Questions In Which Just a Little Knowledge Hurts Your Chances of Getting a Correct Answer

[Melchior]

@Shagnasty

This is a hard question to ask so stick with me. Sometimes science and facts are not intuitive at all (see quantum mechanics). However, there are a few questions in which both a child and an expert could give a correct answer but not someone with an intermediate level of knowledge. There undoubtedly other cases where the child or uninformed person gets it more correct than the intermediate level of knowledge to this day because science and expertise are constantly being revised and sometimes reverse themselves.

Let me give you an example. If you asked any child in 1980 what type of animal a Panda Bear is, he or she would have responded with ‘a bear’. A zookeeper would reply that it is a cute answer but it isn’t true. Pandas aren’t bears, they are more like cuddly overgrown raccoons. Flash forward a few years later and suddenly Pandas are back to being bears again even though that traumatized child was correct in the first place and will never receive an official apology letter.

Do you know of any other examples? I have a few other ones but they will spark controversy so I am more interested in what you have to say.

I never believed that Greater and Lesser Pandas were closely related. I always thought that the Great Panda was closely related to other bears. I was right.

[johnpost]

‘i dunno’ is my most frequent correct answer.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@C_K_Dexter_Haven

Another one is, what comes next in the sequence:
1, 3, 5, 7…

(a) 9, because the sequence is odd numbers
(b) 11, because the sequence is odd primes
(c) 8, because the sequence is numbers that have the letter “e” in their English spelling.

1 is not a prime number, though it was formerly considered to be one.

[Don_t_Panic]

How many bytes are in a kilobyte?

Stupid answer: 1000 bytes.
Smarter answer: 1024 bytes.
Genius answer: 1000 bytes (as defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1998 and later adopted by ISO and other standards organizations. 1024 bytes is a kibibyte).

(OK, real answer: Either 1000 or 1024 depending on context, since the kibibyte thing doesn’t seem to be catching on.)

[bup]

Why do wagon wheels, propellers and some car wheels appear to be stationary or moving backward?

Classic answer - because your eyes input data like a projector - combining many static shots and interpreting motion.

Cecil’s answer (at one time) - that doesn’t happen. At least, it only happens in movies. Or when there are fluorescent lights affecting things.

Correct answer - Well, there are a couple of competing theories, but it happens.Doesn’t anybody remember records?
I also remember in school being taught that the effect of seeing the unlit part of a crescent moon was an optical illusion. Of course you can see it, though, for real.

[Ulf_the_Unwashed]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

1 is not a prime number, though it was formerly considered to be one.

See post 37.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Ulf_the_Unwashed

See post 37.

I don’t know how to scroll upward. Everybody knows that.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@C_K_Dexter_Haven

Another one is, what comes next in the sequence:
1, 3, 5, 7…

(a) 9, because the sequence is odd numbers
(b) 11, because the sequence is odd primes
(c) 8, because the sequence is numbers that have the letter “e” in their English spelling.

@Ulf_the_Unwashed

(b) would be shaky because mathematicians don’t generally consider 1 to be prime.

Yeah, there are better similar examples.

What comes next in this sequence: 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, ___

[SPOILER]Probably the most obvious pattern is that you’re skipping every third integer, so it’d continue 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, …

But, alternatively, the numbers listed are those which are written with curved parts, so it’d continue 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, …

I’m sure there are other possible patterns as well.[/SPOILER]

[Flywheel]

Why is Fahrenheit 451 titled Fahrenheit 451?

Uninformed: “Because that’s ‘the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns.’ Duh! It says so right there on the title page!”

Informed: “Because Ray Bradbury thought that was ‘the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns.’”

Somewhat informed: “Because that’s the number on the main character’s helmet. I read the book cover to cover and didn’t see a single reference to that number as ‘the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns’ in the text of the story. So I’m going to have to assume that the reference in the subtitle is some kind of fanciful metaphor and isn’t meant to be taken literally.”

[Little_Nemo]

@Thudlow_Boink

What comes next in this sequence: 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, ___

I’m sure there are other possible patterns as well.

Sure. You have the sequence: number with a three-letter name, number with a five-letter name, number with a four-letter name. So the sequence continues 1, 60, 4.

[Derleth]

@Jragon

There’s quite a few in programming. One off the top of my head is Java/C# references vs C/C++ style pointers.

Something related: Does C have pass-by-value or pass-by-reference semantics?

Level 1 answer: “Pass by value! Everything gets copied.”

Level 2 answer: “Pointers mean pass-by-reference, so C has some of that.”

Level 3 answer: “Pointers are just values, and they get copied just like everything else in a function call context. C is purely pass-by-value.”

Another: Is Lisp a functional programming language?

Level 1 answer: “Yes, because everything you do is arranged into functions, and there are higher-order functions like map to help you use your own functions.”

Level 2 answer: “Not really, because C has (or can have) all those things, too, and nobody really calls C a functional programming language. Besides, Lisp still has unmarked side effects.”

