False Assumptions and Counterexamples

We've all seen other people make false assumptions about things. The most common ones I see online are things like "every guy draws dicks everywhere he sees" and "all boys draw this S shape". These are clearly entirely a cultural phenomenon because my childhood in India, despite the massive amount of street stuff drawn, just didn't have these things drawn. And we didn't do it as little boys either.

But there are ones that influence people's world views a lot. I'll try to collect them as they come to mind.

Libraries Can't Exist

This Is Allyween @AllyMalinenko

People who tweet things like this have no idea what working in a public library is like

Sep 9, 2024

All libraries can only be public. This is a popular one. The view is that without government funding for public libraries, the only way to read books would be to go buy them from a store. I know this to be obviously false because in Chennai we don't have the extensive public library system that the US has. But what we did have were private libraries. The one I went to is Easwari Lending Library. As you can see there, they have quite a few branches. The Google Maps listing has pictures for the place I used to go and where I got most of my childhood reading from.

So the answer is that if libraries didn't exist, there'd be affordable libraries to use that served that business case.

Celsius v Fahrenheit

Tiger Webb @tfswebb

one thing americans genuinely seem not to understand is that celsius, like fahrenheit, makes complete intuitive and bodily sense to people who use that scale

Dec 23, 2024

The Celsius/Fahrenheit thing is another great war between the peoples in the vein of the emacs/vim war and so on. I've never personally had any trouble using either. The one thing that sort of makes sense is that F-based thermostats which don't have a decimal increment can move in finer-grained increments. I find it so simple to do either where necessary.