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

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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    18 hours ago

    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.

  • matelt@feddit.uk
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    14 hours 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.

  • HatchetHaro@pawb.social
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    17 hours 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.

  • Katrisia@lemm.ee
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    17 hours 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.

  • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    22 hours ago

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

  • SheenSquelcher@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • chobeat@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      but then it’s a social force, and social force can be turned into a physical force. I would say any cybernetician would agree with this. Social signals are part of the same system of physical signals. Then we can argue cybernetics is not science but rather its own paradigm, but that’s a different conversation.

  • Ray1992xD@feddit.nl
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • angrystego@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

        • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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          2 days ago

          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.

          • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Towards the back of the machine normally counts as up for upwards-facing sockets, unless it’s a case with feet on the side, in which case it’ll be away from those feet so the sockets would be the right way up if it were sideways and on the alternative feet.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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        2 days ago

        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.

  • kamen@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

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

  • Machinist@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • Christian@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      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.

    • MunkyNutts@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      So that’s what happened when I plugged my 120 V appliance into a 240 V outlet, I released the magic smoke.

    • Suck_on_my_Presence@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • Machinist@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

  • socialjusticewizard@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • RBWells@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Oh I believe in precognitive dreams, because I used to write down my dreams and had some that happened later. And I don’t mean big things like deaths or pregnancies. I mean piddly details that meant nothing and can’t have been foreseen. Once dreamed that I was at the local bank, three people were in line, I got on the scale they had there to weigh myself but the dial went backwards then I turned around and saw this girl Joann that I’d not seen since middle school. Wrote all this in the dream journal.

      Couple of weeks later went to the bank. 3 people in line. I got on the scale but it was broken and said I weighed 30lb. I got off the scale and turned around, and yep, Joann from middle school, turns out she’d moved away but had moved back to town.

      That’s the one I remember and I would have just thought I had dejavu if I’d not written that dream down.

      And honestly it pissed me off pretty bad. I want to believe in free will, that we can choose, that the future has not happened yet. The dreams kind of broke that.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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      18 hours ago

      i have that too, a lot. not just when people die though. it is quite different than just a random hallucination, because i get the feeling that an organized intelligence is actually having a plan and giving me specific information.

      like, sometimes, i will have a dream that conveys something important to me, and then i will deliberately wake up in the middle of that dream in a way that makes me remember what i dreamed about, so i can write it down.

      to make an example, just yesterday. i dreamed that an old school colleague of mine is in some sort of deep trouble. today, for the first time in 6 years, i get a text message from a close friend of his that asks me to meet up.

    • MTK@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s not impossible that for some reason you and your family have some sort of strong subconscious indications in your dreams. So maybe things that your subconscious has picked up manifest in dreams and if we’re talking about predicting things that have been developing for a while like someone’s death (old age or sickness) or pregnancy, it’s not impossible that you subconsciously already knew it to a degree.

      But confirmation bias abd memory synthesis is probably more likely.

  • Anna@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

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

    • MTK@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.