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
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?
The Apollo moon landings have been faked dozens if not hundreds of times and only done for real 6 times.
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.
If any of it was reproducable it would science instead of pseudoscience
Cryptozoology. There are definitely creatures unknown to science. Dozens of new ones are discovered every day. Loch Ness monster - no. Unknown ape - possibly.
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.
We even have sea unicorns, land unicorns don’t seem too far fetched.
Except all of their remains have somehow disappeared
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And it’s called a rhino! I do admit that I use the term horse-like rather broadly here.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
I subscribe to historical materialism, which is apparently a pseudoscience according to that Wikipedia article.
Is that some kind of magazine
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.
Osteopathy.
I thought it was scientifically proven, it seems that’s not the case 😬
Say 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 !
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 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.
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.
