Like many (most?), I grew up thinking-actually being absolutely certain-that when you shave your hair or beard it grows back thicker. After all, the evidence was right there, no? I would shave my hair, and then hard stubble would start growing, tougher than my usually soft hair.

When my beard started coming out, I kept shaving it because I wanted it to grow fuller. And from my point of view, it really did work! It was patchy, then I shaved it and it grew back less patchy. Every month I would do this, and every month it would grow back fuller and fuller. I knew that my own natural hormonal development had something to do with it as well, but I really felt like shaving was working.

But it turns out I was wrong. It's just a self-fulfilling prophecy, as, of course, shorter hair will seem stronger. There's also the fact that any new hair hasn't yet suffered any of the usual wear and tear that old hair has. Add to that that usually time passes between shaving and full growth (like my example of the beard, but it also happens with people who shave babies), and it's easy to see why the myth is so convincing.

(If you don't believe me, and I don't fault you for that, then here are some links from authoritative sources: here, here, here, here, and here.)

I remember when I first found out about this in my late teens. It was one of those moments when a piece of the greater puzzle of life just slid into place. It's not a big piece, but the act of realizing that what one believes is wrong1 is humbling and creates a greater appreciation and openness for other things.

...

What I find really interesting here is not so much that hair doesn't get thicker, but that this belief is still widely held even though it was disproved many years ago.

At least where I live, if you try (and oh boy, I've tried) to tell anyone that shaving doesn't improve hair strength, you'll receive many looks of polite condescension and be told, "Oh but that's what my grandma did". "Go back to daydreaming and let us grown-ups do what we know is right".

I think this phenomenon is the culprit behind many of our society's wrong beliefs. I might be stretching it a bit, but it seems to me that this "that's how my grandma did it," this tendency to favor tradition over new knowledge (in spite of the fact that it has hard scientific evidence to back it up), is one of the reasons we're so stuck on certain topics that we should've already gotten over by now.

...

I don't mean to turn this post into a critique of societal norms and human customs, so I'll stop that line of inquiry there. Instead, I want to briefly consider the "inverse" of what I was just saying.

It is true that tradition sometimes prevents us from progressing, but one must not ignore the fact that, for many, tradition is the central source of meaning in their lives.

Traditions of family, of country (bleh), of religion, or anything else-even your favorite sports club. Traditions do indeed help us feel part of the greater whole, and maybe having some harmless false beliefs is not such a bad price to pay for a little sense of meaning and belonging.

Unrelated, but I wanted to share a wonderful new word I learned today: ravel (the positive form of the arguably more popular "unravel")

ravel (verb) To entwine or tangle something confusedly; to entangle, often forming a complex knot or mass of threads or fibers.

ravel (noun) A tangle or knot.

Wouldn't it be cool if the web were called "the ravel"? Sounds badass. "World Wide Ravel".

Hey, is this the first instance of the Word Corner?

Thoughts:

  • Whatever happened to that Windows feature (Recall?) that recorded your screen and told you what you did the previous days? That would be really useful for me, though I understand the worries about privacy. Would be awesome if there were a "purely local" solution (actually, there's one for macOS, but not for Windows AFAIK).
    • Probably they delayed/removed it after all that backlash they received. Or maybe it's released and I don't have a powerful enough PC.
    • Actually, this is not a bad project to work on. I'll think about it some more. The trick is how to actually make it efficient without losing too much resolution on what the person did. Maybe do screenshots every T seconds, which is configurable per user? Then local model to analyze and summarize. Hey, would be cool to have it create a sort of interstitial journaling. Cool, cool.

Footnotes

  1. I always come back to the interesting idea that in life you eventually get to the point where it's impossible to review all the knowledge you've acquired to decide what's true and what isn't (or what used to be true but science has since realized it's not). ↩