Is Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience winning?
vox.com
vox.com
Most humans are desperate. I prefer to view things that way, as it casts less summary judgment on the victims of Paltrow's fraud. Because that's what this certainly smells like: fraud, perpetrated by Goop, and at the very least abetted by Gwyneth Paltrow, in willing exploitation of women's hopes and dreams.
We can all buy into bullshit under the right circumstances. Even the smart ones among us fall for scams, schemes, and snake oil. Whether we're down on our luck, insecure, or even just bored, we're all vulnerable from time to time. That's when bullshit smells its sweetest.
When a predatory person or entity preys on people in those circumstances, the law mostly blames the predator. So should we.
Instead of actually getting myself well and trying to figure out how to share info on that, I should have just become a celebrity movie star first. Then I could be raking in the dough instead of being poor and ignored and occasionally pissed on for the assumption that what I am doing is anything like this.
A lot of this stuff has become popular over the years, from Intelligent Design to faith healing and homeopathy and those weird mystical bracelets people were advertising about ten years ago.
Yet it never won. It never became the 'common' consensus on a topic, or something the mainstream believed in, or that the scientific establishment promoted. It became popular with a moderately large but still somewhat niche audience.
And that's the case here too. This 'Goop' thing couldn't truly win, because truly winning would mean people would generally take it seriously. No example of pseudoscientific nonsense has ever really won in that sense.
If something makes you happy and improves your quality of life, why not do it as long as the positives outweigh the negatives? You could argue that the products are all psychological if you want, and that doesn't make them any less useful. Possibly more so.
Science is about reducing uncertainty. It is not about suppressing hobbies that seem offensive or weird.
Before someone goes off about best schools, best companies, best other things, do remember that these "bests" are not available to the masses in America.
The anti-science, anti-schooling, anti-intellectualism is rampant across the nation, resulting in articles such as this!
Celebrities are revered more than Scientists, Business is revered more than environment.
National slurs will get you banned here, so please don't do this again. (This goes for any nation.)