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
You must log in or register to comment.
ITT: very little pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience only when you try to pass something non-scientific as science (understood in the modernist sense). There are plenty of systems of knowledge that are outside of science and don’t really care about passing as science when making statements about the world: metaphysics, theology, cybernetics, open systems theory, and so forth. Those are not pseudosciences.
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.
Mind-body. That you can think yourself sick, or well. Not like magic, but a lot of the time. Like how people won’t get sick until vacation a lot of the time, they say “don’t have time to get sick” so then on the day off, the mind tells the body “ok now you have time!”. All of my kids were born on a day off or weekend, same thing in a way. And once I read a book where the protagonist’ hands were burned, very vividly described, and got blisters on my fingertips.
I just really believe a lot of physical illness, and health, comes from thinking.
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.
Memetics is not really pseudoscience. It was science, there there were compelling evidence and arguemtns that ideas have no agency on their own, contrary to genes, and the whole field died for good.
Genes don’t have agency either.
While genetic agency is often appropriated by reactionary politics, it’s a quite established scientific perspective.
I’m guessing “agency” in this case is being used in a way that’s very specific to that area of research and not exactly how people use it in normal conversation?
It’s obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.
In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.
For people like Dennet, which I’m not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.
Does a grain of sand have agency? Does it want to be caught by a specific size of classification sieve?
Because that’s exactly the level of agency that drives natural selection.
Agency is not will though. For sure genes have no will and neither does sand
You are always the center of the observable universe.
Love is a physical force, not just a human emotion.
Did I get that from Interstellar? Yes. Do I care? No.
Human life has meaning because we decide it does. That decision and that meaning are influenced by love, and the ensuing actions we take affect our physical environment.
Love takes energy and invokes acceleration of matter one way or the other. It’s a force.
but then it’s a social force, and social force can be turned into a physical force. I would say any cybernetician would agree with this. Social signals are part of the same system of physical signals. Then we can argue cybernetics is not science but rather its own paradigm, but that’s a different conversation.
It’s hard resisting the power of the moon.
The moon haunts you.
Or in the case of Destiny and FFXIV:
Maybe like a limited Gaia hypothesis. The whole planet is a conscious thing, we are its braincells and its hands.
why not go full panpsychic it actually makes even more sense and has been seriously studied for millenia
I guess fundamentally I see the mind as arising out of physicality and emergent constructs within that physical system rather than being fundamental. The reason the Gaia hypothesis appeals to me then is because it is just an extension of that emergence idea but across the whole 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.
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.
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.
More plz
sry i’m too tired rn
maybe another time :D
here’s a short summary:
plants produce life out of the four elements (water, air, sunlight, earth), so they are producers of life. animals/fungus are consumers of such life (they eat fruit) and decompose it into urine, air, shit, and heat/energy. so it goes full-circle.
what, however - you may ask -, is in it for the plants? why produce food only for animals to eat it? it is because the plants get something for it, and that is that animals transport the seed in the fruit around and drop it somewhere far away. so plants get movement or transport from the animals. and that advantage is, in fact, large enough for the plants for it to even bother producing food in the first place. so quite big. that’s not really pseudoscience btw, more real biology done by real biologists, but still interesting :D
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.
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.
That wiki article is very biased.
It also has problems distinguishing pseudo medicine (proven not to work) from alternative medicine (not conclusively proved or disproved).
Once something works, we call it medicine. There’s no such thing as “alternative medicine”.
Even if it’s weird, or comes from popular knowledge, or disrupts the profits of a pharmaceutical company - if it’s proven to work, it’s medicine.
Modern doctors are using fish skin to combat burns, maggots against necrosis, electroshock therapy for depression.
The things that need the “alternative” qualifier before the word “medicine” are the ones that do nothing but extract your money.
I’m not sure what are you trying to tell me.
That you agree with me that “alternative medicine = not proven to work, but I’m wrong somehow”?
If your definition is that something can be called “alternative medicine” simply because we have no proof if it works or not, my magic stick that heals all wounds is alternative medicine.
What? There are no studies proving it doesn’t work… and no, I won’t let you touch it. But it’s alternative medicine!
That’s literally alternative medicine defined as per well, science. And you being silly doesn’t take from it. In the past, viruses were considered alternative medicine (quackery even), until they were proven to exist and work as in theory.
If you hit someone with a stick and that person gets cured of cold, it’s alternative medicine (you suspect there’s correlation or causation, and repeating the treatment during other incidents tends to have similar effect, i.e. when you hit more people they also get cured). When it’s proven that there’s causation between your action and the cure, then it’s medicine.
There’s no scientific definition of alternative medicine, it’s not a real category.
You might want to check out wikipedia.
Ah, that explains why you think popular definitions are somehow scientific.
