I thought I was smart. I’m not. I’m clever and good at figuring things out, but there is a difference.
I call myself smart enough to know I’m not.
I know that I know nothing, said Socrates thousands of years ago. So I’d say it’s beyond clever to teach yourself things and learn from your experiences. That is very smart in my book.
I thought libertarians were cool. Then I learned about the “fiscally conservative “ parts.
Throw back to when I was young and naive and considered myself an “independent” who argued both sides. Then I found out who the real snowflakes were
My dyslexic ass read librarian and for a whole minute I was confused why this should be connected to reading and sorting books professionally.
Except for school I never went to any institution as a kid. No nursery, no kindergarten, no after school programs. Both my parents worked part time, so there was always an adult at home. For most my life I felt sorry for the kids who had parents working 9-5 and having to be in institutions and getting institutionalized.
I was well into my 30s before my wife explained to me why I was wrong. She was studying for these kind of pedagogical jobs, and while following her education on the side line, it really turned on a light bulb in my head: I was wrong.
While the home-raised method might have worked decently when I was a kid when more people did it, it would absolutely not work today. Most of my own issues throughout childhood and later basically also comes from not socializing enough as a kid. My own kids have been through the whole institution process because both my wife and I have had 9-5 jobs. Due to this, my kids are much better developed to tackle the world that they live in, and they have not lost any off the ability to think freely or anything that I previously believed was the negative effects of being raised in institutions. Of course there are some institutions that are better than others, but overall, their personel are a lot better educated to handle it than someone who has no education on this and only believes in “what was good enough for me…”
Even today, I sometimes meet people who want to home school their kids and such. While that might be a good idea in certain cases, it’s almost always done for the wrong reasons and without regard to how difficult it actually is if you want the best for your kid.
I think this is compounded by the fact that many of the social institutions that used to exist are also greatly reduced, and children are expected to be much more structured now than they were. Used to be that kids could reasonably be expected to walk to a library or playground on their own, or play with neighborhood children, without being constantly supervised. (And yes, bullying happened, and yes, so did the Atlanta Child Murders. But the former was a much more realistic problem than the latter.) Kids were also going with parents to church, parents probably had some kind of social outlet, etc. There was, in general, more community. (I’m not bemoaning the loss of religion, since I think religion is trash, but I do miss the community that religion helped build.)
And yeah, most people I know now that home school kids are doing it to ensure that their kids aren’t exposed to ‘dangerous’ ideas.
Funny, in American English, “institutionalized” means “sent to an insane asylum”.
For the longest time I was under the impression that everybody has unlimited potential, that you can essentially take a homeless junkie of the streets send them through college, give then a job and have a functioning intelligent person come out at the end. That is absolutely not true. based on my own experience we all have limits and glass ceilings. Yes, we all live on the same clock, but some of us have to deal with so much behind the scenes just to stay afloat while others can breeze through life like its nothing. There are people who are incredibly academically gifted but absolutely inept in personal or household stuff, some people are thick as a rock but incredibly charming, etc. We all have our strengths and weaknesses but sometimes of course all the marbles roll into the right holes and you get somebody who’s good at everything they touch and are almost doomed to success.
There are just things that I will never able to grasp, or habits that I will never able to form because I tried my whole life and it never worked out. I consider myself as a fairly baseline dude, so its safe to say that if I have these experiences the majority of people will have them as well.
For me it was that other people think in the same manner, basically. But it turns out that brain usage is very different for people. So some people use more of their visual cortex for maths, making them see color in numbers.
In this video Richard Feynman explains it better then I could.
So you’re telling me we can’t just steal a baby from one of those secluded amazon tribes and force them to learn the quadratic formula so I don’t have to? there go my weekend plans :(
You don’t actually smell burnt toast when having a stroke.
Joked about it to my roommate who was in med school once that “I might be having a stroke, or someone burnt their toast again.” To which he responded “WTH are you talking about?”
So I explained the meme and he debunked it for me right there haha
But phosgene does smell like freshly cut grass. “Phosgene smells green!”, kids.
There’s also a scene in Saving Private Ryan where a dying soldier talks about smelling the bread from back home.
That if you weren’t part of “our” religion (my family’s religion, Catholic), you were basically living your life wrong and were an awful person. When I went to college I met people who believed different things, including in nothing, and I realized they were not, in fact, terrible, almost subhuman, people. I quickly changed for the better and that’s one of the best things to ever happen to me. It’s amazing how accepting you can be when you just accept people for who they are
It could easily have been the same for me, as my father is a Protestant pastor. Fortunately, my family has always been very tolerant and open-minded. That’s how my parents brought me up, for which I’m still very grateful to them today. It’s good to hear that you’ve found your own path, which certainly wasn’t easy. Respect, my friend.
