YouTube is smarter than you

Watching YouTube can be a humbling experience. It starkly demonstrates how unreliable peoples’ memories really are. How many times have you been telling people about some commercial you saw the night before or some crazy sports play you remember, and then to verify what you’re saying, you go: “Look it up on YouTube.”

So the whole office gathers around your desk as you type it into YouTube. The clip comes up…oh, what’s this? That sports highlight you told everyone to watch wasn’t as unusual as you remember it being. The commercial you referenced had a completely different ending from the one you told everyone about. It’s deflating…and you will sit there thinking to yourself: I WAS SO SURE THIS WAS HOW IT WENT.

And here’s how insane we are: Rather than admit that your memory isn’t 100% accurate, you will actually say something as ridiculous as: “I must be thinking of some other time Larry Bird stole an inbound pass from Isiah Thomas in the closing seconds of game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals.”

We can’t admit our memories are wrong, even in the face of incontrovertible, easily accessible evidence.

Now think of all the people who have been convicted on the back of eyewitness testimony.