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[–] 88 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (18 children)

A short list of things you didn't realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    I actually learned the lemmings thing from the windows 95 era PC game "Lemmings". This is also how I learned that lemmings have green hair!

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    fun fact, lemmings was developed by a little studio called DMA designs, which later changed name to Rockstar North, and is nowadays most known for the GTA games.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    TIL Lemmings are an actual creature and not just from the PC game Lemmings! I'm guessing that's why it's named "Lemmy" and then has a logo of a rodent. I just thought it was a random name and a drawing of a mouse this whole time.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it's become a bit of a meme nonetheless.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    More extracts from that same podcast:

    In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.

    That's one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    The lemmings thing never made sense to me until I found out what the film crew did to them. There's just no way a species that susceptible to mass suicide could survive long term. They would have gone extinct long before the invention of bored documentarians.

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