Came across a list of pseudosciences and was fun seeing where im woo woo.
Lunar effect – the belief that the full Moon influences human and animal behavior.
Ley Lines
Accupressure/puncture
Ayurveda
Body Memory
Faith healing
Anyway, list too long to read. I guess Im quite the nonscientific woowoomancer. How about you? What pseudoscience do you believe? Also I believe nearly every stone i find was an ancient indian stone. Also manifesting and or prayer to manipulate via subconscious aligning the future. oh and the ability to subconsciously deeply understand animals, know the future, etc
If you know the future you should be doing good with this power! There’s so many things we need to stop before they happen, falling down stairs, health conditions, the questions we’re gonna be asked in court!
Acupuncture, to a certain extent. There’s obviously something to it (a friend of mine went there because of various issues, and it helped), but the actual science isn’t nailed down yet.
My insurance pays for it which I find shocking. I do find it helpful whether it’s placebo or something else, and since it’s covered I do it.
The Moon landing was staged, but Stanley Kubrick insisted to shoot on location…
Pffft, you believe in the Moon?
How else would you explain the Lunar effect?
Made up by lunatics.
The Apollo moon landings have been faked dozens if not hundreds of times and only done for real 6 times.
Cryptozoology. There are definitely creatures unknown to science. Dozens of new ones are discovered every day. Loch Ness monster - no. Unknown ape - possibly.
I just know we’ll find that damned Insulindian Phasmid soon
Speaking of unknown animals. Unicorns could pretty much be real. Just imagine: We have horses, we have horned animals (even one-horned animals), it is not impossible that a horse-like animal with a horn exists.
Except all of their remains have somehow disappeared
deleted by creator
We even have sea unicorns, land unicorns don’t seem too far fetched.
And it’s called a rhino! I do admit that I use the term horse-like rather broadly here.
It’s an armored unicorn then!
They are part of the same order (broad toed ungulates) and share a common ancestor, so they are certainly related
Hippopotamus literally means river horse, so they are related (not genetically, of course, but etymologically).
Hippos 🦛 aren’t rhinos 🦏
I still like the thought that the Loch Ness monster was real, but died out. That legends grew from the real thing, and occasional real sightings, then popularized with more recent faked evidence.
Of course that doesn’t mean it probably was real, just it might have been.
There are a fair few accounts in Tasmania about thylacines still existing. The lands are so rugged and harsh that there’s not really any solid way to get in there and search. But I’ll believe it, absolutely.
That is not really cryptozoology, a known real creature that we think is extinct, but if it’s turns out to not be… Nothing weird here.
A lot different to claiming there is a loch Ness monster.
Many people claim the Loch Ness monster is an animal thought to be extinct though. The thylacine is generally held to be a cryptid in my experience.
Goodness, that’s a lot to read.
I don’t know if I believe any of them with actual faith instead of just chalking coincidental things up to some beliefs like that. The Lunar phase one comes to mind as something I’ll often reference, but I don’t actually believe in lunacy.
However, there’s one about grounding methods in the health section. I definitely don’t believe there’s anything about elecron alignment or whatever bull that all is. But being on the ground helps me a lot with anxiety and relaxation in general. To the point where I prefer sitting in front of my couch vs on it, lol. So maybe I believe in that one, but not in any pseudoscience way??
I work in 911 dispatch, and I don’t have hard stats to back it up, I’m not even really sure how it could be objectively measured, and I’m sure I have a whole lot of bias and such, but I’m pretty sure everyone I work with agrees that we just get weirder calls on full moons.
Not necessarily busier, or more severe, there’s just a certain something that’s hard to explain about a lot of our callers that seems to get a little strange on a full moon.
It’s not something we’re actively keeping track of, it’s not like we have a reminder set on our phones for the full moon, but when we have one of those nights where everything just seems to be a little off and we check the moon phase, it seems like it’s full or nearly full more often than not.
Although personally I think we see a bigger difference for a couple days after the clocks change for daylight savings time. My pet theory on that is it throws people’s medication schedules off by an hour and it takes them a few days to readjust. Plus throwing off sleep schedules, and dementia patients who sundown may be up and acting up at a time they would otherwise be asleep.
