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This is the kind of thing (Korean fan death is another) that sends me into a momentary spiral as I rack my brain for any scientifically indefensible convictions I may hold myself. Of course I don't come up with anything—that's the whole issue—save for the fact that I, out of sheer ignorance and blind faith in what I've been told by various authorities (and, to a much lesser degree, by what I've observed personally), generally believe in peer-reviewed, effectively canonized science.

It's easy to point to western religions as examples of this kind of thing, but I think there are plenty of other unverifiable (or even effectively disproven) but deeply felt beliefs that proliferate among both the right and the left, some of which are deeply dangerous and only gaining momentum.

View on HN

There's a big difference between low-impact, low-evidence beliefs like fan death, and easily verifiable, high impact things like "sacrifice a cat person".

The problem isn't that people have momentary false beliefs (fan death can be disproven with a bit of evidence gathering) but that there appears to be no correction mechanism. If you never see a dude turn into a cat, and if sacrificing people doesn't make you rich (worked for Jeff! ... Sorry couldn't help myself) then why do you think it works?

I'm not sure the answer is intellectual. It's quite possible people have some sort of psychological desire to believe things they know deep inside aren't true. Perhaps it's some sort of group belonging that must be satisfied ("yes, he walked on water!") by professing belief in what everyone can see is false.

And “fan deaths” brought us some neat things, like fans with timers in them.

I do not see what neat things “sacrificing cat person” will bring.

I have similar experiences to you to this kind of stuff, and will add to that another layer of analysis -- racking your brain for all the beliefs and experiences you have that contradict each other.

I have no belief in the supernatural, paranormal, or any hocus pocus. I don't believe in ghosts. But, conversely, I've had an experience that I've a hard time explaining as anything but a ghost. My dad lived in a house that once was used as a pheasantry, but no pheasants lived on the land for ~100 years. At night, though, I and many other folks would hear pheasants coming from inside the conservatory, where the pheasants used to be hung after slaughter. On many investigations, no source of the noise was ever discovered.

The only way I can harmonize the two is to just avoid thinking about it. If asked if I believe in ghosts, I say no. If asked if I've ever experienced a ghost, I recall this experience.

I don't mean this as some spooky tale or suggestion that anything mystical is possible, just one account of the weird ways evidence and beliefs work.

There's a surprising amount of people in the US who believe in variations of witchcraft, things like tarot cards, horoscopes, and talking to the dead. Much of this actually comes from secular society.

Yeah. I think this is a good example, because it's similar to the juju in the article in that the belief often seems more aspirational or preferential than necessarily defensible or provable in some sense. My impression from people I've known who were into, say, astrology, isn't that they would put it up against gravity in a facts-or-not evaluation, but rather that they like the idea of a world organized thusly, or that they find it benefits them to frame things thusly, and therefor 'believe' in it.

The shopkeeper wasn't prepared to demonstrate the good things his pouch of talismans were doing for him, but he certainly preferred to believe that his day would go better with them in hand. Who wouldn't? What an easy way to ward off misfortune.

It's like a belief in Myers-Briggs personality types, too, in that it's easily bolstered by a confirmation bias and, arguably, can serve a broader function in metaphor. The same of course can be said for much religious dogma and many faith-oriented parables. I think most people would agree that the world would be a better place if more people behaved as Christians believe Jesus did.

Continuing to think about this, it's occurred to me that I've spent so much time digging into Galen's and Empedocles's framings of the world, and the grander notion of the integrated universe, that they have, in some abstract way, had an impact on the way I think about things.

I don't believe that an excess of something called black bile, which relates to autumn, Earth, etc. makes me feel melancholy, but I have, numerous times, described my girlfriend as 'sanguine' to people who've not met her, and then, when I was rightly mocked for saying that instead of something more colloquial, proceeded to attempt to justify my word choice with an approximate characterization of her based on a humorist framework.

Perhaps this is just a product of insufferable douchiness and self-satisfaction, and is little more than analogizing, but that's kind of all beliefs are, anyway.

