Lol those losers at cern wasted hundreds of millions of dollars to find out that there aren't frequencies that alter your energy while I only spent 36 dollars.
One day at work, I found out a work friend actually believed the whole "crystal energy" thing.
Since she was the first person I had ever met who actually admitted to that, I wanted to know more about what her specific beliefs about them were.
At first she was super bubbly about it, on par with her personality. But then as I asked a couple common sense questions about why science doesnt find anything measurable, and first she got hostile and mad that I would dare question another person's beliefs, but when I explained I was genuinely curious and had no interest in changing her beliefs she just kind of broke down because nobody ever takes her seriously or believes her about her "personal healing journey"
The way I see it, it's for adults who like pretty rocks, but can't come to terms with the fact that they like something "childish" (because for some reason a lot of adults call a rock collection cringe or childish or dumb, but clearly they've never met a geologist) so instead of having a pretty rock and mineral collection, they have "healing crystals", and eventually it just becomes kind of like part of their identity the way a religion is.
I will however, 100% giggle at their expense with my wife, later. Because anyone who buys $50 polished selenite drink coaster "charging plate", and a $200 brass pyramid to "recharge" their $50 "healing quartz wand" while refusing to listen to real science deserves to be giggled at.
I will however, 100% giggle at their expense with my wife, later. Because anyone who buys $50 polished selenite drink coaster “charging plate”, and a $200 brass pyramid to “recharge” their $50 “healing quartz wand” while refusing to listen to real science deserves to be giggled at.
I mean, humans do all sorts of wierd, irrational, ritualistic things. IMO, whatever floats your boat.
Did you buy your wife a diamond ring? Or at least gold? :P
I think this is the perfect response haha. Ppl find comfort where they can in the world, even if it looks a little whacky. So long as it's not hurting anyone, let them have their whacky
No, I made the ring from sapphire (birth stone) and silver. Jewelry is easier than you might think when you've been doing small metalwork for knife handles, pommels, and guards.
I'm pretty sure the anti matter "crystals" it produces can alter one's "frequencies" quite well. If we had enough of the stuff. In the mean time eating bananas is a good substitute.
My mom died of cancer a few months ago because she was convinced that a combination of sunlight's natural vibrational frequency and some expensive "medical" herbal teas would cure her. Placebos affect people, but if you let them believe that they're an alternative to actual science and medicine, then they'll use them as such.
you really haven't thought this through, have you?
Not only does this encourage scammers to scam people, which is itself obviously bad, but it also means that some people will buy these things instead of getting actual treatment.
If people are getting their medical advice from a meme post in a meme community on a link aggregator on the Internet, I doubt there is much that actual science, education, and common sense can do to help.
I forget the YouTube channel name now, but I recall someone testing some of the cleansing bracelets, with "energy" and "healing" powers...
It turned out that the energy was mostly in the form of radioactive materials, and the only thing you would be healed from by wearing it, was your continued life.
Crystals, on the other hand, are mostly just inert and harmless. So if someone wants to keep a "healing" crystal or whatever on them or put it in their office or something, okay sure. It won't do what it claims to, but it won't hurt you.
But if I see someone wearing a cleansing bracelet, I'm going to reach for my Hazmat suit (since I don't own one, I'm just going to keep a safe distance from the person willingly carrying around what is very likely to be radioactive material), and reevaluate my association with anyone willing to buy such nonsense with absolutely no understanding that it's probably harmful.
I forget the radioactive material used. From what I recall, it's not "drop and run" dangerous, but prolonged exposure is probably going to have some unpleasant side effects... Kind of like radon (it wasn't radon... Radon is a gas with an extremely short half life IIRC, but it can be dangerous to have long term exposure - many years, and it's in most homes.... Buy a radon sensor folks, they're not much more expensive than a good smoke detector).
I looked and that seems right. I watched two videos on it, IIRC, and it was interesting and concerning.
At the end of the day, I'm not sure how much sympathy I can muster for people who are so superstitious that they'll buy that snake oil, but at the same time, the manufacturer is being incredibly deceptive. So I'm a bit split on the issue. At the end of the day, one thing I'm not uncertain about is that consumer protection should be stronger for such things.
Fact is, for it to work as a placebo, you need to believe it will work.
I've had a few coworkers who had stuff like crystals on their desk because their partner believed in it. I understand why that stuff happens, the believer who (supposedly) cares about your well-being, gets benefit from it, and wants you to have the same or similar benefits from the same. But since they're doing it to placate their partner and don't personally believe, it's just a rock on their desk.
Placebos don’t work. It’s a common misconception. Placebo effect is the error in measuring not any actual effect. It’s literally the barrier we use to define effective and non effective.
Anyone claiming they have something that provides a placebo effect to help is fraudulent or ignorant.
In the UK it is illegal to proscribe placebos. Because they don’t work.
the only thing you would be healed from by wearing it
not actually definitely true! look up 'radiation hormesis'
I mean, it's not what they're advertising, and I don't think we know for sure that it's a thing, but it might be, and this would make it fucking hilarious.
