23 Often-Misinterpreted Scientific Facts

Actually, 50 percent of all marriages don’t end in divorce
23 Often-Misinterpreted Scientific Facts

Scientific information is complicated and full of caveats and clarifications. This, of course, absolutely ruins the shareability of even the most interesting facts and discoveries. So, what’s an internet to do but clumsily cleave off context and cram the best bits into infographics ad nauseum?

After all, it’s not a meme page’s problem that people took a science post at face value. Plus, it’s probably rare that you’d ever actually get corrected. In the event you’re in the presence of actual, serious scholars, though, you might want to hold back on sharing the following oft-misunderstood facts.

9mo ago Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment that demonstrates why it's ridiculous to try and extrapolate quantum physics to any scale larger than particles; it was not intended to actually represent superposition. 501 ...
Vexonte 9mo ago Historical fact, but people think if the average life span of someone in the past was 50 they assume that most people drop dead at 50. In reality, it was the average lifetime, including infant mortality, child birth, and accidents. So if you lived past the age of 12 you are more likely to die in your 60s and 70s rather than croaking at 50. 237 ...
Trex-died-4-our-sins 9mo ago The right brain VS left brain personality traits. I cringe on the inside when I hear people say it. yes we definitely have different areas of our brains responsible for specific things but not when it comes to personality traits, with exception of frontal lobe. 93 ...
GaiaMoore 9mo ago Not a fact per se, but the way headlines and articles frame scientific findings. Scientists proved XYZ !!! No, they didn't. Researchers may have discovered evidence through observation, experiments, or other methods, but that's not proof. It's evidence, and it is completely subject to being challenged when examined alongside contradicting evidence. This is how rapidly advancing fields get a bad rap among the populace. Scientists keep flip flopping on issue XYZ, they keep proving one thing and saying another a month later. They're all quacks and don't know what they're doing
CaptainTime5556 9mo ago A lot of people think that just being in space is enough to make you weightless. As in: get far enough away from the Earth's surface, and you start floating instead of falling. Reality: astronauts are always falling, all the time. Except that they also have enough horizontal velocity that the Earth's surface curves away from them as they fall, such that they can never land. Weightlessness is an illusion based on the fact that their spaceship is falling (and curving) around them at the same velocity. If it were possible to build a skyscraper tall enough
kikistiel 9mo ago There's an article that makes its rounds on reddit every so often when someone wants to make a gotcha about domestic violence that says Lesbians experience highest rate of domestic violence and think it means that women are the most abusive demographic in the world. The thing is, they never read the actual study... which goes on to say that more lesbians than not have experienced domestic violence and it's a smaller pool of people (as opposed to straight or bisexual women) and then goes on to state that most of the lesbians who experienced DV reported
thaddeusd 9mo ago The entire field of toxicology. People will freak out because substance X is in my vaccines/tap water/air/Big Mac/blood/etc. What they mostly don't understand is the concepts of dose, exposure time, toxicity thresholds, exposure vector, and other fundamental concepts that determine how harmful a substance can be to a person. 35 ...
Oddish_Femboy 9mo ago Dog bite statistics. The CDC, the Humane Society of the US, and the National Animal Control Association don't even collect data on breeds involved in dog accidents because the data is either unreliable, or completely useless with how frequently dogs are misidentified and how many incidents go unreported. 29 ...
brennanfee 9mo ago For Evolution, the concept of our common ancestor with apes. That misunderstanding is why we continually get the gem of, If we evolved from monkeys, why are here still monkeys? 52 ...
battery_ashmore 9mo ago Edited 9mo ago I am so late to the game. But the widespread conception that your frontal Cortez (edit: *cortex lol) isn't fully formed until you're 25. They did a study and found it wasn't developed by age 18, so the next study they checked it in 25 year olds and still found it was developing. The published results state the frontal cortex isn't finished developing until you're at least 25...but even then still probably not 33 ...
Ernosco 9mo ago The Dunning-Kruger effect. It's the effect that people who are not so competent at a skill tend to overestimate their own performance more often than competent people. Redditors love to cite this effect. But they often present it as if the incompetent people perceive their scores to be higher than the competent people do, which isn't the case. They are just more likely than the competent people to overestimate their own performance. Which leads to a problem many statisticians actually have with it: It also happens when the data are randomly generated. If you score a 5/100
Feeling_Astronaut487 9mo ago Everything is made of chemicals. People often use chemical as a negative term 9 ...
Zolo49 9mo ago The speed of light doesn't really have anything to do with light. A more accurate term is the speed of causation, the maximum speed at which information can travel through the universe. The only reason light travels at this speed is because it has no mass. 51 ...
kyomiihrtzz 9mo ago that the cold makes you sick. being in the cold just weakens your immune system and makes you more susceptible to disease. the cold itself is not a disease, and i wish i more parents and just adults knew this.
AccomplishedUse6093 9mo ago Carrots improve eyesight. During WW2 the allies were killing Germans extremely effectively at night and they didn't know how we saw them so easily in the dark so we told them our pilots ate a lot of carrots when in reality we just developed Radar systems in our planes!
mal_wash_jayne . 9mo ago We didn't evolve from apes, we both evolved from a common ancestor. 14 ...
noodle_salad 9mo ago 50% of all marriages end in divorce. False. The annual divorce rate is (was?) 50%, which meant that, say, in 2007, 100,000 couples got married while 50,000 couples got divorced. But that doesn't mean that half of all marriages end in divorce, since those 50,000 divorces came from marriages that already existed prior to 2007. And that's A LOT of marriages. So the annual RATE came to 50% but that does not correlate to the 50/50 shot of your marriage ending.
Killer_Sloth . 9mo ago You only use 10% of your brain. First of all the 10% figure is really just speculation, but let's assume that it's accurate. What it really means is only about 10% of the neurons in your brain are actively doing something AT ONE TIME. You use 100% of the neurons in your brain, but having them all active at once is what we call a seizure.
statsjedi 9mo ago There are only two sexes. XY is male and XX is female. This totally ignores the existence of intersex people, people with other karyotypes, people with conditions that can cause a mismatch in sex chromosomes and genitalia (AIS, Swyer syndrome, de la Chappelle syndrome, etc.), and transgender people.
paraworldblue 9mo ago Edited 9mo ago The concept of the heat death of the universe. A lot of people seem to think it's this single, relatively brief event where everything gets roasted to oblivion, but that's pretty much the exact opposite of what it really is. The theory is that due to entropy, the energy of the universe is very gradually dissipating, and matter is very gradually coming apart. In quadrillions of years, it will reach a point where it'll just be an even distribution of elementary particles throughout the entire universe. No more planets or stars or anything, just
wynnduffyisking 9mo ago Whenever some idiot thinks global warming is a hoax because it's cold in their neck of the woods. It's called GLOBAL warming, not local warming.
DiAOM 9mo ago the only whatever tiny % of the ocean has been explored, who knows whats hiding down there? Well we do really, yes we havent gone down and scuba'd around every inch of the ocean but we dont need to. We have lidar and tech that can map the ocean for us, there isnt some hidden megalodon or cthulu, its just fish. Same goes for the 10% of our brain is used, we use all of our brain, we arent idiots.
Possible-Collar-5492 9mo ago The chances go up by 80 percent factoid. If you're at risk 1% for say, lung cancer, and your risk for lung cancer increases by 80%, you do not have an 81% chance now. You risk is now 1.8%. It's probably not the biggest deal but it's a little important for stuff like understanding fertility and genetics. 744 ...

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