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
Uff, i have a lot:
Life on earth is a huge organized organism. It created intelligent humans deliberately sothat we can spread life to other planets. Living beings (plants, insects, other animals, fungi) could not do that otherwise.
All life is sentient. Sentience doesn’t come from the brain, rather it comes from the hormones in your bloodstream. When we sweat, these hormones enter the air (apparently within the fraction of a second) and other people can smell them. That is how we can instinctually know how others are feeling.
Also i have a lot of mythology:
Heaven (realm of all ideas, knowledge and forms) and Earth (origin of mass and material) are a love pair. Because they couldn’t easily meet (there was an insurmountable gap between them), they created a bridge, which is life. This way, heaven supplies the shape (genes), and Earth supplies the body, and these two can be together in this way.
Viruses are books. They have a cover (shell) and contain scripture (RNA/DNA). We humans let them in because they are nature’s messengers and have a specific purpose, which is to exchange some information.
ask for more and i will give.
Definitely the lunar effect, but that is still under study. There’s a documentary called “The Shark Side of the Moon” which follows a scientist trying to prove a lunar effect on sharks. There’s also some inconclusive evidence of a lunar effect on people with bipolar disorder; the full moon might trigger mania, probably due to excess light during nighttime. Context: >!People with bipolar disorder (known as ‘manic depression’ years ago) are very sensitive to light, substances, and many other things that can trigger manic or depressive episodes for them. The possible mania under the full moon may be a reason behind myths like werewolves and terms like ‘lunatic’.!<
I’ll edit if I find more.
Edit: I found another one which I would easily try or suggest to others if evidence-based therapies have failed.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy in which the person being treated is asked to recall distressing images; the therapist then directs the person in one type of bilateral sensory input, such as side-to-side eye movements or hand tapping. It is included in several guidelines for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some clinical psychologists have argued that the eye movements do not add anything above imagery exposure and characterize its promotion and use as pseudoscience.
I really want to believe the Assassin’s Creed concept that our DNA holds memories from our ancestors.
Epigenetics. But that’s not as cool as whatever Assassin’s Creed is.
Before she passed my Nan had chronic arthritis. She had many joint replacements (both hips, a knee, shoulder, pins in her wrists etc) and without medication life was a misery.
One thing she said gave her genuine relief was acupuncture, and she wasn’t into pseudoscience at all. Maybe is was a placebo effect and it was expensive but it was worthwhile for her.
I’ve heard a few people say acupuncture has helped them. And saw an interesting thread on Lemmy or Reddit sometime with people citing papers against each other that it’s evidenced or not.
My guess so far is that it genuinely helps sometimes - perhaps via the nervous system, which is something scientific medicine still knows little about (compared to many other areas of medicine) - but some practitioners do it well and others not, and sometimes it works and sometimes not, and without scientific analysis and regulation it’s hard to know which.
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.
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.
Shun the nonbeliever! ShunNnNnn!
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.
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.
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.
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.
All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn’t work anymore.
Some broken or malfunctioning machinery respond to incantations projected with emotion. Cuss a machine hard enough and it will start working again.
Another one I’ve personally experienced, but don’t know of any studies for: the main casting of machining equipment such as mills or lathes is a big crystal with unique properties. Each machine has different frequencies it resonates at when cutting. You can hear and feel the vibration when cutting and tune the machine/program for more efficient cutting and tool life. Sort of like taking a guitar that is out of tune and tuning it to a pleasant chord. Two identical machines will need different tunings. This tuning can change over time due to wear, temperature, humidity or maybe the phase of the moon.
Unrelated to machinery: there are mountain lions in the deep south in the deep woods. I had one check me out once. The state wildlife agency denies the modern existence of mountain lions and I didn’t believe in them until I was face to face with one. I had to growl and hiss at it to convince it that I wasn’t interesting.
I had an old Mustang and used to say I could cuss start it.
I completely believe the mountain lions one. Wasn’t the largest ever mountain lion just captured and tagged in Florida? It’s not hard to believe a family or two migrated out of Florida into the rest of the South. The woods are so thick, it seems like a great place to live.
Novel inbound. Don’t think I’ve ever written this down.