Opening bananas.
Watch a nature documentary showing me a monkey knew better.
Using my thumbnail on the long thin end and no over-ripe bananas I never had problems with peeling.
I thought lizards lived everywhere, and didn’t know until I was 18 that Oregon was on the west coast of the US, I thought California ended where Washington started and that Oregon was inland (we did not have geography in school).
When I finally went to college as an adult I took a world geography class as an elective because I felt so incredibly ignorant. Now, even years later I can help my kids with geography, quite a bit of it actually stuck.
I’ve always lived in Oregon. You would be surprised how many people think it’s only California and Washington on the west coast. About a dozen different people in various MMOs have had the same confusion.
I learned that the lowest point in Canada is a hair farther south than the most northern part of California
And that 50% of Canada lives below the 49th parallel
That my dad cared about or respected me. After a family dinner, my wife asked me if he always talked about me like that and it just kind of clicked. Things like telling my kid, “If you play too many video games, they’ll melt your brain like your dad” or “why would anyone pay you that much” when I told them that I broke a six figure salary. She made me realize that this wasn’t normal and I didn’t have to sit there and listen to it just because of who he is.
I haven’t spoken to him or really any of my side of the family in almost two years now. Good riddance.
Thinking the words, “just calm down” in the heat of an argument with my wife will actually work if I just try it enough times. Mathematically it should but it seems math doesn’t care about that.
Yes, I’m still learning that. Also giving emotional support instead of trying to fix everything instantly is difficult.
As a non American who has never been to the US, but grew up well within its sphere of cultural influence.
I thought that about half of the population was black, maybe 40% minimum. I was surprised to learn that it was just above 10% in reality.
They tend to be concentrated in a few areas. There was one place I lived where none of the dudes living there had ever even seen a white dude in person other than cops and social workers.
I thought the “purple” skittles were supposed to be brown (I still think they look brown). One day I looked on the package. The rest is history.
Ever done a color blindness test?
Funny you say that, I’m actually a tetrachromat, which means I’m the opposite of colorblind. The purple skittles just didn’t seem purple. They chose such a drab shade of purple that, even to me (or even especially to me), rather than being recognizable as the same vibrant color as grapes, it appears to be the kind of purple you get from the sky on an exceptionally rainy droopy day.
It also helped that, after looking at such a drab sky, I ended up seeing the rainbow, thinking back to the skittles commercial, seeing what colors were actually in the rainbow, and thinking “wait a minute…”
TIL Tetrachromacy exists in humans.
It’s actually the same exact gene as the colorblindness gene, except it manifests as tetrachromacy in females while manifesting as colorblindness in males. If you have any colorblind people in your family, chances are you also have tetrachromats in your family too.
It’s a rather double-edged sword, especially as an artist. For example, you lose a little of your natural appreciation of differing shades, and it doesn’t transfer over to technology, so a picture of a bird you see on a device is going to have less color than the same bird if it were right in front of you. Personally I could do without the extra colors.
That Tom Brady was a product of a winning system and would be average at best if he played with another organization. What made me realize I was wrong? Fuckin ring number 7 and our (the Bills) absolute owning of New England ever since he left.
Rinsing after brushing teeth. The fluoride in the toothpaste should stay on your teeth for a while to be effective. So you should floss, then brush, and wait to rinse or not rinse
That’s only true in England, because they don’t flourinate their water. In the US, you get plenty of flouride from tap water.
I learned last year that you’re supposed to floss BEFORE you brush. I have no idea why no one ever taught me that.
Yeah you loosen up every thing and then brush it out. Actually, I floss, swish, then brush. I end with brush by because the fluoride concentration in toothpaste is much much higher than in most fluoride mouthwash. I’d rather leave that on my teeth after I’m done.
I floss, rinse, then brush. The fluoride content of toothpaste is much higher than rinse, so I’d rather end having that on my teeth than a weaker dose from the rinse.
I’m referring to rinsing w water or even drinking water
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Cocoa has an “a” at the end of it. I was in college and was like, “haha, they spelled it weird.” Nope, just a dumbass.
A BLT is literally just bacon, lettuce, and tomato. I thought it was just the toppings on the base meat (like how a pepperoni pizza inculdes bread, sauce, etc.). I don’t like bacon or raw tomato, so I never had one.
There is no bone in the penis. I swore there was one until I made it to 3D molding and, as we were going over different body parts and their movement, I asked my male friend “Hey, where’s the penis bone/muscle.” He looked at me like I had two heads. I assumed it could do tricks, like waving and stuff. 🤷🏿♀️
BLTs also have mayo, and preferably a hell of a lot of it. They are garbage without it.
Garlic Aioli, my friend.
Your welcome.
