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From time to time, you hear things and just assume they are factual.  Here are my three favorites:

Myth 1.  “We have a few more candidates to interview and then we will call you.”  Instead, chances are good you will not hear back from the company at all.  Few companies take the time to call back  unsuccessful candidates.  They are either too busy or simply rude.  If you really want the job,  be proactive and make the call yourself.

Myth 2.  “It is illegal to yell FIRE in a crowded movie theater.”  Of course it isn’t.  If there is a fire in there, I hope someone yells FIRE.

Myth 3.  “Half of all marriages end in divorce.”  This ‘stat’ has been around since the early 60’s and is still in the mainstream consciousness.  After the jump, I have re-printed some source material that should provide the reader with sufficient ammo to refute this myth.  One part of the myth is factual:  Even if less than half of all marriages end in divorce, 100% of the remaining successful marriages end in death.


from various sources—

In the United States, in 2005 there were 7.5 new marriages per 1,000 people, and 3.6 divorces per 1,000, a ratio which has existed for many individual years since the 1960s.[1] As many statisticians have pointed out, it is very hard to count the divorce rate, since it is hard to determine if a couple who divorce and get back together in that same year should be considered a divorce, so there is in fact no predictive relationship between the two annual totals. This method does not take account of the length of marriage, just the fact that a certain percentage of people were divorced and a certain number of people are married, rendering the statistic almost meaningless. Nonetheless, the claim that “half of all marriages end in divorce” became widely accepted in the US in the 1970s, on the basis of this statistic, and has remained conventional wisdom. Pollster Lewis Harris in his 1987 book “Inside America” wrote that “the idea that half of American marriages are doomed is one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense ever perpetuated in modern times.”
To establish an actual divorce rate requires tracking and analyzing significant samples of actual marriages through decades, which is not an easy task. Recent US scholarship based on such longterm tracking, reported for example in the New York Times on April 19, 2005, has found that about 60% of all marriages that result in divorce do so in the first decade, and more than 80% do so within the first 20 years; that the percentage of all marriages that eventually end in divorce peaked in the United States at about 41% around 1980, and has been slowly declining ever since, standing by 2002 at around 31%; and that while in the 1960s and 1970s there was little difference among socioeconomic groups in divorce rates, diverging trends appeared starting around 1980 (e.g., the rate of divorce among college graduates had by 2002 dropped to near 20%, roughly half that of non-college graduates)