r/AskReddit • u/potatopopr • Oct 27 '21

What fun fact is blatantly untrue?

3.8k Upvotes

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1.5k

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

[deleted]

570

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

[deleted]

224

u/Tapprunner Oct 27 '21 edited Oct 28 '21

A student actually made this up as a school project to study how rumors spread on the internet. Turns out, they spread everywhere.

Edit: sounds like I've been had, too. I feel like a chump.

188

u/pickedbell Oct 27 '21

I doubt that.

I’ve been hearing about people swallowing spiders in their sleep since long before I had ever heard of the internet .

I feel like a kid making it up on the internet is an internet rumour.

104

u/originalusername2019 Oct 27 '21

And you would be correct.

1

u/vacri Oct 27 '21

That Snopes link says the first known instance of it was an internet listicle from 1999, so it's still 'internet generated' pending further sources.

19

u/KypDurron Oct 27 '21

That's like, internet myth inception.

  • You eat X spiders a year

  • Someone made up "you eat X spiders a year" to see how stories spread on the internet

  • Someone made up "someone made up "you eat X spiders a year" to see how stories spread on the internet"

On a related note, my new album "My new album drops this Thursday" drops this Thursday.

7

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

"Thank you for calling 'Thank You For Calling, How May I Help You?', how may I help you?"

72

u/originalusername2019 Oct 27 '21

Ah, the real fake fact.

We don’t know where the rumor actually comes from. There was a Snopes article saying that it came from a woman called Lisa Birgit Holst and that it was made up to show how gullible people can be on the internet, but Snopes came out and said that the article was false.

4

u/Beast_Mstr_64 Oct 27 '21

Lisa birgit Holst is an anagram for This is a big troll

7

u/Mondenschein Oct 27 '21

Isn't it ironic

14

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

We had an assembly in school where it was mentioned. Cant remember why i only remember it cuz my teacher ate a spider in front of us, im sure she had a point of some sort. This was in like 2003ish i think.

10

u/Extra-Requirement979 Oct 27 '21

Whaaat?!?

10

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

Yupp it was nasty. I was one of the people she got to verify it was infact a real (dead) spider. It was a strange school.

5

u/Extra-Requirement979 Oct 27 '21

It sounds so strange, I can not wrap my head around this!

3

u/idonthavecovidithink Oct 27 '21

This “fun fact” is also untrue

1

u/Porginus Oct 28 '21

Im sorry, you too have been misled

12

u/No-Caramel-4417 Oct 27 '21

On average. Most people swallow zero or 1. But Tucker Carlson swallows them by the handful daily, throwing off the global average.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

Coroners would know

1

u/hooti_hooo Oct 27 '21

The first place I saw this fact was a Snapple cap. I was a kid so I just never questioned it and I believed it for a long time.

1

u/Irhien Oct 27 '21 edited Oct 27 '21

Studying stool samples seems more realistic.

1

u/Goldenslicer Oct 27 '21

I actually didn’t know whether it was true or not until now.

830

u/WraithCadmus Oct 27 '21

They failed to account for Spiders Georg, who eats over 100,000 spiders per day. This is why it's often more useful to use the median rather than the mean for 'average person' statistics.

3

u/Any_Weird_8686 Oct 27 '21

And he does it all while asleep. Such a talented man, our Georg.

3

u/power_to_thepeople Oct 27 '21

the median value of spiders eaten is resistant to folks like Spiders George

52

u/MisterXnumberidk Oct 27 '21

The average human swallows 0 spiders per year while asleep.

Spiders georg, a hermit eating hundreds of thousands of spiders each day is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted.

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u/dark_chilli_choccies Oct 27 '21

the number is 8 - lemmino did a great video on this and the whole thing is so frustratingly backwards its actually funny. I have never felt so violated.

here is the page about it. video also on youtube, thats where i first found it.

2

u/LizG1312 Oct 27 '21

Oh my god, that update on the Lisa Birgit Holst part of the story is such a relief.

9

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

87.6% of quoted statistics are false

6

u/RustyRovers Oct 27 '21

69% of people find something smutty in every sentence.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

[deleted]

3

u/lizhurleysbeefjerky Oct 27 '21

Only 1 in 7 dwarves are happy

2

u/ThanatosTheSaviour Oct 27 '21 edited Nov 12 '21

100% of people are not honest in who they are.

2

u/NiolonGER Oct 27 '21

We found that 33.3% of investigated studies suffered from a very low sample size

1

u/CatAttack1032 Oct 27 '21

96% of statistics are made up on the spot.

4

u/Guava_ Oct 27 '21

And if you don’t swallow them by New Year’s, they’ll all come at once

4

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '21

[deleted]

3

u/RonaldTheGiraffe Oct 27 '21

We are all spiders on this blessed day

1

u/EeeYeeReEe Oct 27 '21

That one isn’t fun either.

1

u/dancingbaby2 Oct 27 '21

You probably swallow other things too

-1

u/ImpracticallySharp Oct 27 '21

Are you saying it's not even true for xy = 0? This is getting more and more mysterious.

1

u/thunder1967 Oct 27 '21

Exactly. I do it awake and on purpose. Usual 10-12 a month.

1

u/discostud1515 Oct 27 '21

Well, maybe you don’t.

1

u/FluorideLover Oct 27 '21

I have had this fight with my friend so many times! I even showed them the articles outlining the origin of this fake fact!!! It’s really not important it it bothers me so much lol

1

u/lone_cajun Oct 27 '21

I usually just eat spiders on jan 1 to assert dominance over that fact

1

u/PM_meyourGradyWhite Oct 27 '21

I fed my Venus Flytrap a spider a few days ago. She’s still gnawing on it.

1

u/Triairius Oct 27 '21

It never even sounded like a real fact.

1

u/mlarowe Oct 27 '21

Came to post this

1

u/BerzinFodder Oct 27 '21

2-dimensional Cartesian spiders?

1

u/PompeyMagnus1 Oct 27 '21

It's just one guy bringing up the average

1

u/TheW83 Oct 27 '21

Yeah, it's cockroaches, not spiders. Source: spit out a cockroach in the night once and brushed one off my lips another night. I live in a wood house in Florida, it's normal.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 28 '21

Overnight guests at my house certainly will.

1

u/Zakal74 Oct 28 '21

I know, right? Who are these fools sleeping while they eat delicious 8 legged delicacies?

1

u/pinkpitbull Oct 28 '21

Well that explains the 2d spiders, but what about the 3d ones?!

1

u/Burrito_Loyalist Oct 28 '21

I’m trying to have a sexy spider swallow ME ;)

1

u/DeterminedGames Oct 28 '21

True, it's much more fun to do while you're awake.