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Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Well what’s condescending and useless is the crowd of people that, in absence of any understanding or genuine interest in the subject, use words and phrases from quantum mechanics to enforce their beliefs or sell snake oil to others. I can see the books and blog posts and motivational videos now:

“Entangle yourself to your successful universe”

“Science proves life is quantum”

“What entanglement to life proves about our spiritual path”

“

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Is this really a thing though? It's a small group of ungrounded people and con artists trying to make money with absurdities like you mention, rather than a widespread phenomenon. Multiverse theory was "woo" until it wasn't. The problem is not with these uneducated fools, but rather with the "woo" category being overly broad and preventing any alternative theories from being posited. Scientists with valid credentials and a body of work are getting bucketed in the "woo" category because their ideas don't fit the prevailing model.

You’re right. People searching for meaning in life and selling positive messages is so condescending, annoying, and useless. Scientific findings could never serve as useful metaphors for the human condition. I almost took scientific advice from a spiritual blogger once - that was a close one!

The issue is when these metaphors aren’t presented or interpreted as such but as literally physical reality.

It’s the difference between seeing the Bible as inspirational and believing that the earth is literally 6000 old and Christ Is Coming Back Soon; take this course to prepare to Meet Him.

If you compromise on truth in order to further your goals, you’re just priming people to be susceptible to conspiracy theories and other actually harmful untruthful ideas like that Bill Gates literally is putting nanochips inside vaccines.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my hippie friends seem to have turned antivaxx on unscientific grounds lately.

It’s not necessarily meaningless, but that doesn’t mean it’s not absolute rubbish, in reality. People can find meaningful, useful, comfort in anything. I’ve seen people who put clovers in their wallets, rocks/crystals in their pockets/necklaces, perfumes/oils, wear special clothes/socks, etc. It doesn’t mean those items are anything but those items. The thoughts of those items is what’s magical, not the items themselves. In fact, physical existence isn’t even required!

Yes, exactly.

>> People searching for meaning in life and selling positive messages is so condescending, annoying, and useless

In some cases,absolutely! If the results of such bending of meaning weren't actively harmful (eg Vaccine denialism) perhaps it could be ignored.

All ideas have more or less merit. Address them individually based on their grounding in facts and evidence rather than a priori bucketing an arbitrary subset of ideas with a label. It's no different than calling people "libtards". You mention "woo" with annoyance before anyone even said anything, indicating a strong bias.

Look, it’s just a convenient term for working scientists to use to categorize a group of people who are not worth listening to at all (in the scientific realm). Quantum physics gets a lot of this because it’s spooky but all fields experience some amount of quackery. Think people who send P=NP proofs to universities, “alternate” historians, flat earthers, and the like.

Imagine if there were coding boot camps that were entirely based on developing a good vibe with the computer, and didn’t involve learning about how to write code at all. People go in, “learn” something, but then they try to get a coding job and fall flat on their face because they don’t actually know anything. This is exactly the state of quantum physics re: the general public. I would guess as a scientist it would get demoralizing.

> Imagine if there were coding boot camps that were entirely based on developing a good vibe with the computer

From my experience the industry is sorely lacking people who have developed a good vibe with the computer and we can probably trace the root cause of a lot of the major systemic issues we see to that. This boot camp sounds great.

OMG, +2 for this bootcamp. I think the above comment about shroomwater in a camelback applies here.

> Imagine if there were coding boot camps that were entirely based on developing a good vibe with the computer...

Not quite zen cracking, but that's getting closer to the old +ORC ideology.

Nah. Ridicule them ruthlessly and bring back the shame to being an idiot. One idiot's quantum entanglement with a tardigrade is another idiot's claim that antifa created the tornadoes that devastated Kentucky. Can't they see how much they have in common with each other?

While we are making broad generalizations, the problem with people who shame "them" (whomever you think "they" are) is that everything is binary, it's either the prevailing theory, or it's insane idiocy. There's no room in between, so even if you are scientist who put in good work but diverge a bit from the mainstream you get labeled as "woo". Labels are horrible lazy tools is my point. Just address the assertion itself.

Except it's not at all like that. There are definitely media sorts and influencers whose followings are based on you believing that's the case so they can portray your faction as some sort of victim of nefarious elitists to keep you glued to their content, but it's never been a good idea (for example) to call a debate between an astronomer and a flat-earther in any way fair and balanced, yet it's those sorts of contrived ridiculous scenarios 24/7 now for top advertising $$$. You might need a new hobby if your find yourself in the midst of anything like that.

Will you address my claim that there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter?

If not, why not?

My point was about a broad categorization, not individual bad ideas and theories. Building up a general intolerance to a vague and broad category called "woo" ends up in you calling a non-zero percentage of viable theories "woo" because it's outside of your world model, rather than being contradictory with evidence.

It's the science equivalent of labeling someone a "conspiracy nut" in politics, where CIA manipulation of the media (a real thing with plenty of evidence) gets bucketed with reptilian overlords to unfairly denigrate the former valid theory.

There is absolutely a ruling class with personal interest in the status quo within the scientific community that applies unthinking skepticism to perfectly valid ideas to protect their own agendas. I'd recommend listening to Dr. Avi Loeb's thoughts on this.

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