This is really just a compendium of old fashioned common misconceptions - Everest is only the third highest point on the Earth, the dodo didn't die out because we humans hunted it - and so on, but I will admit that they were all new on me. And it's fresh and pleasantly presented. `All Time Scary` seems to be the new voice of Mandela's...for what it's worth. Good clean fun, anyway:
That video perfectly illustrates what is actually going on when 'the Mandela Effect' is invoked. Mr Woah Dude the narrator clearly has not had a classical education and knows nothing at all about the Library of Alexandria. The fact that he keeps on talking about 'books' instead of 'texts' is a fairly strong clue that he's blagging it. There's a fighting chance that he could not find Alexandria on the map, but he
has heard the name and can understand the concept because of fleeting references in video games, Hollywood and on the Internet, so he's simply conflated it with other famous infernos from the ancient world (Nero fiddling while Rome burned in 64 B.C.--also likely a myth).
We are now exposed to so much information that if we have no specific reason to consciously
work with it in some form, it is only retained at a surface level, and the resulting memory is plastic enough to allow prior and subsequently acquired factoids to be attached. We
feel as if we know things, but when that information is interrogated it simply melts into air. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" as Pope didn't quite say in a poem I have read only once and can merely parrot the next lines as they were the only bit I needed to quote for an essay fifteen years ago:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
How many people who could 'quote' that first line incorrectly could actually tell you what and where the 'Pierian spring' was? Or why it might intoxicate? I once studied this kind of stuff and I find that I erroneously thought that there were seven muses (actually nine are more commonly listed) hanging out there. Why? Probably because of 'interference' from 'Seven Sisters' (Pleiades), who enjoy the benefit of a tube station and part of Tottenham. But now I find that both neighbourhood and station were in fact named after seven local elm trees encircling a walnut tree on a nearby green, not the star cluster nor the catasteristic suicide-victims that produced it. These facts are melting into air as fast as I can chase them.
Set me an essay or schedule an exam on the subject and I'll have it for life; throw it at me on Wikipedia or YouTube and it's lost in hours.
Similarly, the Salem witch trials. He keeps on saying that he formerly believed that those found guilty were burnt or drowned, but now he has discovered they were 'hung' (he means 'hanged', more evidence that he had never read an article on the topic), but in his earlier belief he was simply conflating the ideas of general heresy and witch-trials with the counter-reformation,
autos-da-fé and the Marian persecutions in England.
The transformation of the Everest 'fact' is similarly doubtful. It is simply a case of linguistic inexactitude and changing the parameters. Yes, sea level varies, which is why elevations are measured against
mean sea-level across the planet. Here's a shocker: sea levels actually change (daily, monthly, yearly), and we do not wish to re-measure and 'correct' land elevations, so we work with a constant average. And the main field in which we care about establishing land-based elevations is that of mountaineering, and mountains that you cannot climb from base to summit (such as underwater ones) are not relevant in the survey.
It's like the old chestnut of whether a tomato is a fruit of a vegetable: it completely depends who is answering and for what you or they intend to use it.
I had no facts about the Dodo to work with--although I saw a stuffed one at the Horniman Museum. I don't recall any notes on its taste or the factors behind its extinction.