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votes
What common misunderstanding do you want to clear up?
A debunked myth, a frequently misused word, a lie that seemingly everyone believes…
What’s a common misunderstanding, and what should people really know instead?
A debunked myth, a frequently misused word, a lie that seemingly everyone believes…
What’s a common misunderstanding, and what should people really know instead?
Firstly, I love your questions @kfwyre.
Probably the one that annoys me the most is media reporting of military 'war games'.
Often the media will get in a frenzy because 'Country X and Country Y are joined together to do aggressive war games off the coast of blah blah blah! COULD THIS MEAN WAR?'
Firstly, they're not wargames. That does happen, but it's very different, and highly technical/scientific. I find it boring but some people love it. To me it's the least fun part of planning.
What the media is mostly talking about is military exercises, which are visible because they're in the field (the physical world). There are non-field exercises, but that's mostly to test and refine things that don't occupy the physical domains of war. Think things like command and control. Or tabletop exercises, to test out 'What if [unlikely but very dangerous thing] happens? Are we ready? Do we need to adjust our plans?'
With field exercises, if we're talking normal, non despotic countries (NATO, Japan, South Korea, most of South East Asia, almost all of Europe barring Russia and a few others), these things are planned years in advance. They mostly happen to certify different capabilities. For example, certain Army formations in my country go through an annual large-scale field training exercise each year to be certified that they are combat ready and deployable.
The schedule of field training exercises goes well into the next decade, because often it's the final step in certifying if a particularly complex thing is up to the task.
Secondly, if more than one country are having field training exercises together, that doesn't just happen overnight. That is also planned years in advance. I think probably the most common one I see in the media is 'the US and South Korea are having joint war games in response to latest aggression from North Korea/Russia/China! Does this mean war is imminent?'
Nah, it means that they're allies, and they're testing that their forces can work together (interoperability). RIMPAC and Steadfast Defender are great examples of lots of countries coming together to figure out if Capability A can talk to Capability B, and what the limits are. They're huge multilateral events, but the main objective is figuring out how things work in real life, as opposed to 'theoretically, we should be able to work together' and finding out too late that something crucial doesn't work because an artillery field-of-fire management system speaks Spanish and not French.
Of course, the planning of exercises is often designed to project presence in a region, or show a particular capability. They can serve as a deterrent in themselves. But it's not like sounding the drums of war or anything, it's just part of regularly scheduled programming.
(There are obvious exceptions - when you're dealing with Russia and North Korea almost all bets are off. China has increasingly started notifying nations when it is having big exercises, but not always.)
To try and make a Tildes-friendly analogy, the media freaking out about 'war games' is like hiring a penetration testing contractor, saying 'cool, our cyber security defenses work, well done team', and then having your HR department scream about being under cyber attack and tell everyone to throw their laptops out the window.
It's a misunderstanding that leads to panic-inducing click bait, and more 'Could this be WW3?' headlines than I can remember. Most of the time field training exercises are announced and advertised well in advance, especially if they're being publicised and the press is invited.
Tabletop exercises can be slightly more reactive just because it's easier to get people in a room and run through a scenario. But even then, it's not a cause for 'Does this mean war is coming?!'
Speaking for the countries whose defense forces are paid for by taxes, there's a big responsibility to have thought through what to do if plausible bad situations occur. So tabletop exercises are used to prepare for the most likely and most dangerous scenarios, so that responses don't have to be made up if a crisis emerges. I would be very annoyed if my country and its allies didn't revise plans and make new ones as new information comes to light.
So next time you see a bunch of big gray ships floating around or tanks rolling through somewhere or pilots competing for best highlight footage, sure, part of it is to demonstrate strategic deterrence and do a bit of diplomacy by inviting your friends along, or countries you'd like to be friends with. Showing that a bunch of like-minded countries can work together is a big disincentive for aggressive expansionist countries doing anything silly.
But usually the main thing is 'Alright we need to test if this all works together. Ah fuck, that bit didn't work. Start again, but let's try this instead... Well, we ran out of time and money and fuel for some bits, but we can refine again next year. Everyone go home and clean your stuff.'
That was quite interesting about the exercises! I knew the difference between the two things but not how much actually goes into the exercises. Logistics are a crazy thing.
And yip, don't believe everything you read! Because as soon as you read articles and hear news about subjects you actually are an expert on, you realize how much most journalists get wrong. Most news are very surface level and it's sometimes to the point of being either so simplified that it's wrong, or straight up misinformation/misunderstanding on behalf of the journalist.
I think we all have a lens through which we read articles that are about subjects we know a lot about. At least for me, my reaction is often along the lines of "kind of yes, but not really" or like "well that's misleading" or similar. So I try to remember to apply that lens to all other news I read - that there's a lot of accidental misinformation or details that are misleading and the particular media's slant and biases etc. etc. That I'm at best getting surface level knowledge of whatever thing I'm reading.
So that feeling we have when reading about our own areas should always apply to everything else we read.
The Byzantine empire isn't the continuation of the Roman empire, or a succesor state of the Roman empire. It was the Roman empire, centred on the capital it had had since Constantine (Constantinople), speaking a language it had spoken since the Late Republic (Greek, which they called Romaic), with the same religion that was growing in the state since the time of Augustus all the way to Diocletian before Constantine (Christianity).
It got caught up in European renaissance propaganda (you can't revive Roman civilisation when the Roman state is still right there), and is today caught up in post Ottoman national myths.
