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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It’s hard resisting the power of the moon.
Especially if you work on a boat, by the coast.
The moon haunts you.
Or in the case of Destiny and FFXIV:
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
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.
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 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.
The only pseudo science I believe is that one day I’ll be happy. Even though I know i ll never be happy.
That is neither science nor pseudoscience. I don’t know your story, but there are scientific and pseudoscientific ways that might be able to make you happy one day.
I think that currently society is too polar about this issue. A lot of so-called pseudoscience have a lot of anecdotal evidence that should be taken into consideration and don’t have a lot of science to deny them. On the other hand a lot of them do have that so there is an issue where there’s a lot of people who believe a lot of different pseudosciences because some of them genuinely seem to have results but the people who go explicitly by scientific research sometimes can group all of these together. For example, homeopathy is obviously bullshit, and there is a ton of scientific research that shows that. But, for example, a lot of Chinese medicine, which has no scientific backing, does seem to have a lot of anecdotal and historical evidence that suggests that if science does look into it, they might find some actual results.
I don’t know what lunar effect is, but the description you gave sounds very plausible. Like, why wouldn’t a full moon affect the behavior of humans and other animals? How it affects them? To what degree? Sure, that’s debatable. But generally affecting them, that sounds reasonable. It’s a significant change in the night. It lights up the night more and It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that some animals might use it as time management indicators that might relate to biological cycles.
Right. There’s a mix in lots of ideas, of interpreting real evidence and experience, and of making up rubbish to sell things. And just of building too big of a theory off minimal data and putting too much trust in it.
So, moonlight being a major factor to change your behaviour to evil or crazy, is presumably nonsense. But, as you say, moonlit nights affecting human behaviour, such as having social events on a moonlit night, or even working later in the fields those nights, is obvious.
And the phase of the moon causing programming bugs? Absolutely real. There’s one or two documented cases.
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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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
In that theory we’d more be the cancer-cells rather than braincells 😏
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.
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.
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.
Not sure either of these counts fully as what OP is looking for, but -
The idea of the technological singularity feels right to me. There’s a whole section on the wikipedia page about scientific objections to it, and I get that, but if we don’t kill ourselves before then, it seems like an event that almost has to occur at some point, to me. And maybe it zigs instead of zags and we get star trek. Or maybe it zags and we get terminator. But probably neither of those I’m guessing, and these days it’s hard to imagine that it would put humanity on a worse trajectory than we seem to be on today.
Similarly, but less seriously (for me) I like to consider the whole “maybe we’re in a simulation” theory.
Yeah I kinda adhere to the simulation thing too. As a videogames programmer, every time I try to learn about quantum mechanics I learn about some new quirk that really makes it sound like some game engine limitation
when I like to gain perspective and imagine how useless we are on this meaningless little planet in a massive galaxy universe etc I just imagine the lonely little Boltzmann brain that’s actually just imagining the whole thing for a few nanoseconds before it returns back to quantum foam
I thought you were going to say
As a videogames programmer, it is natural to me to consider myself as a character in some video game.
On the surface, it does seem like there is a similarity. If a particle is measured over here and later over there, in quantum mechanics it doesn’t necessarily have a well-defined position in between those measurements. You might then want to liken it to a game engine where the particle is only rendered when the player is looking at it. But the difference is that to compute how the particle arrived over there when it was previously over here, in quantum mechanics, you have to actually take into account all possible paths it could have taken to reach that point.
This is something game engines do not do and actually makes quantum mechanics far more computationally expensive rather than less.
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.
Time probably isn’t real.
I don’t know what to do with that information. It’s just a weird gut feeling.
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.
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.
I’ve often thought that maybe time is like color or weight. Electromagnetic radiation exists, but color only exists as an idea in our heads, how we’re perceiving and interpreting what does actually exist. Our weight is variable based on our mass and gravitational effects in our environment, rather than being an actual property that describes us. Is what you’re saying about time potentially being an emergent property of entropy the same deal? Are color and weight emergent? (I’m asking both about the actual wording and also how analogous the ideas are.)
Counterpoint:
Time IS real, but like all dimensiona of space it must be traversed in a direction. We can only experience it in a linear fashion, but as it can be traversed there must be a forward and backward (regardless of if we can access it or not). Ergo, predestination is real because all moments are happening simultaneously in different locations upon the time axis.
Here’s a twist I just came up with. We experience time passing, because we’re sliding through it uncontrollably.
Imagine a sled sliding downhill. If you wanted to stay still in time, that would take active effort. It’s like pushing against the sled to prevent it from sliding down. If you want to go back where you came from, it would take even more effort. It’s like climbing uphill.
Also, I have zero evidence about any of this, which makes me 99% confident that time doesn’t really work this way. It just sounds like an appealing concept that should be a foundation of a scifi novel.
must be traversed in one direction
See that’s the part I’m not so sure of. At least for all information transfer. Matter is likely too weighty to go against the current.
But time “feels” like a plane where traversal is just beyond my fingertips.
Or I’m just in the really early phases of dementia.
I think it’s like… in terms of time we’re kind of ‘2D’. Like if you picture a dot on a sheet of paper, it can only move around the directions on that flat plane. That’s time and velocity for us. if you go further up the X axis, you go less far along the Y axis, which is why time slows down the faster you go.
If you were somehow ‘3D’ in time, it’s be like if you lifted the pen off the paper, you could hop around all over the place or maybe even to a different sheet of paper entirely.
But isn’t all velocity relative?
I’m partial to pan-psychism. Consciousness is a property of matter.
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’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 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.)
