A Little Bit of Knowledge...

In last week's This American Life, they talked about knowledge.

In one segment, they talked about having a "little" bit of knowledge, just enough to get yourself into trouble. Like, everybody knows that trans fats are bad for you. But nobody knows why. So, when you encounter a person who waxes eloquent on the evils of trans fats, if you ask them, "why are they bad for you?" they will probably try to just make up some plausible story. There's a word for it, and it's called a "Modern Jackass."

I do this all the time with politics, of course. I know just enough about, for example, the latest debacle with Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac to know that I don't like it, but not enough to have actually read the bill and be able to argue intelligently about it if someone asked me any kind of in-depth question about it. I am a "modern jackass."

The next segment was about beliefs we had growing up, into adulthood, that suddenly turned out to be wildly off-target and mistaken--and usually we find that out in some embarrassing situation. Like the woman who thought that the abbreviation "Xing" as in "Railroad Xing" was pronounced "zing". Or the one who thought that unicorns were an endangered species of a real animal. Or the one who grew up having only eaten chicken for lunch and dinner--ever--and thought everybody else did too.

I've had several of these mistaken beliefs too. Some that come immediately to mind are:

1) razor blades last forever.
I remember being a sophomore in college and complaining to my roommate that I hated shaving because it hurt so much. He asked me how long I'd been using my Bic razor blade, and I replied something like, "I don't know 2 years or so." He just stared at me for a while. Then he handed me a new razor blade and said, "try this." And it was glorious. It was actually shaving my beard instead of ripping it out. That was the first time I learned that a razor only lasts for a few shaves.

2) men get haircuts about every 6 -8 months.
I was into my 20s before I read, in a Men's Health magazine, that people are supposed to get a haircut about every month. I was utterly dumbfounded. Literally all my life until the age of 24 or so, I only ever got a haircut when my hair was so out of control (it curls into an afro), that I could not get my brush through my hair. My parents had never, EVER, taken me to get a haircut before I complained that I could not get my brush through my hair--which was about once every 6-8 months or so.

3) Never drain or rinse canned beans.
It has only been in the last 2 or 3 years that I have learned that when people cook with canned beans that they usually drain and rinse the beans before they use them. Wow! What a discovery! Growing up, we never drained or rinsed canned beans--which we ate almost every day of our lives-- and I thought that the nasty bitter taste of the "bean gravy" that I hated was just how beans tasted and was normal.

I'm sure I could think of more. So, what are your dumb discoveries?