This piece represents (in my view) a SD Platonic ideal for investigation:
Thanks for sharing. I had read about the spinach thing last week. I was trying to trace my own history of how I came to believe it. Health class?
Cite?
Regards,
Popeye
Fascinating article. Thanks for posting it.
I’d heard the claim that spinach’s reputation as an iron source was due to a misplaced decimal, and I’d always regarded it a little skeptically. It was really interesting to see someone chase it down.
I tried to do something similar a few years back, when I tried to chase down the origin of the notion that Kennedy flubbed his “Berliner” speech. I got as far as a mention of it in an early 80’s academic paper. I contacted the guy who wrote it, and he admitted that he didn’t have a source for it. So the trail went cold for me there.
I love these hunts for the origin of rumor and legends. I wish I could figure out a way to make money doing it!
It’s a fascinating article.
On the one hand, it really shows how easily we can fool ourselves. Academics and scientists are subject to all the usual cognitive biases. Warding these biases off is really fucking hard work, and errors can always slip in.
On the other hand, this particular example is a relatively trivial thing. IME, in a lot of academic literature these sorts of historic asides are mostly used as a rhetorical device. If I was an agricultural researcher, say, trying to figure out details of the regulation of iron metabolism in spinach, I might include some variation of “spinach iron content was overestimated due to a misplaced decimal point (Larrsen*, 1995)”. That would be placed in the introduction, as part of a more rigorous and substantive discussion of the importance of understanding metabolic pathways in vegetables, and iron metabolism in particular. I would take much more care with the citation of literature directly related to my research question and methods. The mis-cited factoid would still be disseminated by my work, but it would not affect the experimental results, or their interpretations. In another domain, mis-citing factoids like that could have more concrete consequences. It’d be really terrible to include that as support for dietary recommendations in a public health policy paper.
I’m personally fascinated by all the little superstitions that work their way into scientific methods. For any given experiment, there are practically infinite combinations of different experimental parameters. There isn’t enough time in the world to work out every detail, so we rely in part on intuition to figure out how to do experiments. Some parameters of the experimental protocol are empirically determined, others are based on more or less informed guesswork. Then, over time, that standard protocol gets annotated with little stories of mistakes that seemed to make the experiment better or worse. Probably none of them actually matter, but they might. So I’ll incorporate some of these ad-hoc changes, because at some point I get the experiment working right and I can’t afford to skip any steps that might be critical.
Eventually that protocol is re-written or published, and some of the rigorously determined experimental details are written alongside the dubious superstitions. And in ten years time, everyone in the lab is spinning counterclockwise before adding reagent X, because I did it one time that the experiment worked particularly well.
- That was an unintentional error, correct cite is (Larsson, 1995), but I’m leaving it.
What I find interesting is when these things come back into vogue again. I remember learning this a few months or even a year ago. Yet it was published in 2014, and is now back again.
Also, I find it interesting that this paper goes on for a long while pretending the decimal point myth is true. Why does it not go out of its way to dispell the myth, either?
I think a lot of people are going to take the wrong message away from this. Ideally people should learn that they have to be extra careful to determine the real facts of a situation before reaching a conclusion. But instead many people will decide that they can ignore what scientists are saying and believe that vaccines cause autism and climate warming is a hoax.
My favorite hoax story is the one about sawing Manhattan Island in half. The story is that in 1824 a man named Lozier started a rumor that Manhattan Island was starting to sink because of the weight of all the buildings being constructed. And he told people that there was a major project being planned to save the city; Manhattan Island was going to be sawed in half, the southern half was going to be towed out to sea, the island would be turned around, and then towed back to land and reattached to the northern part of the island with the heavily built-up neighborhoods that had been on the southern tip of the island now firmly anchored in the middle. Lozier kept this story going for weeks and had hundreds of people applying for work. On the big day, workers were stretched out in a line across the city waiting for their tools to be delivered so they could start cutting with hundreds of people showing up to watch. Of course, nobody showed up. People noticed Lozier was nowhere to be found. And eventually they started to realize that you couldn’t saw an island in half and tow it around.
So a perfect story of how easily people could be taken in by a hoax, right? People would just believe the silliest things.
For example, some people have heard this story and actually think it happened. But it didn’t. There’s no record of any of this in newspapers or other documents from 1824 when this was all supposedly occurring. There’s no evidence that Lozier ever existed. The earliest mentions of the story come from fifty years later. So the story of the hoax is itself a hoax.
Here is an article on Slate that describes how a small footnote regarding opioid addiction got turned into scientific gospel that opioids were safe and non-addictive. Part of the problem is that the term “Addiction rare in patients …” in the footnote got mistyped in a headline as “Addiction rate in patients …”. What started out as a footnote became labeled as an “extensive study” and then cited as a “landmark study”.
It is a fascinating read on this very subject: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/06/how_bad_footnotes_helped_cause_the_opioid_crisis.html.
I thought this was going to be about Your Permanent Record.
Things like this are so frustrating. I have a PhD in folklore. This is exactly what we do, and our annual conferences always have papers about exactly this sort of thing. But the field is so marginalized within academia that we have no voice. Whenever a scientist reinvents the wheel, usually badly, he or she gets adulation in the popular press.
There is a difference between a hoax (a deliberate fraud), a rumour (no narrative content), a belief (something that purports to be true), a legend (a specific type of narrative), a myth (another type of narrative), and an urban legend (a subtype of legend). There are decades of study in how each of these work, including aspects of culture, psychology, and language.
In this article, the author cites a number of publications. You’ll note that those in his field are academic sources, while everything about folklore is from popular sources. Not a single scholar of urban legend is cited, much less rumour or belief. “Lazy author syndrome” indeed! It’s as if he has absolutely no awareness that there is a ton of scholarship on this precise issue.
Technically, they’re reversing their polarity. And just to be sure, they’re doing it twice.
“Then why does it taste so salty?”
IIRC, isn’t that the foundation for Popeye’s swilling down spinach when he needs a boost?
I heard about the spinach thing a long time ago. Saw verification for it only recently. Recently saw a warning about cooking with aluminum foil because of the risk of Alzheimers, even included a reference to an academic paper, but of course nothing in the paper indicated that there was risk from exposure to aluminum cookware. And then for decades doctors insisted stomach ulcers couldn’t be caused by a virus because no virus could survive in acidic conditions of the stomach.
No, actually the reason given in comic was that it had lots of vitamin A. cite
H. pylori is a bacterium, not a virus.
I apologize, I was using the legend as a reference 
Hey, how come memes never go bacterial?
I thought it was going to be about EVERY SINGLE ONE of the things I was told in school that ended up being False on snopes.
- We had to pass a swimming test because some donor’s child had drowned in Lake Carnegie
- You got straight As if your roommate died
- Prof leaves hat and comes back late; students leave their hats and come back late
- Student fills out test - you don’t know who I am, do you? and drops blue book in pile on desk
- etc.!
Ah. I thought this thread was going to be more about legends from academia, like: there was a story at my college about a professor who was “Pavloved” by his students. They would act especially interested when he got nearer to the classroom trash can, and less interested as he moved away. It got to the point that, at the start of class, the professor would walk into the room, immediately turn over the trash can, stand on it, and start lecturing.
Not familiar with this one. What’s the story?