Asklemmy

The Moon landing was staged, but Stanley Kubrick insisted to shoot on location...

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.

None. If any of it was reproducable it would science instead of pseudoscience

Cryptozoology. There are definitely creatures unknown to science. Dozens of new ones are discovered every day. Loch Ness monster - no. Unknown ape - possibly.

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.

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

We have come so far through the application of rationality and the scientific method. All the wonders of the modern world we owe to science.

What has pseudoscience bought us? Ignorance and stagnation.

I want to live in a world of technological progress not a “Demon Haunted World.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

The only pseudo science I believe is that one day I'll be happy. Even though I know i ll never be happy.

If it’s not provable by science, then I don’t believe it.

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.

my mother was a new-ager and my father was an engineer. the amount of woo i got exposed to on a regular basis, and the amount of explanations on how it's bullshit, has pretty much inoculated me against it.

it's all about theory of work; questioning what would cause the ascribed effect.

It's hard resisting the power of the moon.

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.

Time probably isn't real.

I don't know what to do with that information. It's just a weird gut feeling.

I'm partial to pan-psychism. Consciousness is a property of matter.

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.

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.

Like you, I ain't reading the list.

However, I'm not dismissive of stuff that's woowoo, but the stuff you listed has pretty much been shown to be nothing better than placebo effects, with the partial exception of the cycles of some things in nature matching the moon. But it isn't about the phase, per se (at least, the last serious publication I saw on it indicated it wasn't).

Thing is, woowoo placebo effect isn't a fake thing. Hence me not being dismissive. If something A: helps get someone through shit, B: doesn't hurt anyone, and C: isn't being used by someone as a tool to manipulate, it ain't my business to correct anyone.

Some shit, like acupressure has benefits beyond the placebo, even though it isn't for the claimed reasons. When stuff like that works, it's very often the touch itself combined with the idea it will help that makes it effective enough to be worth keeping around.

But, with that kind of thing, that's only okay if it's conjunction with evidence based beat practices. That's when woowoo really shines. To help someone decrease stress, handle the horrible, and get through another day. Because it really does help in that regard.

See, it's known that religion serves that purpose. It's a psychological coping tool in one of its aspects. It doesn't matter if the same effect happens because of faith in a deity or not. It's that we can, to a limited degree, improve our selves by how our minds are functioning. So, if someone gets through their divorce, or being sick, or grieving by burning incense and playing with pretty rocks, IDGAF, I'll lie to their face and tell them that it's great, as long as they're also working on whatever it is more holistically with something evidence based.

Even then, I'd just try to convince them to add to, not abandon.

That being said, I wish some of that shit worked. It would be so fucking nice.

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.

I believe that acupressure, meditation, reiki, etc. can actually help ease some chronic issues in the same way that a placebo drug does. The mind believes that it should feel less pain, anxiety, depression, etc so it does - to an extent. Afterall, if stress is harmful to our health then relaxation must be helpful.

I subscribe to historical materialism, which is apparently a pseudoscience according to that Wikipedia article.

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.

Maybe like a limited Gaia hypothesis. The whole planet is a conscious thing, we are its braincells and its hands.