What Pseudoscience do you Believe?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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 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.
-
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.
The full moon does something to people's brains and makes them act weirder than usual.
There's been more than one time when I've been out and thought people were driving crazier than usual or people on the bus were being more psycho than they normally are, and I've looked it up and it's been within like 2 days of the full moon on either side.
People are ~70% water and the moon does move the entire ocean around, so maybe it's something to do with that?
-
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 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?
-
If it’s not provable by science, then I don’t believe it.
Science can't "prove" anything. It is more accurate to say that it reduces the level of uncertainty of hypotheses, but that uncertainty can never be reduced to exactly zero.
-
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 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 also believe this and have similar stories. Sleep is the cousin of death.
-
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.
That is not really cryptozoology, a known real creature that we think is extinct, but if it's turns out to not be... Nothing weird here.
A lot different to claiming there is a loch Ness monster.
-
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.
That's cheating! You gotta wing it like a pro.
-
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.
-
Acupuncture.
My insurance pays for it which I find shocking. I do find it helpful whether it's placebo or something else, and since it's covered I do it.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
-
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.
USB Superposition
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.)
