot of echo chambering. I updated immediately (and probably turned an interesting shade of red).
its important to gut check and know if something is what you REALLY want rather than something you are doing because its a good idea or makes financial sense.
This doesn't seem convincing at all, can you elaborate a little?
I once believed that six times one is one.
I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but for whatever reason numbers became relevant and I clearly and directly stated my false belief. It was late, we were driving back from a long hard chess tournament, and I evidently wasn't thinking clearly. I said the words "because of course six times one is one." Everyone thought for a second and someone said "no it's not." Predictable reactions occurred from there.
The reason I like the anecdote is because I reacted exactly the same way I would today if someone corrected me when I said that six times one is six. I thought the person who corrected me must be joking; he knows math and couldn't possibly be wrong about something that obvious. A second person said that he's definitely not joking. I thought back to the sequences, specifically the thing about evidence to convince me I'm wrong about basic arithmetic. I ran through some math terminology in my head: of course six times one is one; any number times one is one. That's what a multiplicative identity means. In my head, it was absolutely clear that 6x1=1, this is required for what I know of math to fit together, and anything else is completely logically impossible.
It probably took a good fifteen seconds from me being called out on it before I got appropriately embarrassed.
This anecdote is now my favorite example of the important lesson that from the inside, being wrong feels exactly like being right.
I suspect you were saying six times one, but your brain was thinking of one to the sixth power, which indeed is one.