I hadn’t heard of the big mountain lion from Florida, I’ll have to look into it. Nifty.
I have heard that the lions in Florida experienced a bad genetic bottleneck and are inbred and won’t survive long term without intervention. There has been discussion about bringing in fresh breeding stock to try and help them, don’t know if its been instituted.
I saw mine deep in the woods, about 10mi north of a place called Cougar Holler. (I heard about that holler after this.) I saw the cat in Skyline WMA in North Alabama. Was 2mi from a road, no trail, after dark, coming up the side of a holler.
On a flat spot up the side, almost to the top, I saw what looked like green headlights coming towards me. It was confusing because you couldn’t even get a four wheeler in there and it was quiet. Realized it was eyes as it got closer, we were moving towards each other. Got to about 20 yards and realized it was a giant cat. LED lamp, so color isn’t great/lot of green, but it looked like gold/tan fur and white belly. Its tail was proportionally shorter than a house cat and longer than a bobcat. End of the tail was squarish, almost tufted. Face was blocky and a little flatter than a common housecat. It was twice, maybe three times the size of a bobcat, so probably a juvenile.
The way it moved was like a snake slithering. It was up on a deadfall, and it kept sliding out of my light. It slid off the log towards me. At that point I drew my handgun and started growling and hissing. It stopped and stared at me and I kept moving towards it. It turned back the way it came and just casually slithered away. It wasn’t afraid of me, just no longer interested.
I know bobcats and house cats. This was not that.
I will never, ever, forget its eyes or the way it moved. The entire event is burned into my memory. Adrenaline was up, but I wasn’t scared, living in the moment, excited. Got the shakes when I made it back to my truck and sat down.
One of the peak experiences of my life.
All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn’t work anymore.
I love this.
Not original to me. Totally stole it.
So that’s what happened when I plugged my 120 V appliance into a 240 V outlet, I released the magic smoke.
Yup. Unfortunately, once released, the magic smoke is gone and cannot be replaced.
I kind of a little bit believe that dreams have some weird predictive ability. The scientist in me knows it’s likely a mix of confirmation bias and information synthesis, but like… my family has a pretty strong history of dreaming about deaths and births a week or two prior to pregnancy announcements and right before/after deaths. My mom has had several dreams where a loved one has come and chatted with her in a dream and said goodbye, then later that day we learn they passed, for example. It’s happened enough that I have a lot of trouble brushing it off. I’ve had a similar dream myself and it felt quite different from a normal sleep dream. That one was less paranormalish though, it was a friend who died a few years ago and showed up to give me some life advice. Just… hit me in a specific, indescribable way (it was good advice too).
Can’t explain it. Don’t really believe it’s paranormal I guess, but I also don’t disbelieve.
Oh I believe in precognitive dreams, because I used to write down my dreams and had some that happened later. And I don’t mean big things like deaths or pregnancies. I mean piddly details that meant nothing and can’t have been foreseen. Once dreamed that I was at the local bank, three people were in line, I got on the scale they had there to weigh myself but the dial went backwards then I turned around and saw this girl Joann that I’d not seen since middle school. Wrote all this in the dream journal.
Couple of weeks later went to the bank. 3 people in line. I got on the scale but it was broken and said I weighed 30lb. I got off the scale and turned around, and yep, Joann from middle school, turns out she’d moved away but had moved back to town.
That’s the one I remember and I would have just thought I had dejavu if I’d not written that dream down.
And honestly it pissed me off pretty bad. I want to believe in free will, that we can choose, that the future has not happened yet. The dreams kind of broke that.
i have that too, a lot. not just when people die though. it is quite different than just a random hallucination, because i get the feeling that an organized intelligence is actually having a plan and giving me specific information.
like, sometimes, i will have a dream that conveys something important to me, and then i will deliberately wake up in the middle of that dream in a way that makes me remember what i dreamed about, so i can write it down.
to make an example, just yesterday. i dreamed that an old school colleague of mine is in some sort of deep trouble. today, for the first time in 6 years, i get a text message from a close friend of his that asks me to meet up.
Yeah, that kind of stuff exactly. Good to know it happens to others.