The premise is flawed. The LHC is looking for specific things, and it takes forever-and-a-day just to look much less decide whether the-thing-being-searched-for is there.
The premise here is that the LHC found All That Is, and it didn’t find [magical-rock-mystery-waves] so pfffttthh stupid hippies.
Until we figure out just what dark energy and dark matter is, we can't throw out there being a fifth force that the LHC isn't even designed to detect in the first place but if you think that humans are affected by things we only tend to notice on the astronomical scale, you're putting the cart way before the horse. The whole reason we can't detect them is because they don't interact with us.
Long comment:
Perhaps there are other "forces" in the universe than physical forces. For example what is faith but a non-physical force? And yet it drives people to feel certain ways and do certain things. Same goes for love.
Just like the placebo effect there are many things that affect a person internally even though externally they don't appear to be doing anything.
If something so simple as wearing a bracelet brings balance to someone's troubled mind then I don't see the issue nor do I see the reason to argue about it on the internet.
Now, all that being said, these products are just a grift. We lost the plot when we went from
"pretty rock that eases my mind because I get dopamine from looking at it"
to
"this rock has magical powers and you should buy it because of that".
Conclusion: people are allowed to feel spiritual and psychological connections with things and it is wrong to take advantage of those feelings for profit.
Yes. Insofar as our brains are made up of physical matter and interpret electrical signals from our body. Emotions are our meat computers' interpretations of some of those inputs. If you could know the exact location and velocity of every physical particle, you could know/predict the future based on that information and physics. It's impossible to get that knowledge currently, but that doesn't make the underlying principle any less true.
But I do agree that this is a dumb thing to argue abt and to let people enjoy their little thingies.
They recently found evidence that not only was Penrose right all along about quantum effects in the brain but there's these crystaline things in your brain that do quantum shit, not very specific on all the details.. but the first thing I thought was
"Can't wait for Spirit Science to completely and delibrately misinterpret this to sell more rocks."
Edit: Maybe I was jumping the gun a bit about claiming Orch-OR itself was proven
OrchOR makes way too many wild claims for there to easily be any evidence for it. Even if we discover quantum effects (in the sense of scalable interference effects which have absolutely not been demonstrated) in the brain that would just demonstrate there are quantum effects in the brain, OrchOR is filled with a lot of assumptions which go far beyond this and would not be anywhere near justified. One of them being its reliance on gravity-induced collapse, which is nonrelativistic, meaning it cannot reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory, our best theory of the natural world.
A theory is ultimately not just a list of facts but a collection of facts under a single philosophical interpretation of how they relate to one another. This is more of a philosophical issue, but even if OrchOR proves there is gravitational induced collapse and that there is quantum effects in the brain, we would still just take these two facts separately. OrchOR tries to unify them under some bizarre philosophical interpretation called the Penrose–Lucas argument that says because humans can believe things that are not proven, therefore human consciousness must be noncomputable, and because human consciousness is not computable, it must be reducible to something that you cannot algorithmically predict its outcome, which would be true of an objective collapse model. Ergo, wave function collapse causes consciousness.
Again, even if they proved that there is scalable quantum interference effects in the brain, even if they proved that there is gravitationally induced collapse, that alone does not demonstrate OrchOR unless you actually think the Penrose-Lucas argument makes sense. They would just be two facts which we would take separately as fact. It would just be a fact that there is gravitionally induced collapse, a fact that there is scalable quantum interference effects in the brain but there would be no reason to adopt any of their claims about "consciousness."
But even then, there is still no strong evidence that the brain in any way makes use of quantum interference effects, only loose hints that it may or not be possible with microtubules, and there is definitely no evidence of the gravitationally induced collapse.
Not to defend these things, I also don't think they work, but the simplest argument is that they work on a metaphysical frequency/energy/whatever, so a physical instrument wouldn't be able to detect it.
Could also be a placebo which has been clinically proven to have some subjective effect. Not worth getting fleeced over, but worth 2 bucks for a nice rock that makes you feel hopeful.
When I was growing up (granola) everyone in my family had a special little crystal that represented them. I remember when we all picked them out from a big bin. Not to say this kind of thinking can't have a dark side, though...
Nowadays I just find "special" rocks while I'm out on a walk feeling a certain way, and like mentally imbue them whatever feeling I need (stability, remorse, etc). Then I keep them around and think of that whenever I look them, until I eventually forget why I even got them.
Got a nice Jasper that's flat on one side helping me through some shit with my family atm
Metaphysical means that it’s beyond the bounds of normal physics - stuff like ghosts, spirits, religious stuff, etc. Basically, you can cover a lot of hokey with it.
Now I'm just a humble weed farmer but I've seen "A Boy and His Atom" and it looks an awful lot like waves/vibrations to me. And I'm pretty sure some researchers have seen Lithium atoms collapse into waves near absolute zero. And we know that these waves and particles are effected by observation. And I've also smoked a bunch of DMT and eaten mysterious varieties of mushroom. That's why I believe in m⛤gick.
I've smoked DMT and eaten plenty of mushrooms, and I don't believe there's anything supernatural. And if I did, saying it's because of drugs would be a terrible argument for it being true.
