Generally the people who deride others for pseudoscience are most often the real pseudoscientists. Almost always. Take this article, for example, claiming that selenium, reishi, cordyceps, colloidal silver, chaga, ashwagandha are all "pseudoscientific wellness products" suggests to me the author is ignorant and hasn't actually reviewed the scientific literature on these products. Clearly has an axe to grind.
Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
121–130 of 221 posts
Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#122Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#123Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#124Kind of a weird hit-piece - I'm not understanding why I should be shocked. When I visit the Zoo gift shop, I am not under the impression the zoo manufactures the stuffed animals. Still, I guess, there's something fun about feeding conspiracy theorists a conspiracy.
What is the conspiracy theory here? The claim is that 2 crackpots from opposite extremes of the political spectrum know their fans are easily duped, so they sell similar fake products to enrich themselves. It's not a conspiracy, it's just a correct observation.
There is none. That's my point. Both storefronts get many of their same ingredients from the same suppliers.
But for Alex Jones' audience that would be exactly the kind of mild, uninteresting connection they would run wild with.
Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#125The anti-authority/anti-expert theme in American politics isn't a left or right phenomenon. There's a fundamental breakdown in institutional trust within American society which is present on both sides, and the similar approaches to wellness are a vivid expression of this.
I think it's more than a coincidence that we see this "anti-expert" ideology concentrated at the two political poles. For either the far left or right, it's important to reject evidence that doesn't conform to ideology, and eventually the way to do that is to reject authority that isn't your own. They don't want to be subject to authority, they want to be be the unquestioned authority. It doesn't matter if the topic…
Yeah, I think you're right that a big chunk of this is vibes-based in-group signalling. One doesn't usually wind up far out on the political poles if one's generally happy with the decisions and worldview of the experts/authorities.
Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're underestimating how many people live in food deserts and basically don't have access to fresh food. That might seem like a nitpick against a larger argument, but I think it serves as a good example for why you need to take a close look at the environment that these people exist in as a whole, and that it likely goes beyond their innate habits or those of just their immediate family in childhood.
A single fruit tree can yield 100-200 lbs of fruit (apples, pears, oranges, etc), conservatively. All you need is 40$ for a fruit tree and some water, and some space, and 5-10 years. Plant 5 of those and now you've got 500 to 1000 lbs of fruit per year. If the free market refuses to provide what people want, then we can create our own food and let the execs wonder why they keep loosing market share every year.
this math adds up only until tried
Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#127And you can buy homeopathic remedies at CVS. At best this is a kind of placebo. At worst it's people being dumb, which is not illegal. Move on!
They are not labeled clearly, IMO. Oscillococcinum is labeled with “flu-like symptoms” “body aches, headache, fever, chills, fatigue” “medicine” and “works naturally with your body”.
These fall on a spectrum between misleading and outright lies. While “fever” may be seen as an only misleading label (the label doesn’t say that it treats fever in any way, so you could make that argument), there are some outright falsehoods on that box.
“Works naturally with your body” is an outright falsehood. It would have to work, in order to work naturally with your body.
“Medicine” is another outright falsehood.
The shit should be regulated into oblivion.
Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#128Clickbait. I have taken a lot of these in the past, and the label "pseudoscientific" is unwarranted. The "writer" cherrypicks and generalizes data to discount it, but if you want to understand the mechanism of, say, Ashwagandha, you probably should spend a few hours reading research and meta-analyses and not spending 10 minutes on Google to decide if it's "good" or "pseudoscience". Should these companies not be allow…
People just want to feel good about themselves, and mocking infowars (etc.) is a easy way to assert their superiority.
Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#129A data point for the orthogonality of politics and intelligence. If one is holding to the belief that a certain political stance means people are somehow deficient, it just shows that one is vulnerable to propaganda which dehumanizes and blames a group. Don't hate the person. Call out the stupid. Actually, don't hate. It makes you stupid. (Again, this is orthogonal to politics!)
It’s incredibly difficult to call out and correct negative beliefs and behaviours while maintaining a fully positive human relationship. — It just doesn’t seem to scale well.
So you're saying: Not being positive == hate?
Thanks for sharing!
How about not being 100% positive, while also not dehumanizing, devaluing, and hating? Is it too much to ask to just accept everyone as fully human and not something disgusting, even those we happen to disagree with?
It just doesn’t seem to scale well.
Please give us a historical example where "letting your hate flow" led to scalable mass changing people -- That didn't also involve mass death and violence?
Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products
#130And you can buy homeopathic remedies at CVS. At best this is a kind of placebo. At worst it's people being dumb, which is not illegal. Move on!
At worst it's harming people with something poisonous or toxic.
Homeopathic medicines are generally non-toxic because they only contain fillers / non-active ingredients.
You may be thinking of herbal remedies.