[bbanyc]

For all the complaints about our corpus being contaminated by AI slop, there's been plenty of human-generated slop being regurgitated over the years as well. Lazy textbook writers copy and paste from older books, lazy test makers quiz on arbitrary phrases from the textbooks, nobody ever does any fact checking to see if any of it makes sense.

My favorite example is the "tongue map" - decades of schoolchildren have been taught that different parts of the tongue are responsible for tasting sweetness and saltiness and so on. This is contrary to everyone's experience, and it turns out to have been a mistranslation of some random foreign journal article on taste buds, but it's stuck around in the primary school curriculum because it's easy to make it into a "fill in the map" activity. As long as the kids can regurgitate what they're told, who cares if anything they're learning is true?

[eddieh]

Percival Lowell misunderstanding the Italian word “canali”[1] should rank pretty high in terms of similar phenomena and is probably the most impactful example.

1. https://lowell.edu/percival-lowells-search-for-life-on-mars/

[unwind]

It looks like Wikipedia [1] has a better explanation of the actual misunderstanding, the page you linked wasn't very clear to me (Italian "canali" corresponds to English "channel", not English "canal").

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals#Supposed_%22dis...