The 2024 Global Risks Report issued this week from the World Economic Forum named misinformation and disinformation as the greatest risk to humanity over the next two years. “People believing weird crap” beat “interstate armed conflict” (number 5), “societal polarization” (number 3) and “extreme weather events” (number 2) for the coveted title.
The report warns that bad actors will use artificial intelligence to flood the world’s information channels with false narratives and propaganda, potentially affecting elections on a scale never seen before, leading to civil unrest, and encouraging Draconian censorship as states try to control the flow of information. Somewhere around half of the population of Earth is expected to participate in elections in 2024 and 2025, so there is a lot of money and power at stake, and AI’s ability to easily produce hyper-specific propaganda will no doubt be widely employed to influence the power structures that affect the lives of just about everyone on earth. Since there is nothing anyone can do to prevent this, I’m going to focus on coffee instead.
I learned today that coffee is not brewed from beans. “The beans you brew are actually the processed and roasted seeds from a fruit, which is called a coffee cherry,” according to the National Coffee Association USA. Correcting that small personal misconception about my favorite drink made me feel a little better in the face of the global tsunami of bullshit that the World Economic Forum predicts, so here are six more things you may have always been wrong about.
“A dog year is equal to seven human years”
This oft-repeated “rule” dates back to the 1950s, and was always more about getting a rough estimate than an exact measurement of dog years. Back then, dogs (generally) lived to be about 10 and humans, on average, lived until they were around 70, so the math works out. But different dog breeds have different expected lifespans. Australian Cattle Dogs average around 14 years, where a French Bulldog is lucky to see its fifth birthday. And anyway, people live longer now, so the whole equation doesn’t work anymore, even as a rough estimate.
“Humans have five senses”
“I’ve got one, two, three, four, five, senses working overtime,” XTC sung in its 1982 new-wave banger “Senses Working Overtime.” But we actually have several more senses than sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. There’s our sense of direction and our sense of object permanence. Balance is a sense. We sense movement, heat, pain, and the passage of time, all of which could be defined as separate senses. We might have as many as 33 senses. Some of this information comes from the World Economic Forum, which gives me a sense of foreboding and dread.
“Water conducts electricity”
Pure water is an insulator that doesn’t conduct electricity. The tricky word in that sentence is “pure.” Pure water is distilled and absent any ions. It’s usually only seen in laboratories for specific purposes. The water we bathe in, drink, and long to drown in when we read news from the World Economic Forum is never pure. It’s choked with dissolved minerals, pollution, and especially ions. The ions conduct the electricity, though, not the water. It’s a technicality, and annoying, but it’s still true.
“Different parts of your tongue taste different flavors”
There used to be “tongue maps” that indicated which part of your tongue had receptors for which flavors, but tongue research has come a long way since then, and we now know that taste buds for different flavors are scattered all over the tongue, and you can taste everything, everywhere. This misinformation dates back to a scientific paper published in German in 1875, which was mistranslated into English in 1901. For more than 90 years, people believed this, even though we all have tongues right in our own heads!
“Blowing into a broken Nintendo cartridge fixes it”
Fixing a Nintendo or other cartridge-based video game by taking it out and blowing into it doesn’t work. When a game isn’t working, it’s usually because the pins aren’t matching up. Every time you take the cartridge out and put it back in, you’re giving the pins another chance to align correctly, but there’s no need to blow. You could see how this would seem to work, though.
I find this myth fascinating because it was a universally accepted practice before there was much of an internet to spread misinformation. How did everyone, everywhere, think to do the same thing, at the same time? Maybe some long-forgotten kid tried it on an Atari 2600 cartridge in front of his friends, and they spread it from there like a virus.
“Fortune cookies are Chinese”
Fortune cookies did not originate in China. They originated in Kyoto, Japan in the 1870s. Makoto Hagiwara was the first person to sell fortune cookies in the U.S. at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco in the 1890s or early 1900s. In the early days, they were apparently known as “fortune tea cakes” due to their Japanese origins, but in the 1940s, when the U.S. sent Japanese Americans to internment camps, it’s thought that Chinese businessmen were able to take over the manufacture and distribution of the confection, leading to its association with Chinese restaurants.
