False But Earnest

When one says that one might get a cold from being outside in winter without a hat, one does not do so intentionally to deceive or reinforce false data. Their earnestness is merely expressing itself as a false factoid. The harm is not in the actual suggestion, nor the feelings it conveys.

So too is there nothing intentionally harmful about one who attributes the temperature to when leaves change colour and drop (they're driven almost entirely by sunlight, which is why we can predict when they'll peak each year - it's the same time year in and year out with just a small effect driven by precipitation).

These sort of common mistakes - common knowledge passed as accepted wisdom but actually false -- proliferate our daily existence. The present author almost assuredly knows some things that are false. These unknown unknowns, as esteemed international criminal Donald Rumsfeld once explained, haunt us, dangling just out of sight - an ignorance we assume we have but have no way of finding or knowing. A sort of self loss of ego as we stumble around, wondering if the factoid we just explained or correlated was in fact incorrect all along. Even to attempt to research said acceptable data can be a rabbit hole of paranoia and confusion. One merely need look at the entire industry of research and data and ads and guides and self-help of diet and exercise to question what we really know and feel overwhelmed. The fact that we are so often driven by a desire to know what we don't know is one thing, the fact that even once we know something, we might still be wrong, is another thing entirely. As always, the end result is self-doubt.