In 1999 David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that people who perform worst consistently rate themselves highest. The popular version of this finding is about other people. The actual finding is that it applies to everyone, that experts are not exempt, and that knowing about the bias does not help you avoid it.
The claim that the Great Wall of China is visible from space was written in 1754, 215 years before anyone went to space. Every astronaut who has specifically looked for it from orbit has reported they could not see it. The Wall is 6 metres wide. At 400 kilometres altitude, that is below the resolution threshold of the human eye.
Teaching at Oxford began in 1096. The Aztec Empire was not founded until 1428, making Oxford 332 years older. Students were sitting examinations in Oxford while the Aztec empire was at its height. The two worlds simply had not met yet. Here is what else was happening in 1096 when Oxford opened its doors.
Saudi Arabia banned the sale of cats and dogs as pets and prohibited walking them in public. The reason given by the religious police: young men were using them to flirt with women. The cat ban had no basis in Islamic law. The Prophet Muhammad was famously devoted to cats. And the ban was never really enforced.
Venting about your problems feels like release. Research by Amanda Rose and Brad Bushman shows it often makes things worse. Co-rumination predicts closer friendships and more anxiety at the same time. Venting anger maintains and amplifies it. Here is the difference between a conversation that helps and one that rehearses the problem.
Hitler was Austrian. He remained an Austrian citizen until 1932, one year before becoming Chancellor of Germany. For 43 years of his life he held no German citizenship. His antisemitism was formed in Vienna, where he lived homeless for five years after being twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts. Austria later spent decades presenting itself as Hitler’s first victim.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid. The gap between the pyramid and Cleopatra is 2,500 years. The gap between Cleopatra and Neil Armstrong is 2,000 years. Pizza Hut is closer to Cleopatra than the pyramids are. Ancient history has its own ancient history.
Your brain begins discarding an unfamiliar face within 72 hours of meeting someone. But two groups of people experience faces completely differently. One cannot recognise their own family. The other never forgets a stranger they glimpsed once a decade ago. Both conditions reveal something fundamental about how face memory actually works.
The story everyone knows about Rasputin’s death comes from one source: the man who killed him. The autopsy found no poison and no water in his lungs. He did not survive cyanide. He did not drown. A 2024 forensic evaluation concluded he was executed by a single close-range shot to the forehead. The legend was built by a man with every reason to exaggerate.
