this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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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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[–] RBWells@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

ask for more and i will give.

[–] emberpunk@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It's hard resisting the power of the moon.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago

Especially if you work on a boat, by the coast.

[–] Katrisia@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

Or in the case of Destiny and FFXIV:

[–] HatchetHaro@pawb.social 4 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] smb@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

I believe that literally every esotheric and nonesotheric bullshit is more trustworthy than everything a politician says at any given moment.

[–] Katrisia@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 59 points 4 days ago (8 children)

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.

[–] Oaksey@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)
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[–] kamen@lemmy.world 69 points 4 days ago (4 children)

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

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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

Body Memory

I mean, cellular memory and muscle memory exist.

[–] matelt@feddit.uk 2 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] MTK@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] callouscomic@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I really want to believe the Assassin's Creed concept that our DNA holds memories from our ancestors.

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[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

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

[–] pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] nonfuinoncuro@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago

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

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] CapriciousDay@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] nonfuinoncuro@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

why not go full panpsychic it actually makes even more sense and has been seriously studied for millenia

[–] CapriciousDay@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

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

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[–] Machinist@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago (7 children)

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.

[–] RBWells@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I had an old Mustang and used to say I could cuss start it.

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[–] criitz@reddthat.com 34 points 4 days ago (4 children)

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

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[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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).

[–] GrizzlyBear@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] AnnaFrankfurter@lemmy.ml 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] Diddlydee@feddit.uk 31 points 4 days ago (14 children)

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

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[–] SheenSquelcher@lemm.ee 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] BmeBenji@lemm.ee 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] xylogx@lemmy.world 23 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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 β€œDemon Haunted World.”

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

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