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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I subscribe to historical materialism, which is apparently a pseudoscience according to that Wikipedia article.
Is that some kind of magazine
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.
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.
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”?
I think you sorted things into three types of medicine:
[ pseudo, alternative, modern/mainstream ]
I think he believes that most things you put into the alternative category have already been mostly studied; those being not proved or disproved to work.
I think the that some issue here comes from the fact that conspiracy theorists / other (for lack of an agreed upon modifier) medicine gurus may have used the argument that some medicines aren’t proven to be bad yet as a way to give them legitimacy.
Whether or not other medicine is good for you should be be studied and determined to be medicine or not. Until then we can’t say anything about its efficacy. But there can be carry on effects: protein powder was found to have heavy metals, is protein powder good? Maybe in certain circumstances, but concentrating a given substance can have unintended consequences when not properly analyzed.
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.
I’ve kinda made up my own pseudo science that astrology is real. However, it has nothing to do with the location of the stars when you are born.
Instead, the time of year when you are born affects your personality for life. Think about it: babies born in winter and constantly being wrapped in blankets and mostly isolated from others except around the holidays. Babies born in summer wear light clothing, and are more likely to have encounters with others, perhaps causing them to be more social later in life.
I was born in summer, unfortunately I’m the exception to that rule
Actually, me too. Leos are supposed to be outgoing, but I’m usually not. Eh, exceptions prove the rules, right?
Wikipedia is a terrible source for the likes of this.
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 believe that literally every esotheric and nonesotheric bullshit is more trustworthy than everything a politician says at any given moment.
Body Memory
I mean, cellular memory and muscle memory exist.
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
In that theory we’d more be the cancer-cells rather than braincells 😏
It’s hard resisting the power of the moon.
The moon haunts you.
Or in the case of Destiny and FFXIV:
Especially if you work on a boat, by the coast.
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.
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.
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
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.
“center” of the universe can be picked completely arbitrarily.
IIRC there are still theories within the scientific community of the universe being non-homogenous and roughly geocentric. Usually (when I’ve come across them) presumed to be incorrect, but still possible in a, “huh, that would explain the data that we can’t otherwise explain” way.
You are always the center of the observable universe.
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 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 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.
