You’re at a bar. Or maybe a boring office mixer. Someone drops a daily fun fact about daddy longlegs being the most venomous spiders in the world, but their fangs are too small to bite you. Everyone nods. It feels true. It’s a great little nugget of trivia that makes the person saying it look smart.
Except it’s total nonsense.
The "daddy longlegs" myth is just one of a thousand tiny lies we tell each other every day in the name of curiosity. These bits of information circulate through TikTok loops and Reddit threads until they become gospel. But if you actually dig into the entomology, you’ll find that "daddy longlegs" usually refers to harvestmen, which aren't even spiders and don't have venom glands at all. If they’re referring to cellar spiders, they can bite, but their venom is mild. We live in an era where information is everywhere, yet we are drowning in "factoids"—a word that, ironically, originally meant a false statement presented as a fact.
The Psychology of the Daily Fun Fact
Why do we love these things so much? It’s basically brain candy. When you learn something new and surprising, your brain releases a hit of dopamine. It’s the "Aha!" moment. We are wired to seek out novelty because, evolutionarily speaking, knowing something your peers didn't could keep you alive.
Nowadays, it just makes you better at Jeopardy.
The problem is the "Skinner Box" effect of social media. We want that quick hit. We want the daily fun fact that takes five seconds to read. This has led to a massive degradation in quality. Content farms know that "sharks don't get cancer" (false) gets more clicks than "sharks have a robust immune system that is currently being studied for potential medical applications" (true, but boring).
Dr. Elizabeth Marsh at Duke University has done some fascinating work on how "knowledge" sticks. Her research suggests that even when we know a source isn't perfectly reliable, we often store the information anyway. Later, we remember the fact but forget the source. This is how your uncle ends up believing that humans only use ten percent of their brains. We don't. We use all of it. Even when we're sleeping.
The Napoleon Complex and Other History Whoppers
Take Napoleon Bonaparte. If you ask anyone for a daily fun fact about the French Emperor, they’ll tell you he was short. "Napoleon Complex," right?
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He was actually about 5'7".
In the late 18th century, that was actually slightly above average for a Frenchman. The confusion came from a mix of French inches being longer than British inches and a very successful British propaganda campaign by cartoonist James Gillray. Gillray drew Napoleon as a tiny, tantrum-throwing child, and the image stuck for two hundred years. It’s a perfect example of how a "fact" is often just a very old joke that people forgot to stop telling.
History is littered with these. People think Vikings wore horned helmets. They didn't. That was a costume choice for a 19th-century Wagner opera. People think Columbus discovered America. He didn't, and he never even set foot on the North American mainland; plus, the Vikings (the ones without the horns) beat him by about 500 years.
Science Fact vs. Science Fiction
The world of nature is the biggest victim of the poorly researched daily fun fact.
You’ve probably heard that a goldfish has a three-second memory. Honestly, it’s insulting to the fish. Goldfish have been shown in repeated studies—like those by researchers at the University of Oxford—to remember things for months. They can learn to navigate mazes. They can recognize their owners. They can even be trained to push levers for food.
Then there’s the "alpha wolf" thing.
This one actually hurts animals. The guy who popularized the term, Rudolf Schenkel, was observing unrelated wolves forced together in captivity. In the wild, wolf packs are actually just families. The "alphas" are just the mom and dad. David Mech, the scientist who helped spread the alpha concept in his 1970 book, has spent the last few decades trying to get his own book out of print because he realized he was wrong. But the "daily fun fact" version—the idea of a violent struggle for dominance—is too "cool" for the public to let go of.
The Math of Coincidence
Probability is another area where our intuition fails us. Have you heard of the Birthday Paradox?
It’s one of those things that sounds like a lie.
In a room of just 23 people, there is a 50% chance that two of them share a birthday. By the time you get to 75 people, the chance is over 99%. Most people think you’d need 180+ people to reach those odds. We think linearly, but probability is exponential. This is why "crazy coincidences" aren't actually that crazy. You aren't psychic because you thought of someone and they called you; you're just experiencing the law of truly large numbers.
How to Spot a Fake Fact in the Wild
If you’re looking for a legitimate daily fun fact, you have to be your own editor. The internet is a swamp of recycled 2012 Buzzfeed lists.
Here is how you actually verify stuff:
First, check the "Why." If a fact sounds too perfect—like it fits a specific political narrative or sounds like a movie plot—it’s probably skewed. Real science is usually messy. Real history is usually nuanced and lacks clear heroes.
Second, look for the "primary source." If an article says "Scientists say..." but doesn't name a university or a peer-reviewed journal, they are guessing. Or lying. A real daily fun fact should lead you to a rabbit hole, not a dead end.
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Third, beware of superlatives. "The only," "the first," "the most." These are red flags. The world is too big for "the only." For instance, people say the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space. It isn't. You can't see it with the naked eye from low Earth orbit, but you can see highways, airports, and even large greenhouses in Spain.
The Tech Gap
In the world of technology, facts move so fast they become "expired" before they even finish trending. You might hear a daily fun fact about how your phone has more computing power than the computers used for the Apollo 11 moon landing.
That’s true. It's very true.
In fact, a modern USB-C charger cable often has more processing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). The AGC ran at about 0.043 MHz. Your iPhone 15 Pro's A17 chip runs at 3,780 MHz. But comparing them is kinda like comparing a calculator to a symphony; they were built for totally different tasks. The Apollo computer was incredibly "hardened" against radiation, something your phone wouldn't survive for a minute in deep space.
Why Accuracy Matters
You might think, "Who cares? It's just trivia."
But the way we consume a daily fun fact reflects how we consume news, politics, and health information. If we don't hold our "fun" facts to a high standard, we lose the ability to distinguish between reality and a well-packaged story.
When you share a fact that is actually true—like the fact that trees in a forest communicate and share nutrients through an underground fungal network (the "Wood Wide Web")—you're not just sharing a bit of data. You're sharing a more accurate way to see the world. That matters.
Actionable Steps for the Curious Mind
If you want to be the person who actually knows their stuff, change your information diet.
- Stop following "Fact" accounts on X or Instagram that don't link to sources in the bio or comments. They are almost always bot-run and scrape data from 15-year-old forums.
- Use Wikipedia’s "Talk" pages. If you want to know if a fact is disputed, the Talk tab at the top of any Wikipedia entry is where the real experts argue over the details. It’s the best place to find nuance.
- Verify with Snopes or HoaxSlayer. Before you hit "share" on that mind-blowing daily fun fact about a new law or a historical discovery, run a quick search.
- Read the "About" section. If a site providing your daily trivia is owned by a marketing conglomerate, the goal is engagement, not education. Look for educational institutions (.edu) or government archives (.gov).
- Embrace the "I don't know." The smartest people aren't the ones with a million facts; they’re the ones who know that most things are complicated.
Next time someone tells you that you swallow eight spiders a year in your sleep, tell them it’s a myth started by a columnist in 1993 to prove how quickly misinformation spreads. Then, maybe, tell them about the USB cable that's smarter than a moon rocket. That one is actually true.