Submitted 6 months ago by cameron_vale@lemm.ee to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Rob is blowing a whistle, over and over. Bob: “Why are you blowing that whistle, Rob?” Rob: “To keep the dragons away.” Bob: “I see no dragons.” Rob: “It works!”
I can't believe nobody has said religion. All of it. Praying to god being a prime example.
You know, I always used to think praying was incredibly stupid, and I’m sure plenty of people treat it in a way that’s… not really in the right spirit / ineffective? But recently it’s started to make a lot more sense to me. If you’re praying to god in an effort to directly influence the real world I think you’re misguided… If you think of prayer as a time to consider what you’re grateful for and what you want for the future, it actually seems like a really sensible mental health practice. To be clear, I am and always have been an atheist, and I don’t particularly like religions as a whole, but it seems like some of these things I’ve always found odd (like prayer) stem from something that could actually be reasonable and helpful but got corrupted by some game of telephone and people not understanding metaphors lol.
Prayer can be a powerful self meditation tool. It's effectively a way to organize your thoughts by talking to yourself. What is not helpful is sending "thoughts and prayers" every time something bad happens without actually attempting to do anything to address the problem at hand.
Yeah, I can see how praying could influence reality by altering your perspective or your behavior, really just by reminding yourself regularly about the things you really value.
There’s obvious ones like “God please help me be a patient and considerate co-worker”, but even “God please give me a new awesome car” - someone who prays about that 4 times a day is going to be focused on saving for it. God helps those who help themselves and all that.
On the other hand “God please make a free car park for me outside the shop” ain’t helping anyone.
That depends on experience. Plenty of people have seen religious stuff while tripping, meditating, NDE etc.
And plenty of people believe stuff just because it’s popular too. Which is just as bad, even if the belief is useful or whatever.
The most prevalent has got to be, "We prayed and -insert name- recovered - it’s a miracle!
And if the person dies: “It’s the will of God.”
When doctors save a person, “God saved this person!”
No, it was Dr. Jakobs but go on
Just to play the devil’s advocate: many of those thanking God are more expressing thanks for the circumstances that led to recovery. That includes that doctor, along with whatever knowledge and skill they have as a result of years of study and hard work. i.e. God put that doctor in their lives, rather than some quack.
Placebo buttons.
Some appliances like elevators or traffic crossings cycle automatically, but they still have (non-functional) buttons. If the buttons are removed, people complain that the wait is too long. Let them push a button while they wait, and they’ll think it’s much quicker.
Some of these actually do have an effect, but it’s difficult to impossible for a person to know whether this particular one is a placebo button or not.
This is especially the case with elevator close door buttons. Those buttons are always hooked up, because they are needed during emergency operation with the fireman’s key. They are sometimes programmed to cycle the doors marginally faster under normal circumstances, but more often aren’t.
Also, some of the traffic crossing buttons don’t make the walk cycle come sooner, but they occasionally are needed to insert a walk cycle at all, because some intersections don’t trigger a walk cycle unless the button has been pressed.
Also, some of the traffic crossing buttons don’t make the walk cycle come sooner, but they occasionally are needed to insert a walk cycle at all, because some intersections don’t trigger a walk cycle unless the button has been pressed.
Some? In my area all the lights require a button press for a walk cycle. Even if the traffic lights turn red for the cars (e.g. in an intersection for cross-traffic), the pedestrian lights will stay red too unless the button was pressed.
I think you have the elevator example crossed. My random testing suggests the door open button always works. The close button sometimes is as you say, just to make people feel like they have a measure of control.
I think traffic lights depend on the skill of the person setting them up. They’ve got a bunch of sensors (car waiting over magnetic sensor, visual sensor detects something other than road in magic area, pedestrian button pressed, time of day, timer since last transition, emergency vehicle override) as input and different intersection states as output.
Someone could program a cycle to just ignore all of the sensors and run through the various states on a timer. Or they could make a more complex cycle loop that lengthens the main state at night, switches sooner if a sensor is triggered, and tries to be smart about it. Or you could go for an even more complex statistical model that not only takes sensor states into account but tries to predict those sensors for even more accuracy.
My guess is that there’s great variance in both the skills of the person doing the programming and their managers and politicians/administrators calling the shots. And that variance in skill includes ones who don’t bother trying anything more complex than the defaults as well as those who do but aren’t good at it (eg: I’ve noticed that some intersections make their main cycle longer at night and don’t cycle unless someone is waiting but make them wait longer than they would during the day when night time means that interrupting the main cycle affects fewer people so they make people wait on the side streets for no good reason).
And there’s also the question of persistence. If they need to be reprogrammed any time the power goes out, they might just go with the easier route if they can’t restore backups.
I’ve never encountered a traffic crossing that cycles when there’s no one waiting.
I think they’re regional. I don’t remember seeing one either, but I don’t know if that’s because I haven’t encountered it, or because I didn’t notice.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the post hoc fallacy, in general.
Basically in OP’s case, I did this and something did or didn’t happen. Therefore, what I did caused that something to happen or not happen.
Another comment used a survivorship bias with people that survived when others died. That’s also an example of the post hoc fallacy. The idea that the survivor did something that caused them to live isn’t necessarily true. They couldn’t just got lucky.
It’s also the foundational fallacy that connects the president to economic outcomes. Ask any economist: the president can’t control the economy, and his influence is severely limited.
Herbal supplements, magnets, crystals, horoscopes…
My neighbor is big into essential oils.
Amazing.
"that's the way we've always done it" at any job ever.
