The scientific version of this is mechanical watches.
Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
41–46 of 46 posts
Re: Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
#42"According to Pew Research Center data...42% think spiritual energy can be located in physical objects such as crystals." Urgh. Is it really 42%? That's depressing.
It is depressing as knowing someone [0] make a living out of Rumpology [1]?
I remember discovering [0] decades ago when the internet was young. It was funny back then. I search for it recently to illustrate to my kids how wild the early internet was, and to my horror found it hadn't disappeared. One the contrary, it had grown stronger. (Definitely same site run by the same woman - I have never forgotten her face.)
Re: Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here’s an alternative view: we do an ok job of science education, but a deeply unsatisfactory job of teaching people that it is OK to be themselves and likes the stuff they like. Crystal spiritualism to me is just a reaction to the fact that people overascribe meaning to things that they like and enjoy, as a justification beyond “I enjoy it”. It goes hand in hand with the whole spiritualism around rock climbing or st…
The simple counter-example here is: everybody likes cocaine, but nobody likes what cocaine does to you over long term, so you should probably not do it.
i don't particularly like what breathing oxygen does to my body over the long term but i still do that. granted, out of necessity.
anyway i agree with the point you're making, with one caveat: id say it's perfectly okay to do cocaine responsibly. it's just really difficult to do so evidently! if one were to only occasionally do it then i would think that the overall negative impact of it would be significantly less than what would happen if one were to do it consistently for a long period of time. granted my experience is with methamphetamine, which is, uh... an entirely different beast! but either way.
if someone likes crystals, it's ok to like them and to collect them, even to believe some woo things about them. but it's a problem when they start trying to convince everyone else that their experience is absolute and not just anecdotal. the same concept in a roundabout way goes for cocaine: if you like it, by all means, enjoy it! just be responsible with it. personally i don't like cocaine at all, just the way that it smells /s
Re: Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
#44I was at a dinner party and I was talking to the man’s wife about my work in software and cybersecurity. She told me that she keeps a crystal next to the family computer to help protect it from computer viruses.
Did she share rate of success? That would have impressed me.
Re: Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
#45I was flabbergasted at the justifications of the sellers for supporting child labour in this industry:
>>If anything, Stamison wonders if the circumstances of miners in Madagascar, “makes the pieces a lot more special. Because I know some person in a little baby hut was actually polishing it by hand, and they’re setting their intentions into it, too,” she said. “People’s intentions and people’s energy are put into the stones as they’re producing it.”
“So the circumstances they’re mined in, they are embedded into the stone somehow?” I asked.
“I think so. A little bit, it has to be. It has to be.”
Re: Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Science education in this country is seriously broken. The elementary schools jump right into teaching procedural skills such as the 'scientific method', which is really just experimental design and is useless without teaching the basic critical thinking and philosophy of science. Those are way more important for the majority of students, who are not going to go on to be scientists. We need to start the education at…
How do you teach a preschool kid reason?
You don't. You simply teach them that they can be easily fooled. That's the beginning. Among other things, slight of hand magic and optical illusions are both fun, easy to grasp, and get the point across. Reason comes later.
When my boy was a preschooler he came home one day with a terrible story about how his friend's dad had been sucked up by a vacuum cleaner! He was pretty spooked by the story. I simply said, "Hmm, interesting, let's try it." We got out the vacuum cleaner and I let him attempt to suck me up with it. It was fun, funny, and I could see the lightbulb go off in his head.