A list of examples of claims I have had the misfortune to spend time looking into which, on closer investigation, turned out to vanish with the dew:

  • Most discussions of Thomas Robert Malthus are erroneous and show the speaker has not actually read An Essay.

  • Supposedly a man with hydrocephalus destroying >90% of his brain graduated with a math degree; this can’t be directly shown to be false, but it traces back to popular articles, and real research on this anecdotal case was, suspiciously, never published; the weight of the evidence about it and contrasting with other hydrocephalus cases (some affected by research fraud) strongly suggests error or omission of damaging details.

  • Drapetomania is cited as an example of the Antebellum South’s medicalization of slaves the better to oppress them, ignoring the fact that it was supported by only its inventor, was mocked, had no practical consequences, and was of less importance to its time than Time Cube is to our own.

  • The British science writer Dionysius Lardner supposedly scoffed at the idea of fast trains, claiming “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia”; but there is no good source that he ever said that, and it seems to have been made up out of whole cloth in 198046ya by someone who couldn’t spell his first name right.

  • Bicycle face was claimed by an encyclopedia and a few other feminist books to be a disorder pushed by the English medical establishment to discourage women from bicycling & keep them under control; but the scanty primary sources barely supported its existence as an obscure concept known from a few newspaper columns, and certainly not the misogynist tool of oppression it was depicted as. (There appear to be similar problems with Rachel Maines’s claims about Victorian doctors’ use of vibrators, in that the sources simply do not support her claims: “A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm”, Lieberman & Schatzberg2018.)

  • A feminist wrote that ‘This was a time before women had the right to vote. If they did attend college at all, it was at the risk of contracting “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system” (according to Harvard gynecologist Edward H. Clarke)’; this was a grossly out-of-context quote which libeled a man with noble & progressive beliefs, as I pointed out in my comment.

  • There are many attributions to the great physicist Lord Kelvin of a line which runs “X-rays are probably a hoax” or “X-rays are frauds” or somesuch; a closer investigation shows that there are no primary quotations, and that the real context seems to have been his reaction to sensationalized newspaper articles on the discovery of X-rays and that in any case, he accepted X-rays as soon as he read the scientific paper describing their discovery. (He probably also did not say “Radio has no future.”)

  • We all know spinach has lots of iron—or does it not, or does it not not have lots of iron?. Let’s go deeper:

    Hamblin1981 reveals that the widely-held belief that Popeye eats spinach because it contains lots of iron is a myth, and spinach has normal iron amounts; a myth ultimately caused by sloppy German chemists typoing a decimal point and uncritically repeated since then, as an example of leprechauns/urban legends/errors in science…

    Which Sutton2010 traces the versions of, ultimately finding the spinach myth to be a myth and no decimal point involved at all at any point, and the myth coming to Hamblin, as Hamblin agrees, via Reader’s Digest…

    Except Rekdal2014 points out that the story was indeed published in Reader’s Digest—but 8 years afterward…

    And Joachim Dagg in 201511ya finds a decimal point error elsewhere for the iron content of beans, which was debunked by a Bender, and the debunking passed onto Hamlin with a confusion into spinach…

    But Sutton, in 2018, accuses Dagg and another of being obsessive cyberstalkers out to discredit Sutton’s work—proposing that Darwin plagiarized evolution, a revelation covered up by “Darwin cultists”—and that Dagg’s interest in the spinach myth-myth is merely part of an epic multi-year harassment campaign:

    Meanwhile, in 2018, Dagg, who like Derry cyberstalks me obsessively around the Internet eg. posting obsessive juvenile comments on the Amazon book reviews that I write etc. (eg. here), writes in the Linnean Society paper in which he jealously plagiarises what he proves in his own words he prior knew (eg. in 201412ya and later here) to be my original Big Data IDD “Selby cited Matthew” discovery, thanks the malicious and jealous intimidating cyberstalker Derry and his friend Mike Weale. Notably, Weale cited my original (Sutton2014) (Selby and six other naturalists cited Matthew pre-1858) prior-published peer reviewed journal bombshell discovery in his 201511ya Linnean Society paper and openly thanks me for assisting him with that paper. He also thanks Dagg in the same paper. As further proof of his absolute weird obsession with me, Dagg (here) also jealously retraces all my prior-published steps in my original and now world-famous spinach, decimal point error supermyth bust. I think he was trying—but once gain failing (here obsessing most desperately about me and my research once again)—to discredit me anyway he could, which is the usual behavior of obsessed stalking cultists, unable to deal with the verifiable new cult-busting facts they despise, so going desperately after the reputation of their discoverer instead. His Linnean Society Journal friend Derry is totally obsessed with me for the very same reason. He too, for apparently the very same reason, tries but also fails to discredit the spinach supermythbust on his desperate pseudo-scholarly obsessive stalker site (here). What a pair of jealous and obsessive sad clowns they are.

    So, can we really trust Dagg or Sutton…?

  • plagiarist Johann Hari claims that prohibitionist Harry J. Anslinger surveyed 30 scientific experts about the safety of marijuana and ignored the 29 telling him it was safe and based his anti-marijuana campaign on that 1 scientist; each point there is false.

