It was a very dysfunctional group of friends! That was the most egregious thing, but they did a lot. I learned after the fact that one of them guilted another into playing a game he hated by buying it for him as a gift on Steam.

Or, the pasta thing. They insisted that you CANNOT break linguini/spaghetti/etc when you cook it because the extra surface area makes it cook wrong. The person who insisted this was an ENGINEER who presumably had been taught that this added negligible area. But even "all my Italian relatives break it and it's always fine" didn't convince him.

Or the time one of them left a loaf of bread just OUT, completely uncovered, and insisted that it stayed fresher that way. A lot of homemade loaves of bread turned into croutons that year.