Pretty sure lunar effect is a real, scientifically confirmed thing, just known by a different name. Perhaps not the full moon specifically, but we do oscillate according to the moon phase. It’s called circalunar cycles. The name might sound familiar to circadian cycles because they both derive from the same word structure, ie circa-dia (“around a day”) and circa-lunar (“around a month”)
At minimum, I’m quite surprised that Wikipedia lists this as a pseudoscience, because my impression has generally been that circadian researchers acknowledge circalunar cycles as a given
A lot of these are adjacent to real observable phenomenon but a nutty belief system has been overlaid and then additional claims are made on the basis of that nutty belief system which are not observable.
For example, Feng Shui in practice is usually pretty sensible “where should I put the sofa” kind of stuff, but if you claim that it’s about the flow of qi through your house and suggest that based on that not only should the sofa go over there, but you need to put a topiary vase on the table next to it, that might be a nice aesthetic touch but there’s no evidence of qi.
Additionally there’s plenty of Traditional Chinese Medicine that became actual medicine because it has observable properties. For example turmeric is a mild anti-inflammatory.
According to Feng Shui, cacti are not suitable as home plants. Ergo Feng Shui is evil.
I mean, if you brush against their spikes every time you walk into the living room, you’d decry them as unsuitable too!
Like you, I ain’t reading the list.
However, I’m not dismissive of stuff that’s woowoo, but the stuff you listed has pretty much been shown to be nothing better than placebo effects, with the partial exception of the cycles of some things in nature matching the moon. But it isn’t about the phase, per se (at least, the last serious publication I saw on it indicated it wasn’t).
Thing is, woowoo placebo effect isn’t a fake thing. Hence me not being dismissive. If something A: helps get someone through shit, B: doesn’t hurt anyone, and C: isn’t being used by someone as a tool to manipulate, it ain’t my business to correct anyone.
Some shit, like acupressure has benefits beyond the placebo, even though it isn’t for the claimed reasons. When stuff like that works, it’s very often the touch itself combined with the idea it will help that makes it effective enough to be worth keeping around.
But, with that kind of thing, that’s only okay if it’s conjunction with evidence based beat practices. That’s when woowoo really shines. To help someone decrease stress, handle the horrible, and get through another day. Because it really does help in that regard.
See, it’s known that religion serves that purpose. It’s a psychological coping tool in one of its aspects. It doesn’t matter if the same effect happens because of faith in a deity or not. It’s that we can, to a limited degree, improve our selves by how our minds are functioning. So, if someone gets through their divorce, or being sick, or grieving by burning incense and playing with pretty rocks, IDGAF, I’ll lie to their face and tell them that it’s great, as long as they’re also working on whatever it is more holistically with something evidence based.
Even then, I’d just try to convince them to add to, not abandon.
That being said, I wish some of that shit worked. It would be so fucking nice.
It is impossible to communicate pain effectively. Pseudoscience acceptance causes harm because it greys the line when situations are high risk and complicated. I am quite literally collateral damage with my entire life thrown away in this grey area. Not offended at you, just saying it is not harmless.
I do suspect Qi is a useful abstract concept for focusing and activating parts of our physiology. But while it feels like a single thing (“energy”), it is more a very complex bunch of processes the same way our consciousness feels like a single thing, but is actually a very complex bunch of processes.
Osteopathy.
I thought it was scientifically proven, it seems that’s not the case 😬
Tell that to my back/arm pain I had for months after a Ski accident… After 4 session and one good knack I literally felt how everything got back in place.
I felt so exhausted and somehow strange like a little bit drunk… But after a few weeks the pain went away ! Like magic !
So yeah, science can’t prove everything but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work or has some positive benefits ! Science has also been wrong numerous times or has been controlled by conflict of interests… What ever, choose your poison !
The USB law.
When you try to plug in a USB-A connector, there’s a 70% probability it won’t go in. Mathematically it should be 50%, but I don’t believe that.
You switch it around, and there’s a 30% probability it won’t go in. This is not something they taught at school.
You switch it around the third time, and there’s a 5% chance it still won’t go in. Your mind begins to melt down, you switch and insert repeatedly until it finally works sooner or later.
It’s the XCOM principle lol.
A shot with a 99% chance to hit will miss far more often than you think.
A shot with a 1% chance to hit will miss pretty much exactly as much as you think.
That’s true only if you don’t want to or cannot look at the connector. The side with the seam goes to the part of the hole with the plastic bit.
Also, the overwhelming majority of USB plugs have the logo on the side away from the plastic bit, and sockets have their plastic bits towards the top of the device. You want the plastic bits on opposite sides (as physical objects don’t like to overlap), so that means that if you can feel the logo with your thumb, that side goes up when you plug it in, and you don’t even have to look.