    In actuality after checking Hari’s sources, Anslinger did not survey them but they had been debating the ban proposal internally & the AMA provided Anslinger excerpts of their opinions, they were generally not eminent scientists but pharmacists & drug industry representatives, the holdout did not say it was dangerous but merely described a doctor of his acquaintance who had been severely addicted to marijuana & explicitly noted that “This may be an exceptional case”, and Anslinger didn’t base his campaign on it—or even mention it publicly—although he did save the exception to the Bureau files on marijuana (which is where Hari found it).

  • In his book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber claims Nazi rallies were “inspired by” Harvard pep rallies, but without any sources; I investigated this in more depth and concluded that the connection was real but far more tenuous than Graeber’s summary. (Graeber’s books make an extraordinary number of false claims.)

  • The Wikipedia article on shampoo cited popular science writer Mary Roach as summarizing NASA & Soviet research as indicating shampoo is necessary, while the relevant passage seems to say the opposite.

  • CS theoretician Edsger Dijkstra is known for a quote that “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”, but it’s unclear he ever said it and it may have actually been said by either Hal Abelson or one of 3 obscure writers.

  • A famous quote by Oliver Heaviside turns out to be stitched together from no less than 4 different sources (3 different places in 2 Heaviside books, and a later commentator describing Heaviside’s philosophy of science).

  • The “Lindy effect” is the claim that a large volume of output predicts a lower probability of terminating soon & more future output eg. writing novels, as happens under certain statistical distributions, which was credited as originating in a 1964 The New Republic magazine article by Albert Goldman; obtaining a copy, however, I learn that Goldman’s actual observation of “Lindy’s Law” was that comedians appeared to have fixed amounts of material, and so the more output from a comedian, the more likely his TV career is about to terminate—that is, the opposite of the “Lindy effect” as defined by Nicholas Taleb.

  • AI researchers like to tell the cautionary story of a neural network learning not to recognize tanks but time of day which happened to correlate with tank type in that set of photographs; unsurprisingly, this probably did not happen.

    There appear to be several similar AI-related leprechauns: the infamous Microsoft Tay bot, which was supposedly educated by 4chan into being evil, appears to have been mostly a simple ‘echo’ function (common in chatbots or IRC bots) and the non-“repeat after me” Tay texts are generally short, generic, and cherrypicked out of tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and it’s highly unclear if Tay ‘learned’ anything at all in the short time that it was operational; a “racist photo cropping” algorithm on Twitter caused a ruckus in 2020 with people cherrypicking examples of ‘bias’ using pairs of photos where the black person was badly cropped, but Twitter did not confirm this, stated their testing had specifically checked for that, and more extensive testing with up to 100 pairs showed roughly 50:50 crops (reminiscent of the ‘gorilla’ Google photo classification that people declined to note classified white people as ‘seals’); an Amazon hiring algorithm was biased against women and in favor of lacrosse-playing men, except said algorithm was never used, and research on it stopped because it was exhibiting chance-level performance; Cambridge Analytica’s political ads supposedly powered by AI was just a giant scam and could not possibly have had the effects attributed to it, both because advertising has absolutely tiny effects even with vastly more comprehensive datasets than Cambridge Analytica had access to and because the Trump campaign fired Cambridge Analytica early on.

  • A more contemporary example comes courtesy of Mt. Gox: everyone ‘knew’ it was started to be an exchange for trading Magic: the Gathering cards, until I observed that my thorough online research turned up no hard evidence of it but rather endless Chinese whispers; the truth, as revealed by founder Jed McCaleb turned out to be rather stranger.

  • researching “Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement”, I learned that Netscape founder Marc Andreessen’s infamous boast that web browsers would destroy the Microsoft Windows OS monopoly by reducing Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” is ascribed by Andreessen to Robert Metcalfe

  • More minorly, I’ve corrected a New York Times movie review & an ars technica computer crime article.

  • “Littlewood’s Law of Miracles” appears to have not been by Littlewood but Freeman Dyson

  • Richard Feynman’s anecdote about “Mr Young” & methodological errors in psychology studies of rats turns out to be mostly right but got details wrong, making it especially hard to find the original

  • Carthage was not sown with salt

  • There is no edible honey in Egyptian tombs

  • Walpole quote: a popular false quote, attributed to writer & politician Horace Walpole (1717–801797229ya), runs

    The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.

    This is a stringent demand, in requiring one to know “well” not just one thing, but a thousand things. Can even an industrious intellectual live up to this standard?

    After seeing it quoted in a The Browser newsletter, I was immediately suspicious it was apocryphal as this does not sound like an English writer who died in 1797229ya—but like a much later writer (or at least, like a heavily-distorted version of a 1700s original).

    Searching eventually led me to Wikiquote which informed me that it was actually written by Hugh Walpole, a noted but now obscure novelist (who died at the more appropriate date of 194185ya), in an obscure book fortunately available on the Internet Archive. But I could not find it there. Wikiquote noted, oddly, a second publication, to some educational journal I’ve never heard of. (Walpole had taught earlier, but had turned to fulltime writing by this point, so his inclusion is a little odd.)

    While not available on IA that I found, it was available through Hathitrust, where at last I could verify on page 342 the quote, which read there (emphasis added):

    The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things as well.

    This changes the meaning! The real Walpole quote is not exhorting us to impossibly master an endless array of topics, but instead, to maintain a lively curiosity & flexibility.

    So, the quote turned out to be: misattributed to the wrong person 2 centuries prior, to the wrong book, and quoted wrongly, in a way which changed the meaning substantially.