It's what you know that ain't so that's the problem

[xthread]

Last year, the National Institute of Health did a revamp of their 'Top 10 Medical Myths' site. They were trying to address how they debunk medical myths (things that many people think are true that have been shown to be false) since the way that they've tried to debunk such things in the past is actually counterproductive. The problem is with the way human memory works. We are more likely to remember something that we've heard often, and we are more likely to remember something as being true when we've heard it often, even if what we were told was that someone told us that some popularly held idea had been shown to be false. Basically, telling someone something is true many times in a row raises how many people believe it to be true. Unfortunately, telling someone that something is false many times in a row also raises how many people believe it to be true. It's just a trick of how our memory works.

I've been trying over the last year to more frequently take that into account when I'm writing and talking to people about facts. It's hard. I find myself really wanting to write things like We think that X, Y, and Z are true. Actually, we find that... It's the first way of starting the conversation that comes to mind. And I have to stop myself, because using that structure will lead to people misremembering what I said, and thinking that we find that X, Y, and Z are true. It's really exasperating. And makes debunking myths really hard, because I have to spend most of my time talking about things that are true, and little or none talking about things that aren't.

Now, don't think of an elephant.