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
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The Moon landing was staged, but Stanley Kubrick insisted to shoot on location…
The Apollo moon landings have been faked dozens if not hundreds of times and only done for real 6 times.
Pffft, you believe in the Moon?
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.
None. If any of it was reproducable it would science instead of pseudoscience
If it’s not provable by science, then I don’t believe it.
Time probably isn’t real.
I don’t know what to do with that information. It’s just a weird gut feeling.
The more I learn the more time feels emergent and not required.
That… actually makes a lot of sense. Time could just be an emergent property of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics (the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases) could then be applied to explain why time appears to only move in one direction.
Seeing as the time axis doesn’t seem special compared to spacial ones (especially in edge cases like black holes) I think time is just a perspective thing.
My take is that all particles must be moving at the speed of light through 4d space time. Everything always moves at the speed of causality, just not always in the direction you are looking from.
Do we know if the second law of thermodynamics is just a statistical thing? Does it work at extremely small scales? I know heat propagation could transfer from cold to hot. Its just so astronomically unlikely especially the more complicated the system gets.
Listen up brother because im about to open your third eyes fourth eye. Time is a construct made up by the big clock industry to get us addicted to their minute munchers which is exactly why I stop looking at them.
I dont know what day or time it is. I’m pretty sure I haven’t slept in 84 hours and I’ve never been more certain that I am absolutely terrified of everything.
Wake up.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pain is an illusion
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.
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??
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.
Modern geocentrism
kinda. It’s more that “center” of the universe can be picked completely arbitrarily. I can say I’m the center of the universe, and when I spin on my chair, the universe revolves around me. You can define the frame of reference however you wish to. The change of perspective does not change how orbits work.
Lunar effect – the belief that the full Moon influences human and animal behavior.
by that short definition sure, but probably not how they mean. If you’re active at night, the amount of ambient light is surely going to impact your behavior. Not so much in areas with artificial lighting.
Memetics.
Insofar as there are self-replicating ideas, and the ones more likely to self-replicate become more prevalent…sure. Not the whole story either, as ideas can also be pushed by people that don’t believe those ideas.
Osteopathy.
I thought it was scientifically proven, it seems that’s not the case 😬
Cryptozoology. There are definitely creatures unknown to science. Dozens of new ones are discovered every day. Loch Ness monster - no. Unknown ape - possibly.
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.
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
Hunted and had their horns removed by greedy humans.
And it’s called a rhino! I do admit that I use the term horse-like rather broadly here.
They are part of the same order (broad toed ungulates) and share a common ancestor, so they are certainly related