You have piqued my interest, what role does it play in post-ottoman myths?
My History of the Byzantine Empire class I took randomly in college was one of my favorite classes and my absolute favorite history class ever even if I had no right to be in a history class cross listed for grad students as a bio turned psych major.
It was basically all things I'd never learned before because "Western Civ" jumps from Rome to William the Conqueror.
You don't feel nauseous, you feel nauseated. If you're "nauseous," you're making others feel nauseated with your disgusting grammar 🤢
Just kidding. Like pretty much everyone else, I've been making that mistake all my life. It used to drive my ex crazy though, so I made the switch and now I can show off how sophisticated I am when I'm about to puke.
Worth noting that it's not a mistake once it becomes how the word is generally used, which has long since happened for "nauseous" -- the definition that equates to "nauseated" is present in major English-language dictionaries, with the other definition being considered less common and more formal. Language change happens this way all the time, it cannot be stopped by pedants, and people are not wrong or less intelligent for using language naturally rather than following made-up rules that involve arbitrarily deciding certain word usages and grammatical structures that are naturally part of the language are "wrong" and a sign of unintelligence.
"Nauseous" is actually attested as being used for the now-obsolete meaning of "inclined to nausea, easily made queasy" earlier than it's attested as being used to mean "causing nausea,". Were people wrong for beginning to use "nauseous" to mean "causing nausea" back then? When did they become correct? Who decides when the way normal people regularly use a word is "right" and when it's "wrong", and how might their decisions be influenced by arbitrary bias towards the things they're familiar with rather than anything remotely approaching "objective truth"?
The people who insist that the way common words in everyday language are used should be policed like this rarely, if ever, think about these things, and that's before you even start with them literally just making up grammar rules that are not a thing in the English language (not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions being two prominent examples that spring to mind) to start enforcing for no reason other than as a purity test to filter out the "uneducated." And it's all fun and games with little trivialities like "nauseous" vs "nauseated", but the same mindset and behaviors do regularly result in actual discrimination and horrific mistreatment around the world of speakers of languages and dialects that are just as rich and complex as those spoken by the people who make these "rules," but just happen to have less societal prestige.
People who insist that you're using language "wrong" for "mistakes" like this are overwhelmingly assholes (and I say this as a reformed "grammar nazi" myself), and they're also just straight-up wrong and silly from the perspective of those who actually study language from a scientific perspective.
Similarly, "poisonous" vs "venomous".
China's infamous social credit system doesn't really exist (except it does(except not in the way people in the West generally think it does(except in a few areas(kinda(for a few years))))).
Tell us more please!
It's "chaise longue" (lit. "long chair" in French), not "chaise lounge". Drives me nuts for some reason, even though I get how it happened since, y'know, you lounge on it.
I got it drilled into my head by the band Wet Leg, because it's part of the hook in their song Chaise Longue (note that this is a very NSFW song, very funny though.)
That song is played over broadcast radio and in fact has been played at my place of work over the speakers, so it isn't that NSFW.
The 2008 Bailout in the US came at a great cost the taxpayers. With the power of hindsight, it cost US taxpayers -$109b. That is, the US government made a net profit of 109 billion.
Presumably that’s from the Propublica bailout tracker, which includes TARP, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. Looks like most of the profit is from Fannie and Freddie, which have sorta been nationalized.
Matt Levine wrote about the strange situation here:
The US also lost about 11 billion on the GM bailout.
It literally kills me when pedants point out that you should use "figuratively" instead of "literally".
Speaking of China, it does not actively censor videogames that contain skeletons (or blood, or the other things that sound kinda ridiculous in 2025). Censoring rules are broad and left open to interpretation, and are applied on a case-by-case basis. What happens is that publishers self-censor as much as possible to stay on the "safe" side, avoid rework, and get approved asap.
I don't feel up to listing them all but there are a ton of misconceptions about living with colorblindness such as how much color perception I have (in my case, lots, but green is and has always been a weak spot for me, and I confuse it often with gray and red), if I've ever tried those special glasses (I have not, and I have no interest in them), or if it's really that big a deal (depends on what I'm doing; I've usually found a workaround but sometimes I have no choice but to straight-up pull out my phone and use a live color-picker, or ask someone to tell me.)
If anyone has any particular questions, ask them here and I can bet you there's about a 10% chance someone else will pipe up with an answer. Because up to 8% of all males are colorblind in some way.
The primary purpose of copyright was intended to be for the good of the public as a whole, not just the good of the copyright holder.
Per the US Constitution:
The goal is encouraging the creation of more things by making it worthwhile enough to invest in them - it was absolutely not intended to enforce some notion of natural ownership over the work. The idea of copyright as a collective good, with the interests of public balanced against a reasonable incentive to create new works, has almost entirely been lost.
The modern conversation almost always starts from an assumption that ideas are private property, something to be exclusively owned, bought, and sold, rather than from the assumption that they are public by default but that it's sometimes worthwhile to grant an artificial, time limited monopoly. Even when talking about copyright reform, it's almost always framed from the point of view of the copyright holder having an inherent right that could perhaps be limited, rather than as society itself being the main stakeholder.
Planes do not generate lift exclusively through negative pressure from air moving faster over the top of the wings than the bottom and pulling it up.
That is a factor, but the wings also push air down, and according to Newton's 3rd law if an object exerts a force on another then a force of equal magnitude is exerted on object a in the opposite direction. So if the wing pushes air down then the air pushes the wing up.