Via Dean Esmay, I found a nice little debunktion of the myth that a slowly boiled frog will not try to jump out of the container.

The legend is entirely incorrect! The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.

Perhaps that's why Aesop stuck to fables? I mean, does it matter whether the lazy grasshopper really asked the industrious ant to let him come in out of the cold when winter arrived? This is not to call Aesop the father of "fake-but-accurate," because his fables were never marketed as true. (Which is why they won't ever be debunked as "Aesop's Hoaxes"!)

Another urban legend that I keep seeing is the so-called "1895 Eighth Grade Examination," also declared false by Snopes, but which is more thoroughly debunked here. While the references to the test abound on the Internet, it seems that the original document is nowhere to be found.

What I found especially interesting is that the originating site's supposed copy of the original says nothing about the test being intended for graduates from the eighth grade. Nonetheless, based on this Internet rumor, the United States' entire educational system is indicted because of the good old days when eighth graders passed a test which would be impossible for many of today's college graduates to pass.

The problem is that the educational system should be indicted. But hoaxes like this only hurt the effort, in much the same way that Joseph McCarthy hurt his own cause. Like so many people who read the "Eighth Grade Exam" hoax, when I first saw it I too was inclined to believe it -- because it confirmed my darkest suspicions. Had I sent a copy to an activist educrat who bought into all the NEA gobblydook, I might very well have been sternly lectured that I had subscribed to a right wing hoax. While this would not cause me to change my opinions about the state of the educational system, it would nonetheless be embarrassing, and I would have to admit I was wrong. Well, I'm a blogger, and I'm so used to making mistakes that admitting I'm wrong doesn't carry the same stigma that it might for a non-blogger. But I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people would be so humiliated that they'd shy away from educational issues in the future.

I wish people could see these things as the signposts to self improvement that they really are. Hoaxes should encourage healthy skepticism. What they should not do is cause the opinions of the one who was taken in to be condemned simply because he fell for a hoax. Falling into that trap is worse than falling for a hoax.

Part of the problem is that many of these hoaxes are sent by people who mean them not as illustrations of the facts in the hoax, but as judgments of others with whom they disagree. The exposure of a hoax sent by someone who wants to do that would thus be eagerly seen as a well deserved comeuppance -- a sort of judgment in reverse. It is very demoralizing, of course, to have the basis of one's judgment exposed as a hoax, because hoaxes are fraudulent. This must be particularly infuriating for people who never want to admit when they're wrong.

Which is why I think exposing hoaxes is good for the soul!

While the slowly boiled frog "lesson" could advance any political perspective, and the "Eighth Grade Exam" generally advances conservative educational sentiments, I do not mean to single out any group as especially prone to hoaxes. Not long ago, a friend sent me an email I'd consider a leftish hoax: that the upper end Texas department store Neiman Marcus billed a customer $250.00 for a cookie recipe after the waitress told her ("with a cute smile") that the price would only be "Two fifty." The woman called and pleaded (according to the email) but those mean Neiman Marcus capitalists held firm:

"What the waitress told you is not our problem. You have already seen the recipe - we absolutely will not refund your money at this point."

Not only is it a hoax, Neiman Marcus posts the recipe free.

But in logic, anyone circulating such an email who hates big corporations and thinks they should be destroyed really shouldn't feel defeated by the fact that the recipe email is a hoax. Capitalism is either evil or it is not -- and the fact that Neiman Marcus didn't swindle this particular customer no more makes capitalism good than would the same email make it bad if it turned out to be true.

But isn't that just another way of saying that even if it was false, it might just as well have been true? Or that even if it was true, it might just as well have been false?

I hate that!