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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.
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.
Shun the nonbeliever! ShunNnNnn!
That's cheating! You gotta wing it like a pro.
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.
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. Itβs a force.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
None. If any of it was reproducable it would science instead of pseudoscience
Although anyone who works in an ER will tell you the full moon is the busiest night; the occurrence rate of every issue but murder goes up.
CITATION NEEDED
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.
All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesnβt work anymore.
I love this.
Not original to me. Totally stole it.
So that's what happened when I plugged my 120 V appliance into a 240 V outlet, I released the magic smoke.
Yup. Unfortunately, once released, the magic smoke is gone and cannot be replaced.
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 βDemon Haunted World.β
Cryptozoology. There are definitely creatures unknown to science. Dozens of new ones are discovered every day. Loch Ness monster - no. Unknown ape - possibly.
I still like the thought that the Loch Ness monster was real, but died out. That legends grew from the real thing, and occasional real sightings, then popularized with more recent faked evidence.
Of course that doesn't mean it probably was real, just it might have been.
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
A lot of these are adjacent to real observable phenomenon but a nutty belief system has been overlaid and then additional claims are made on the basis of that nutty belief system which are not observable.
For example, Feng Shui in practice is usually pretty sensible "where should I put the sofa" kind of stuff, but if you claim that it's about the flow of qi through your house and suggest that based on that not only should the sofa go over there, but you need to put a topiary vase on the table next to it, that might be a nice aesthetic touch but there's no evidence of qi.
Additionally there's plenty of Traditional Chinese Medicine that became actual medicine because it has observable properties. For example turmeric is a mild anti-inflammatory.
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.
If itβs not provable by science, then I donβt believe it.
Science cannot even prove itself as a method. Science is just spicy epistemology.
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 β 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.
"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.
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.