I’ve been wrong about so many things it’s hard to pick one, but I was reminded of this when I saw one of JFK’s bodyguards being interviewed yesterday.
As you may recall, when JFK was shot and the motorcade started speeding up, Jackie started crawling out on the trunk of the (roofless) car they were riding in (and a Secret Service man ran up and pushed her back into the seat). I was 10 years old, and I just assumed that she was trying to get the hell out of there. Since it was kind of dumb to try to jump out of a speeding car, I also assumed that she had panicked, and wasn’t very brave.
It wasn’t something I thought about frequently, but the fact remains that I didn’t have a very high opinion of her courage for the next 30 years or so.
Then one day I happened to be reading something about the assassination, and I learned that the last shot had blown a fairly big chunk of JFK’s skull onto the trunk, and that Jackie, at great personal risk, was crawling out there to retrieve it, in hopes it would help the doctors save his life. In other words, it took not only a lot of courage, but incredible coolness under fire to attempt to do exactly the right thing just a split second after something totally unexpected and traumatic happened.
So I owe her a huge apology, and I was as wrong as wrong can be for some 30 years.
Tantalizing topic. I tend to repress things I was wrong about and then cling tightly to the updated and more-nearly-correct version as if it were my version all along.
I have been corrected here often enough that it’s hard to point to one that stands out over all the others.
But I will be thinking about it and try to get back to you. I suspect it may have to do with geography, family history, or sports trivia.
Until I was about 12, I thought God was a man who lived in America. Or somewhere. A town called Heaven anyways, and the only place that I knew outside of the UK and Ireland was America, so he must live there.
Back in the eighties, I confidently predicted that when Kim Il-sung died, his son Kim Jong-il would be unable to hold on to power and would soon be overthrown.
I suspect that the OP is some kind of stealth JFK conspiracist who is attempting to soften us up before the big reveal. “As you may recall”, my ass. He knows perfectly well that every detail has been discussed thousands of times.
I thought I knew what it would feel like if I were under the influence of my emotions. Turns out it feels just like when you’re not under the influence of your emotions.
I was an emotional train wreck my whole life and I had no idea. Now I keeping thinking that every thought I have could have been compromised somehow. Similar to a mild version of Winston Smith at the end of “1984.”
General stupidity.
[ul]
[li]Citric acid is the same as vitamin C (asorbic acid)[/li][li]Newark and NYC are the same place. (They aren’t)[/li][li]No insect poison can hurt a human (Spider-hunter wasp).[/li][/ul]
Big stupidity.
[ul]
[li]The moon landings were most likely faked (I stopped believing this when the Japanese space agency took pictures of the lander from lunar orbit)[/li][/ul]
All right, and this is meant quite rationally/respectfully: for most of my life I’ve believed that religious people were less intelligent than atheists (for most definitions of intelligence). And that the famously brilliant people of the past held religious views for fear of persecution.
I’ve seen a few counterexamples these past few years: some fairly stupid atheists and some modern, intelligent believers. I’m still trying to sort out the implications, while remaining quite atheistic myself. I know full well that we’ll probably never get statistics on this. But if there’s a correlation, at the very least it’s much weaker than I thought.
Oh, and on a lighter note, I believed professional wrestling was for reals until my roommate and best friend pointed out the obvious fakeries, when I was about 18 or 19.
I did actually use Algebra in real life; it had a purpose after all.
Years after insisting in high school that I was going to be a journalist and, therefore, would have no useful purpose for algebra, I was faced with a situation in which I needed to use it. I was working customer service for a car rental company. A customer had rented a car at a nearby airport and drove the car a whopping 8 miles, kept the car for a day, and then drove it back. He’d been charged for a full tank of gas. Despite it being a mid-sized car, the customer and I agreed that there was no way driving 16 miles would empty the tank.
I pulled the rental agreement before his, his rental agreement, and the one that came after his – to verify exactly how many miles he’d driven. I went to the fleet department to get the specs on how many gallons of fuel that particular car would hold and the average in-town mileage for that car. I had to calculate how much gas he probably had used on his whopping 16-mile journey, then I actually had to set up an equation to calculate how much of a refund he was owed. He’d been charged for a full tank of gas and had actually used about 1/8. I turned in my documentation to accounting and they cut a check for 7/8 of a tank of gas (at our company’s going rates, which were ridiculous, being a car rental company, of course). Dude got his refund. I immediately dashed off a letter to my high school algebra teacher and apologized to her for giving her so much shit in class back in the 80s. “I am so sorry. I was wrong. It turns out I really did need to use algebra in the real world. Please tell your other creative-brained students this story so they will know that they cannot possibly know what practical purposes this knowledge will have for them later on down the road.”
Note: I haven’t used algebra since then, in the sense of, “Oh, I need to set up an equation and solve for X!” Nor have I graphed a line, for any reason.
When I was a kid, I had read The Time Machine. Or at least I thought I did. Later, I was in an upper division Literature class and we were discussing the book. Me, being an arrogant ass, didn’t even bother to read it since I had read it dozens of times. I was mentioning a chapter and everybody was asking me what the hell I was talking about.
Later that evening I checked the old copy of the book, and apparently it was some sort of adaptation of The Time Machine. Apparently this other author just shoehorned in an extra chapter full of stuff that was ultimately just filler. Boy was I embarassed :smack:
Can’t think of anything seriously wrong, but for about 30 years I thought American school years were January-to-December, just like my school years were in New Zealand, and you just had a long break over summer right in the middle of it.
It’s only since about 2003 that I started to put my disparate thoughts together and figure it out.
