What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
EDIT: Let's cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We're not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don't believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I'm sure almost everybody has something to add.
That mothers shouldn't co-sleep with infants. Every other primate I know of co-sleeps with their offspring. Until very recently every human mother co-slept with her infants, and in like half of the globe people still do. Many mothers find it incredibly psychologically stressful to sleep without their infant because our ancestors co-slept every generation for hundreds of thousands of years.
I would bet money that forcing infants to sleep alone has negative developmental effects.
I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?
Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.
Yes we should be out to revoke chiropractors' degrees, but I'm not sure why that's coming up here since you asked about science specifically. Which chiropractic is not.
No one should be ok with people who run around pretending to be doctors and occasionally paralyzing babies and crippling people by trying to work magic. It's also revolting that any of it is covered by insurance and health plans, which materially takes real resources away from real medicine for people.
Lots of stuff from both social sciences and economics.
Social science suffers greatly from the Replication crisis
Economics relies largely on so-called natural experiments that have poor variable controls.
Both often come with policy agendas pushing for results.
I take their conclusions with a grain of salt.
IQ score is a sham - the tests are quite fallible, and historically they were used as a justification to discriminate against people who are poorer or with worse access to education. Nowadays, I see it quite a lot in the context of eugenics, where some professors and philosophers attribute poor people being poor due to their low intelligence (low IQ score), and that they can't be helped while rich people got where they are due to their intelligence (as in they have a high IQ score on average).
I'm probably going to get eviscerated for this, but that sexuality is purely genetic. I think that for the vast majority of people, sexuality is way more fluid than not, and much more influenced by environment than people would like to think.
I also don't think that has any bearing on people's right to choose.
Don't believe in, or can't understand?
I don't believe we understand the fundamental nature of time, or the universe - we are limited by our bodies, can't perceive or even think about everything that probably exists. But I don't distrust the math or research that scientists are doing. In terms of how it is presented to us laypeople I think profit has poisoned the message, it is impossible to be current and knowledgeable in the way you'd need to be to pull apart all that messaging.
If you mean what do you understand but still not believe? I am still not convinced radio is not magic. I understand how it works but what the heck? Magic.
I saw a study that concluded toilet seats in public restrooms were actually one of the cleanest surfaces in the restroom. Don't dispute that - it just means that the entire area lands somewhere in the spectrum between disgusting and eldritch nightmare. Due to the finding that the toilet seats were cleaner than most other surfaces in the restroom, it further concluded that it was perfectly safe to just plop down bare-assed onto that nastiness.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. The toilet paper bird-nest is a must. A few layers of splash protection toilet paper in the water before I even sit down is a must. 'Ick' factor aside, there are enough contact acquired pathogens to justify extreme caution in environments like that. I ain't risking ass warts over some hypothesis, study, full-blown peer reviewed theory, or anything in between.
In my head, "dark matter" and "dark energy" are the names we've given to the limits of our understanding. At some point in the future the news is going to break that an Einstein or a Feynman or a Hawking will publish a paper titled "So we figured out what's causing the thing we've been calling dark matter this whole time."
Baking. People say it's the science of the kitchen but those people just don't use proper measurements when cooking. What they really mean is that it's fiddly as fuck and even following a recipe perfectly isn't a guaranteed success. There's always some shit about "maybe your room temperature was off?" "what altitude did you try the recipe at?". Fuckers. Science doesn't burn me like this. If I follow a scientific procedure where those variables can completely destroy the end result, they get mentioned in the procedure. Baking itself is a science, but it is absolutely not practiced like a science. Baking is a skill for 99% of us. And I'm sick of pretending like it's not.
Anything I think is ideologically motivated. Having a study to cite doesn't make you right if the study is bullshit.
I may not be answering this right, but the classification of autoimmune diseases—it’s likely a lot more complex than rheumatology would have you think.
Take Lupus for example. Yes, there are bio markers that tend to be positive in cases of Lupus. However, there are varying degrees of positivity and a massive realm of variant symptoms. Prior to use of molecular assays in medicine we grouped these “somewhat similar” presentations into a single disease entity (lupus), but in reality it likely represents a cluster of similar diseases that are slightly different ways of the body attacking itself. The same is likely true to many other “vague” autoimmune diseases. It’s also true for the crossover between neurology and psychiatry. For example, based off of modern imaging we can tell that schizophrenia has an obvious organic root (massive brain structural changes), and this means it would probably be best owned by neurology like other neurodegenerative disease. Despite this, it is still owned by psychiatry and viewed by many (including some professionals) as a “chemical imbalance.” Schizophrenia is no more a dopamine excess than Parkinson’s is a dopamine lack—and we very much treat Parkinson’s as a neurodegenerative disease, not a psychiatric one. This difference is obviously due in part as much to historical classification as it is to the health equity problems surrounding schizophrenia patients.
It took me awhile to accept it. But apparently planting trees on the wrong area could actually contribute to global warming. E.g. Planting on areas, traditionally has no trees, while reforesting would contribute to lowering temperature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00233-0
I learned that from a recent documentary of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park from Vice.