It’s not impossible that for some reason you and your family have some sort of strong subconscious indications in your dreams. So maybe things that your subconscious has picked up manifest in dreams and if we’re talking about predicting things that have been developing for a while like someone’s death (old age or sickness) or pregnancy, it’s not impossible that you subconsciously already knew it to a degree.
But confirmation bias abd memory synthesis is probably more likely.
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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.”
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!
I’m partial to pan-psychism. Consciousness is a property of matter.
I’m with this one. It feels less magical than “brains make consciousness happen.”
Yeah it just makes sense. Everything has a little bit of consciousness in it, even subatomic particles would have a non-zero amount. But the consciousness of these particles then combine in complex and nonlinear ways. Something like, IDK, the combined consciousness of a collection of particles is proportional to their individual level taken to the n power, where n is equal to the number of particle interactions. Totally guessing on the actual math, but it would be something complex and nonlinear like that. If you could quantify consciousness, and humans had a measure of 1 consciousness unit, then the consciousness of an electron would be something like 1/Googolplex consciousness units. Something insane like that. Technically nonzero, but so small as to make an amoeba look like a intellectual giant.
I would agree depending on how you see physics. I think there is no smallest unit, no fundamental, infinite big and small. So though size comparisons make relative sense, they don’t describe relative complexity.
I never knew there was a name for this idea! I came up with a silly science fiction idea based on this a few years ago.
I feel like the list is a mixed bag. There are things like flat earth, which are just against common sense, things like homeopathy, that sound promising to many people but were scientifically disproven many times.
And then there are many things that are mostly pseudoscience but can have some aspects that are true. For example aromatherapy is bullshit in general, but the smell of mint specifically was proven to have a beneficial effect on people’s mood. And there could be more smelling efects we don’t know about, so one day, we might witness the rise of a new science-based aromatherapy. Or Lysenkism - such a twisted terrible dark times for science! Such a disgrace, I always get angry just thinking about this totalitarian shit. But the Lamarckian evolution aspect is surprisingly not completely bullshit, as it turns out, now that we understand that genes are not the only vehicle for evolution and how things like epigenetics work. That’s one point for Lamarck though, not for Lysenko.
Our decisions should be based on what was proven by science. That doesn’t mean that’s all there is. Otherwise we wouldn’t need science anymore.
The list is very interesting, I’ve never heard of Minimum parking requirements and would definitely fall for that.
The wording for the fad diet section bothered me. If benefits of calorie restriction and fasting aren’t scientifically supported, why are their Wikipedia pages full of scientific research regarding their benefits?
Things like the actual uses of aromatherapy make me wonder what to call them. Maybe the word placebo applies, but I feel that there’s a certain level of arbitrariness needed for that specific word.
There’s something about aromas and the soft gestures of reiki that are pleasurable to us in a more objective sense. We don’t like them simply because we’ve been told they’re good for us; we like them because we like them. A waterfall will make most people feel good even you don’t tell them it’s good for them, so I don’t feel it can be called a placebo effect. What is the term for a thing which isn’t directly a medicine, but is medically beneficial by promoting a sense of wellbeing?
I don’t think that laughter should be considered medicine in a literal sense because it would make the term too broad, but also because these things are at least somewhat subject to taste rather than the truly objective effects of drugs. A given drug might effect two people differently, but the difference is a matter of chemistry rather than the subject’s opinion.
(Maybe it will all be the same someday when we’ve dialed in how everybody’s brains work in exact detail and tailor treatments more specifically. Maybe we’ll actually prescribe touching grass instead of suggesting it.)
I believe that acupressure, meditation, reiki, etc. can actually help ease some chronic issues in the same way that a placebo drug does. The mind believes that it should feel less pain, anxiety, depression, etc so it does - to an extent. Afterall, if stress is harmful to our health then relaxation must be helpful.
I think meditation has scientifically proven effects. One thing I keep hearing is that the slow concious breaths you take whilst meditating are signaling your nervous system that you are safe and can calm down.
Meditation and mindfulness absolutely have scientifically proven effects.
Pain is an illusion
I want off Mr. Bone’s Wild Ride.
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.
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.