Amazing! I need to check how many of my cables actually follow this rule.
Also, the socket side tends to be aligned in a particular way, but it won’t work with all manufacturers. I recall seeing some laptops that had their USB-A sockets upside down. Oh, and desktops too! Those sockets are usually vertical, and facing a wall, so it’s anyone’s guess which way is right.
Towards the back of the machine normally counts as up for upwards-facing sockets, unless it’s a case with feet on the side, in which case it’ll be away from those feet so the sockets would be the right way up if it were sideways and on the alternative feet.
That’s cheating! You gotta wing it like a pro.
Shun the nonbeliever! ShunNnNnn!
USB Superposition
The orientation of the connector occupies both states at the same time. If you look at it, the superposition collapses into either of the two.
my mother was a new-ager and my father was an engineer. the amount of woo i got exposed to on a regular basis, and the amount of explanations on how it’s bullshit, has pretty much inoculated me against it.
it’s all about theory of work; questioning what would cause the ascribed effect.
We have come so far through the application of rationality and the scientific method. All the wonders of the modern world we owe to science.
What has pseudoscience bought us? Ignorance and stagnation.
I want to live in a world of technological progress not a “Demon Haunted World.”
I subscribe to historical materialism, which is apparently a pseudoscience according to that Wikipedia article.
Karl Marx stated that technological development can change the modes of production over time. This change in the mode of production inevitably encourages changes to a society’s economic system.
I dunno, man, that doesn’t sound too crazy. I’m in a really bad condition for learning new things right now, and I can’t even figure out what claims this idea would be making. It sounds like it’s just describing a process of advancement and the types of conflicts that arise?
I’m finding this especially hard to grasp because my brain’s on a tangent about how you’d really go about falsifying most stuff in history or sociology. You gonna put a bunch of people in a series of jars with carefully controlled conditions for hundreds of years and observe the results? Like we have this piece of paper from 1700 that says Jimothy won the big game, but our understanding of this guy and his alleged win of this supposed game are totally vibes-based because we don’t have a time machine. I think like the best you can do is try to base your beliefs and claims off things that have been observed repeatedly, but does that make these kinds of topics unscientific? We test what we can and go with our best guess for what we can’t, right? This is going to bother me.
I’m too lazy and tired to go into it at the moment, so I’m just going to paste this infographic explaining the relationship between the material base and ideological superstructure.
To the falsifiability point, while I can’t say a lot without knowing the specifics that Popper argued, historical materialism (and dialectical materialism, the way of understanding the world historical materialism comes from) don’t on the surface make much sense trying to attack from a falsifiability angle. While one could attempt to disprove, say, the extraction of surplus value through profit or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall being properties of capitalism (these are claims about the world that can conceivably be true or false), dialectical/historical materialism is the tool used to analyze the world, attempt to change the world based on the understanding from that analysis, incorporate the lessons learned from those attempts (be they failed or successful) into one’s understanding of the world, and repeat. It’s basically a way of gaining knowledge about the world, as well as an explanation of how people get knowledge.
Again, I’d have to check out Popper’s full argument for the specifics, but I don’t know how one can make assertions about the falsifiability of what is basically an epistemology without committing some kind of category error.
Is that some kind of magazine
I’ve had good luck with acupuncture. In one extreme case it fixed my bell palsy months faster that the doctor said it would heal.
If it’s not provable by science, then I don’t believe it.
Science cannot even prove itself as a method. Science is just spicy epistemology.
Science can’t “prove” anything. It is more accurate to say that it reduces the level of uncertainty of hypotheses, but that uncertainty can never be reduced to exactly zero.
What is “zero” exactly? Scientists CAN prove unequivocally that the earth is a globe, there is no uncertainty and it is not an hypothesis.
Assuming “zero” is the number of people who don’t believe in an hypothesis, then I agree with you. Despite the overwhelming evidence there are people that believe the world is flat.
The beauty of science is you don’t have to believe in it for it to be real or true.
Scientists CAN prove unequivocally that the earth is a globe, there is no uncertainty and it is not an hypothesis.
Could be a weird confluence of spatial anomalies perfectly mimicking a “globe” to our tests. That’s not very likely at all, but it’s a non-zero uncertainty.
Of course, we could all be living in the matrix and nothing is real.
Correct.
You express plenty of opinions not provable by science in your comment-history.
Gödel would like to have a word with you