Well there’s the optimal way to do it for individuals working alone. And there’s also the optimal way to do it when working in a group. They can be pretty different.
And the way they tell you to do it is never either one of those.
The TSA
I actually think the TSA helps, a lot.
TSA fails 95% of their assessments
fee.org/articles/tsa-fails-95-of-the-time/
What they successfully do is pose enough of a barrier to entry that most people trying to skirt TSA don’t try. If they genuinely tried, they’d likely succeed
They do things like not knowing their own citizens, locking up innocent people and looking through their phone and making you believe you’re a liar while at the same time not knowing their own rules. They’re fantastic.
Cargo cult mentality?
Like how island natives after WWII would build ritual airstrips to summon American cargo planes.
Did it work?
It did not. No more MREs and rifles.
I X and it rained; for X in:
Nah this is that other thing. I want to say Survivorship bias but that’s just because I can’t think of the right term.
“Specious reasoning” is all I can think of. That’s what Lisa Simpsons says when Homer thinks the Bear Patrol is working like a charm (because there’s not a bear in sight).
It’s a logical fallacy called “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”. The assumption that an event is caused/prevented by something that preceded it.
Taking echinacia (sp?) to get rid of a cold. I’ve given up trying to tell my friends they’re wasting their money because they believe it works, because they start feeling better, and won’t be told that that was going to happen anyway.
Only cure that works on a cold is organic mercury. One drop per day for a week will make your body virus immune within a year (approximately)
That sounds very wrong. And probably dangerous.
I always liked the expression “asteroid insurance”
This is confirmation bias I guess.
You could throw a bit of “sunk cost fallacy” in there (he bought an anti-dragon whistle, he’s spending his time and energy blowing it),
And popularity bias (if anti-dragon whistles are popular)
And convention bias too of course (everybody knows that anti-dragon whistles keep dragons away. It’s right there in the name).
And authoritarian bias (if the authorities are recommending anti-dragon whistles)
Also, any evidence-based assertion-maker could be accused of making his assertion on insufficient evidence. Which might be the case here. But as opposed to what?
Hmm. What else? Specious reasoning?
Post hoc fallacy
Nuclear weapons.
I think you’re missing the point of the post. Nuclear weapons are an actual deterrent, not just a perceived one.
gpupdate /force
Hahaha… ahem haha. Love this.
Average person Buying or Selling stock has an impact on the price of the stock.
yeah I do, when I buy the stock goes down when I sell the stock goes up
So it’s not just me.
All superstitions.
The classic Superstition in the Pigeon study by B. F. Skinner back in 1948 is always a good thing to read when this subject comes up.
Otherwise something awful might happen.
It’s like some kind of low hanging fruit convention.
Give me one that all the normal, smart people like you and me are guilty of.
All the rituals that baseball players perform.
Sounds like how dogs chase the mailman away.
Okay, so the other day we were doing yardwork and my weird cat was hanging out with us. A dude rode by on his bike and my cat took off after him. He turned around and came back, got off his bike, sat down on our porch laughing and told us “No one is going to believe me. I’ve never been chased by a cat before. I’ve been chased by dogs, but… I had to tell someone.” I mean that’s our cat. I can believe it. But it was pretty funny to watch. I wish I’d gotten it on film.
Tapping the top of a can of soda to prevent it from making a mess when you open it.
This totally works. If you make a mess… You didn’t tap it enough. /s
Pretty sure they showed on Mythbusters that tapping the side of the can is actually much more effective. The reason is that bubbles form all around the edges (and top) of the can and they cause the massive bubbling up when the can opens.
pushes glasses up my nose well actually, flicking the side of the can will work because the carbon dioxide will have space to expand and be reabsorbed.
and if you make an even bigger mess... you tapped too hard
Tin foil hats.
okay but people don’t actually wear those. It’s just a joke.
Let’s look at “tin foil hats” a bit closer: although several carefully-arranged layers of tin foil can indeed serve as a Faraday cage, wearing that as a hat would be insufficient to perfectly block RF/EMF signals because a person would need to cover their whole face and neck and shoulders and body, wrap their whole entire body in tin foil, because if there’s any opening that can access through to the brain, which would be through the neck, the Faraday cage would be ineffective.
So yeah, people don’t really wear those hats.
So you’re saying it’s just as effective as a whistle that “keeps away dragons”?
There’s ample evidence the earth is round, but that doesn’t stop people from believing it’s flat.
Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean people don’t do it
Why is Robert talking to himself?
Playoff beards
justlookingfordragon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“You just turned 100 today - what’s your secret to a long life?” - No matter what the answer will be, I guarantee you that there are millions of people in the world who do the exact same and still die young. But yeah, of course aunt Margharet only managed to live an entire century because she ate tree cans of surströmming every week, no doubt. Genetics, healthcare and lifestyle have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
Phen@lemmy.eco.br 6 months ago
The real secret is to not die.
kamenlady@lemmy.world 6 months ago
And to buy enough tomatoes
Nougat@kbin.social 6 months ago
Poop goes in the potty.
Nemo@midwest.social 6 months ago
Technically, eating three cans a week is lifestyle.
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Blood Moons will also happen if the system is running low on RAM. The BM resets a bunch of stuff, like monster spawns, and since the game is no longer tracking that you killed a particular set of bokoblins or whatever there is more free RAM. This is called a panic blood moon, is very rare, and difficult to force.
zeldamods.org/wiki/Blood_moon
justlookingfordragon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
From the exact same source you just posted.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Wait I’m having so many BMs because I don’t have enough RAM? I’ll talk to my GI about this.