Yeah! It's a fun experiment to ask why a certain molecule dancing on a serotonin receptor makes such a crazy experience occur, but by no means does it indicate magic to exist or anything like that.
I've eaten pounds of cubensis (in total) and smoked DMT until I couldn't physically move my arm to take another hit. I've been on incredible, wonderful trips. But, just like you, I know it's happening inside my brain. Truth is stranger than fiction for real.
This concept is just as dangerous as the right wing claiming LHC will open black holes. There's an implication here that just as soon as LHC was turned on it suddenly gathered information about every unknown Force, particle, and energy in the universe.
The Large hadron collider took 4 years to confirm the higgs boson; as of today it is only on its third data collection run. LHC is hardly a silver bullet.
I see where you are coming from, but if we lived in a world that literally had no scammers, grifters, or corruption, those people might find a hobby that actually helps society as a whole rather than spinning in place.
I didn't mean it in a disparaging way. I love some immature humor myself, having a mental age of anywhere between 8 and 69 depending on my mood and the situation 😁
People will shit on crystals believers in one breath and tell people to 'respect other's religion' in another or gloat about their MBTI assessment. The cognitive dissonance is unreal.
I don't believe in either but at least I'm consistent. If you're not, then you're just finding an excuse to hate on a hobby that primarily attracts women.
This is the same thing that happens to anything that women likes: pumpkin spice lattes, uggs, horoscopes, tarot cards, rose, etc. It's seen as trivial and stupid no matter how banal the average person's interest are regardless of gender.
Pro tip: the difference between faith healers and organized religions and belief systems is that, by and large, priests do not seek out people who are vulnerable, charge them three figures per psychic session, and then try to upsell crystals that do nothing on top of it. You'll never hear someone say "respect their religion" in regards to Scientology.
Also
anything that women like
Bro, have you seen how much people shit on sports, beer, and other stereotypically masculine interests? People shit on basic things because they're basic and some people use them as a substitute for a personality, not because women like them.
is that, by and large, priests do not seek out people who are vulnerable
What are you talking about, every organized religion does this. If people weren't vulnerable to being deceived, there wouldn't be any religious institutions. And I'll spare you the longwinded rant about the pressure to tithe other than to say that it exists and it's extremely aggressive.
Also, you're very much proving their point unintentionally. Quote from the first sentence in the wikipedia article for the slang term 'basic' :
Basic is a slang term in American popular culture used pejoratively to describe middle class white people, especially women, who are perceived to prefer mainstream products, trends, and music.
You're using a gendered insult to dismiss their claims of bias based on gender lines. I usually try to be more constructive than this but wow are you off the mark here.
Have you considered that there's more than one person on the internet? One person can say one thing and another person say the opposite and no one has been a hypocrite.
Anyway, I'd say we should respect people's right to practice what they want, but we can still make fun of it. I probably would say don't do it to their face, but that's up to you.
Respecting others' religions and crystals - I'd only recommend not using the fact they believe in things that don't exist against them. No need to indulge them. No need to do things differently for their benefit.
MBTI - in the workplace it's pretty low value and low predictive power. Testing is unreliable. It's easy to hit whatever set of letters you think are desired in your workplace with a little practice. In groups of MBTI fans it seems more useful, but those groups try very hard to place themselves into correct categories, and it does predict useful dynamics in interactions between people of different MBTI types.
Hobbies that attract women - I don't think that's pertinent, where you see more women into crystals you see men more likely to believe in magic devices for cars.
Belief in magic is pretty even between the genders and pretty common
Belief in magic is pretty even between the genders and pretty common
I was interested and looked up some studies. There is a gender gap in spiritual believe and women tend to be more spiritual, including believing in magic. So OPs statement in that regards holds.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying everything that op wrote is correct or that I agree, but the starting point they used, that women tend to belive in magical stuff more often, seems to be true.
At this point people can believe in whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Someone believing in a bunch of crystals and burning their money on them is a lot less harmful than other beliefs that I won't mention.
I think there are many societal harms that arise out of enabling and enriching the types of scammers that abuse hopeful yet naive people. But social science doesn't count.
Agreed. Crystals, manifestation, astrology etc. is such a stupid thing for people to feel mentally superior over others for. Being a jackass and bullying people for wanting to believe in something like luck is mentally weak. Science doesn't save a mind from its own ignorance.
The frequencies don't have to be new so much as understood.
NASA has concluded electromagnetic frequencies are actively healthy for humans, specifically promoting neural tissue regeneration, so try not to unilaterally dismiss everything crystal hippies say.
throwing a magnet bracelet on isn't going to cure cancer, but magnetism has clinically significant effects on many basic physiological processes like the circadian rhythm and that's why it keeps being studied.
nope, this study specifically focuses on the neuronal regenerative effects of electromagnetic fields, not simple voltage:
"The present investigation details the development of model systems for growing two- and three-dimensional human neural progenitor cells within a culture medium facilitated by a time-varying electromagnetic field (TVEMF)."
The study is interesting and informative about fundamental biological effects of magnetism, for anyone who wants to read it.