Somehow I end up reading many of these backwards, due to the wording. When I see a "list of common misconceptions" containing bullet points like: "Christopher Columbus's efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth." and "Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short.", my immediate interpretation is that these listed claims are misconceptions (they appear in a list of misconceptions after all), and so the opposite is actually true: Christopher Columbus was hampered by a European belief in a flat earth, and Napoleon Bonaparte was especially short.
I do quickly realize it was backwards, but it reads very weirdly to me. If it's a list of misconceptions, shouldn't the misconceptions be the things in the list, with the corrections following each one as explanatory text?
It's because you read like a programmer. You see a data structure (multiple data points within a single page) and then you apply the "False" modifier to every object in that structure without really parsing/grokking the prose.
I do quickly realize it was backwards, but it reads very weirdly to me. If it's a list of misconceptions, shouldn't the misconceptions be the things in the list, with the corrections following each one as explanatory text?