It’s got to be Dark Matter. So many astrophysicists have spent so much time thinking about this stuff and all they’re really sure about is that there must be much more matter in the Universe than we can see, and yet we never actually seem any closer to knowing what it is. In conjunction with Dark Energy it just leaves the layman with the awkward possibility that maybe our model of The Universe is just fundamentally flawed somehow.
For me it's Colloidal Silver. It's been used as antimicrobial in wound dressings in the past but I just don't trust it at all. The reason it suddenly resurged was during the Covid Pandemic a bunch of televangelist snake oil salesmen started endorsing it. If a product contains silver I won't use it at all, and furthermore I reject brands that sell it. I would even rather bleed than purchase a CVS bandaid.
The Big Bang Theory, ... and this despite the fact that I believe the universe is expanding now. This expansion is still accelerating so the small acceleration itself could result in the expansion (speed distribution) without having to postulate an extremely rapid acceleration at time zero and other ludicrous extreme physical conditions.
... and yes I know also about the cosmological microwave background's perfect black body curve and such observations.
Not sure why you mentioned chiropractors, I thought this was about scientific things.
I mean, define "scientific". A currently-held, consensus theory? Because it's easy to find theories that were developed in accordance with scientific theory, held for a while, but discarded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
In physics, aether theories (also known as ether theories) propose the existence of a medium, a space-filling substance or field as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces. "Since the development of special relativity, theories using a substantial aether fell out of use in modern physics, and are now replaced by more abstract models."
I don't believe scientific progress is analogous with human progress or can be used to "decode" morality, ie the science vs religion dichotomy I don't believe in. I don't think science or "reason" guides human societies for instance. This belief is a result of studying Hume and moral philosophy. I think science tells us what is but not what ought to be, and that gap is irreconcilable through science alone, yet it can inform our sense of right and wrong. I disagree with objective morality as well, so the popularization of this science=objective morality idea that Sam Harris has attempted I disagree with entirely. I'm much more aligned with Patricia Churchland's ideas here, and her popularization she outlines in her book "Braintrust." I don't think, as some do, that measuring brain activity decodes human morality, because I don't believe such a thing exists. I don't believe human society is controlled and determined by rational actors, I have a more Darwinian and Maxian view on that. When people profess things like "politics should be scientific" I likely agree with their sentiment but I think "science" is not the reason why, and more of a distraction/lazy way to assert being morally right about something, which science can't actually do because it requires an appeal to human notions of morality, which science cannot determine as it has no measure of which values we ought to hold.
The Monty Hall problem.
You are given a choice of three doors, let's call them 1, 2, and 3.
Behind one of the doors is a fabulous prize. Behind the other two are joke prizes worth nothing.
You are asked to pick a door. It doesn't matter which one you choose, because it's not opened inmediately.
Instead, the host opens one of the doors you did not pick to reveal the gag gift.
He then asks you if you want to change your choice.
What are the chances of winning? Should you choose a different door, or keep your existing choice?
The math says, your chance of winning if you stay with your choice is 1/3. Revealing the contents of one door does not change that, it's still 1/3.
Switching to the other door gives you a 2/3 chance of winning. Not 1/2 or 1/3.
"If the car is behind Door 1, you lose. If the car is behind Door 2, Monty would have opened Door 3, so you would switch to Door 2 and win. If the car is behind Door 3, he would have opened Door 2, so you would switch to Door 3 and win. The odds of winning with the “Switch” strategy are two in three, double the odds of staying."
Downvote for instructions to just chill and not down vote. Just participate with the prompt bro!
Obesity modeled as a disease that should be treated with drugs like Ozempic. I’ll buy that it’s like that for some very small set of people, but I can’t shake the assumption that drug companies are exaggerating so they can sell more, and most of their customers are just too lazy to try proper diet and exercise.
I don't believe that fire played as big as a role in early human development that scientists claim. There are cases of modern humans eating raw rotten meat and being fine. A lot of the chemical shit that goes down when meat rots has a lot of the same effects of cooking it. There are plenty of ways to do a thing and we should view it as lots of useful things instead of one end all.
The Big Bang being a singular event that only happened once, as if we are so special we just happen to be at the point of time, within the spectrum of infinity where matter is in a state that can support life. (I'm not aware if that's the prevailing theory anymore)
Also the double slit experiment. We aren't a phantom observers, we are impacting the experiment. With our equipment.
We are on the steps of inventing true AI or GeneralAI. We already have the internet, something that we can't shut down or 'kill'. When GeneralAI comes to fruition, be it 10 years or 1000 years, we will have created a being that can't be 'killed', using the internet, and given enough time it will know 'everything'. This thing would be able to do things we cannot even imagine. What would we call this thing? God, right? If we can create God, then God already exists, and still I don't really believe in him.... Weird, right?
Surprised I didn't see it here, but this is the big one. I was raised in a very religious household and, while I no longer subscribe to that or any other religion as the absolute truth, I still don't believe in evolution. I don't think capital-G God made Adam and Eve, but I believe in the possibility that a powerful extra dimensional being organized things and set them in motion so that life as we know it exists.
I'm infamous on Reddit as "that moon landing denier gal". Sorry but I just don't buy it. No goalpost was safe that decade and you don't need the analytical videos to tell you that.