Level 3 answer: "Yes, because functional programming is a style, and Lisp supports that style with a minimum of effort, especially because a lot of functional idioms rely on garbage collection to be readable and efficient. Side-effect-free languages, or languages where all functions with side effects must be marked by a monad, support a deeper style of functional programming, but that’s a matter of degree.

Besides, it’s usually more fruitful to classify languages by allocation styles, because those tend to dictate what’s reasonable to develop and what isn’t."

[Yllaria]

@chappachula

Sometimes, having just a little knowledge is fine; and I proudly refuse to let new facts get in way of my knowledge:
Pluto is a planet, dammit!!!

The next question, of course, is what do you call Eris?

@bibliophage

. . . Likewise the question “What did dinosaur meat taste like?” Idiot answer: like chicken because every exotic meat tastes like chicken. Normal answer: we can never know because dinosaurs don’t exist any more. Genius answer: like chicken because chickens are dinosaurs.

Maybe not. Ostrich meat tastes more like beef than chicken.

[Icarus]

IMHO Evolution and the canard of “Survival of the Fittest” is a perfect example of the OP question.

[Jragon]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

1 is not a prime number, though it was formerly considered to be one.

@Ulf_the_Unwashed

(b) would be shaky because mathematicians don’t generally consider 1 to be prime.

Odd non-composites then. The non-composite set is Primes U {0,1}, so the set of odd non-composites would be (Primes U {0,1}) - Evens = (Primes U {1}) - {2} = {1,3,5,7,11,…}

[MrDibble]

@Yllaria

Maybe not. Ostrich meat tastes more like beef than chicken.

And even more like venison.

Hell, just look at turkey meat. Or duck.

On the other hand, crocodile is a lot like chicken…

[BlakeTyner]

@Mr_Shine

me/myself/I:

Someone who doesn’t care might say “She invited me and Dave to the wedding”
Someone who thinks they know a little bit would say it must be “She invited Dave and I to the wedding” or “She invited myself and Dave to the wedding”
However, the first one is right.

Agreed on the subject/object case of the pronouns, but most style conventions would still place “Dave” before “me” in the first example.

[Derleth]

@Mr_Shine

me/myself/I:

Someone who doesn’t care might say “She invited me and Dave to the wedding”
Someone who thinks they know a little bit would say it must be “She invited Dave and I to the wedding” or “She invited myself and Dave to the wedding”
However, the first one is right.

And the people who really know about language know that “correctness” depends on register, dialect, and when the speech act was performed or the text was written.

[Ulf_the_Unwashed]

One for the geography geeks, like me as a kid. My dad, a geography geek himself, asked me at one point what state had the most counties. Georgia, I said promptly, knowing from studying g atlases that Georgia has counties up the wazoo and that they are all about three miles square.

But as it turned out, the answer was Texas. Which I would have guessed if I hadn’t had any knowledge about the question.

[nate]

This happened to me yesterday. I was talking to a co-worker about gravity assist (when spacecraft fly by a planet to some destination) and I confidently stated that due to conservation of energy, the spacecraft doesn’t gain any speed when doing this, but is used to change velocity (the direction component). Of course I was wrong. If I had either just listened to news coverage version of the effect or paid more attention in my newtonian mechanics class I would have known better. But just a little bit of knowledge of this subject caused me to get this completely wrong.

[kanicbird]

@Shagnasty

I thought of another non-controversial example. Ask any child how airplanes fly. The will tell you some version of ‘catching air’ under the wings because they intuitively understand the principle by sticking their hands out of car windows. That happens to be much more correct than the standard explanation taught in virtually every science book in America. The intermediate (and largely incorrect) explanation depends on Bernoulli’s Principle which states that lift is somehow generated by air magically travelling faster over curved surfaces than the flat surfaces below it and airplane wings have to be designed with those curves in mind to work at all.

That is false. There is such a thing as Bernoulli’s Principle but it doesn’t require air to magically speed up over the top surface to generate lift. That is impossible. It is a minor contributing factor for lift and can best be described as a side-effect of good wing design rather than a cause. Of course, that is all obvious when a child realizes that planes can fly upside down just fine without being sucked towards the ground.

The factor that makes flight possible is angle of attack just like the kids first assumed and not some convoluted theory about fluids wanting to be with their friends so much that they speed up to meet them. You can make an airplane with barn door wings if you have enough power. All of this was worked out very early and definitively but people with intermediate levels of knowledge get it wrong.

I think you need to restudy it.

The answer is that the air pressure is lower on top of the wing then below it. The reason for this that basically the same amount of air passes over the top and bottom of the wing but the top of the wing air has to travel further, so it is spread out more, so less pressure.

The confusing thing is this principal is presented in confusing and non-intuitive way.

Angle of attack can be used to move through air, but in this case your ability to ascend is based on thrust, not lift.