Maybe I'm Misunderstanding Woo... But... Wasn't There A Time When...

[cthulu2016]

62. This is a BIG TOPIC, but I'll give it a shot...

Take manned flight. When was it that nobody believed that a heavier than air thing could possibly fly?

Never. Birds fly. Always have. Nothing impossible about heavier than air flight.

The engineering necessary to the task was way off in the future, but if you stipulated a tremendous as yet undeveloped power source (internal combustion engine, in the Wright brothers' case) very few scientifically minded people would have said such a thing was impossible because we always knew that heavier than air flight was possible, as a matter of physics.

So if someone said, "I think we will someday have a power source strong enough and compact enough to do it," that's not pseudoscience or myth or lies. It is a speculation.

Woo is not speculating about what future centuries might hold. It is CLAIMS about the world today... crop circles, fake medicine, whatever.

There is nothing unscientific about aliens coming to Earth. Unlikely, perhaps, but certainly not impossible. I think it pretty certain that the universe has millions of billions of species of technological life. But it is another thing to say they can visit us. But maybe they can.

Now then... what if I say they HAVE visited us, they ARE visiting us? Now I am making a claim about Earth... usually based on lies, obfuscation, delusion and ignorance.

And if the spaceships arrive tomorrow will that vindicate the saucer nuts? Not in anyone's eyes but their own. Because the aliens did not actually kidnap and butt-probe uncle jasper. They did not build the pyramids.

The specific claims are crap.

But saying there is probably a lot of other intelligent life in the universe is not woo at all. It is mainstream scientific thought, with the understanding that the answer is currently unknowable.

A car that runs on water producing more energy that it uses from water alone? Without some sort of fusion reaction? That's pretty much impossible. And claims that such a car ever existed are absurd.


Now, if I said in 1800 that I had a method of heavier-than-air human flight in my barn you would express great skepticism.

And you would be right.

And if some bozo insisted that his brother-in-law knew a guy whose sister had seen me fly then you would not be persuaded.


It is not woo to say, "Cancer might be curable someday." It is woo to say that it has been when it has not been. It is woo to say that X cures cancer when the result is not replicable in trials, but is found only in highly selective anecdote or weak studies easily open to fudging. (Even innocently... innocently faked data is a real problem when an experimenter wants a certain result.)

Science fiction is not woo. You saying that computer storage will be crazy smaller in ten years than we can do today is not woo.

Woo is always about things that are real in the world... that have happened. Earl Grey tea cured this cancer. Bigfoot walked by that cabin. Copper bracelets do cure arthritis. I can read minds... bend spoons... talk to your dead child... find your missing child... see with my finger-tips...

Real world claims that ought to be open normal examination, but that instead are the province of people who don't "trust" science, and want a richer life full of unicorn tracks.

But the sort of scientific advances you are talking about were developed by, and proved by, science.

When people said they were impossible they were making an erroneous prediction about future technology. But when somebody in 1800 said airplanes are impossible, she was right. They were. In 1800.

And anyone in 1800 who said they had riden in an airplane was lying. And they were in no way vindicated by the future.

But again, someone saying that bernoulli's law meant x, and thus with materials we lack Z and power source we lack Y, wings going 200 mph would create this lift... that's just math.

Einstein said gravity curves light. That was not woo, it was just a theory from someone well informed that might have been wrong.

An experiment devised and it was tested. (The famous eclipse observations) And it was true.

And almost every scientist in the world accepted, within a few years, that this improbable, amazing, crazy-sounding thing was TRUE because it had been proven to be true.

THAT is what an open mind is. Do the experiment without room for fraud and ambiguity and let's see WHETHER something is true.