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
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.
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.
That’s a long list I’ve only skimmed it and I didn’t find the theory I like most, the stoned ape theory. That belief that some distant ancestors ate some shrooms and discovered art and a higher state of mind. I’ve taken a microdose a little too high and my vision was like an impressionist painting for a few moments and it made me so happy because Monet and Van Gogh now made absolute sense.
It might be a little too convenient but I think it works and it’s really sweet.
Feng Shui, though I mostly credit it to the Dear Modern channel breaking the concept of qi and energy down into stuff like human traffic flow, activities, scenery, and noise, and using that to optimize spaces for comfort. It’s mostly psychology, and some of the superstitious stuff I’m not really into.
I believe that literally every esotheric and nonesotheric bullshit is more trustworthy than everything a politician says at any given moment.
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.
Body Memory
I mean, cellular memory and muscle memory exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 😏
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.
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.
Partly hollow earth. There are oceans in the crust, I think that is an accepted theory now. Life could have evolved to survive down there. It might not be anything special but a micro-organism is life too.
