Hacker News Reader

Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

Always listen to your grandma.

Most people understand their parents' generation fairly well, but there is a lot of knowledge in generations further removed from our own that generally gets dismissed. That's not to say we should easily believe things from the past without evidence, but there's merit looking into and formally testing old ideas.

View on HN

My grandmother tells me that fans left on will kill me while i sleep.

Is she Korean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

The older ones could: an old style electric motor when on but stuck, can catch fire[1]. That's the nightmare, waking up to a full blown fire.

[↑]https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/hazardupdate.pdf

To be clear, it's about suffocating because the fan uses up the air in the room, or some such nonsense.

There is a lot of superstition in the world, not just among old people (and not just Koreans). The issue is most don't critically question the things they believe in. Especially when there are many others around them who say the same thing. Rationalists will always be contrarians.

The fan thing sounds silly, but it does make a lot of sense to look into more realistic ideas from the past or the present, even and maybe especially when the mainstream doesn't subscribe to them.

Gen-Z as Grandma's: say words of affirmation to the water to make it happy before you drink it. breathwork moaning ensues

Boomers recommend cow urine in my country for any disease. Very knowledgeable.

Listening to just anybody and acting on it is probably not going to end up well. But a lot of things relegated to the past are yet to be re-"discovered" by pharma and made large profits out of them because using them as natural remedies is not very profitable.

Running large scale medical experiments on humans is costly. Vote for your tax dollars to do the research. But that doesn’t mean grandma has sufficient credibility about medicinal claims to warrant “always listen to your grandma”.

How very early 18th century.

My grandma tells me that a draft in my apartment will make me catch a cold.

If only there was a method for differentiating old nonsense from advice that actually works... A scientific one, even?

If I sleep with a slight breeze on my face, I will sometimes wake up with a mild sore throat. There can be half truths in these types of beliefs.

That's probably related to low humidity.

That's probably related to the pathogens carried by the draft too. We don't know.

See this Stack Exchange question. The answers do link some papers.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/88/does-being-c...

That one is super popular in my family. I wonder if it's related to allergies; I sometimes get stuffed up with a fan blowing on me overnight.

A steady stream of cold air coming into your apartment might introduce an airborne virus from outside while the cold weather may hinder your immune system from doing its job as effectively? haha that sounds impossible! stupid grandma!

Maybe use the toddler infinite "why" trick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com