I saw a talk about this one time and the lecturer said that 50-60% of people believe in ghosts (iirc). But I don't think this as crazy as it sounds. If you read William James' on the varieties of religious experience, he talks a lot about peoples experiences feeling entities and stuff like that. Also if you read a bunch of psychedelic trip reports people say similar things like feeling spirits. So I think the more reasonable take is there is a part of the human brain whose function generates these weird paranormal feelings of presence. Some people have brains that do it more, some people less, and some chemicals can change that

The boom in late-19th century haunted house stories can be attributed to CO poisoning from dicey gas lighting systems...

https://pacificheatingcooling.com/2018/12/27/carbon-monoxide...

I'm no anthropologist but I would bet "talking to the dead" is a near universal human cultural constant.

From a US survey completed in 2020, 88% of people claimed to believe some religion. These beliefs aren't really any different from those featured in the article. Western religious beliefs are just as absurd; they are just more acceptable as they are part of our culture.

Here's one belief many of us hold, one that is right in front of our eyes: That Africa is a primitive, pre-modern place of magic, lions, and brutality.

There is so much going on in Africa, and what story makes it onto HN front page? The one that confirms our beliefs. (This is an issue common to the portrayal of many 'outside' groups.)

Eh, there's plenty if you look. For example, most people have strong opinions about the health effects of food (fat, sugar, oils, processed/unprocessed, gluten, you name it), which are mostly unsubstantiated.

Pregnancy and childbirth is another area that's ripe with (literal) "old wives' tales". I read both Japanese and English advice on the topic, and it was both hilarious and disturbing to see completely contradictory recommendations like "eat healthy food, avoid sushi and caffeine at all costs" and "eat healthy food, like sushi and green tea". Another good example is co-sleeping, which the rest of the world considers obvious but in the US is considered outrageously dangerous, mostly because some studies found that adults who are {morbidly obese, drunk, on drugs} occasionally squash their babies.

There are verified occurrences of gluten intolerance, squashed babies of drunk parents, and listeria contamination of raw fish. I agree that it’s not wise to let oneself be scared by incidents with low occurrence. But how is it unsubstantiated?

(In my family we do practice co-sleeping, but without any alcohol involved; and my wife never had sushi during pregnancy because listeria are rare but really bad for the fetus.)

Of course celiac disease and listeria are actual things, but I think we'd agree that a general "gluten is bad for you" is unsubstantiated. It's also funny how sushi gets singled out, when the CDC (below) doesn't even mention it in its list of listeria high risk foods. When did you last hear about pregnant women avoiding hot dogs or melons?

https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/prevention.html

Hot dogs are commonly on lists of food for pregnant women to avoid.

"Don't swim for 30 minutes after eating, you'll get cramps and drown" is one I've heard in the US from multiple people

"Hydration", or "8 glasses of water a day" is another one.

Your kidneys work, if you aren't thirsty (barring certain medical conditions) you don't need to drink water.

There's no such thing as "dehydration without being thirsty" on a routine basis. You'll develop a pretty powerful thirst at 2% water depletion, and for most healthy adults you need to see 4% or more for negative effects.

Drinking a lot of water can be helpful - if you expect to perspire heavily from temperature and/or physical exertion but that is a different kettle of fish.

It can be very difficult communicating people new to the Phoenix area just how much water they need to drink during the summer if they are going to exert themselves outdoors.

I am French and travelled menu times to Phoenix for business. I loved the place (Scottsdale) and was once invited to play golf there (my first golf experience).

I was slowly turning into lyophilized me, fortunately I could give up at the 9th hole and went to immediately drink 2 liters of water.

Drinking a lot of water prior to exertion isn't helpful. You'll just piss it out.

I’m not an expert, but 20 years ago I had a small part in DARPA research into monitoring soldiers’ hydration. The idea was that people in combat often don’t notice they are thirsty, or power through it, and as a result are operating at reduced cognitive and physical capacity. Of course, that’s combat. And for all I know the funding was based on the popular misunderstanding.

Yes, and marathon runners or other people in extreme situations need to drink before they're thirsty so that they keep their intake high enough. But those are really extreme situations, most people walking around with a water bottle aren't sweating out 2 liters per hour.

Nonsense. As we age, our sense of thirst diminishes. Senior citizens are at higher risk of dehydration.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/drink-up-dehydration-is-a...

That's true, and that's why I said "healthy adults" - Senior citizens are in a special category where they may need to drink before they are feeling thirst, but most people are not senior citizens (yet?). The average person walking around with a water bottle doesn't need to drink before they're thirsty.

Is there such thing as a "blood hygrometer" (for lack of a better description) that could objectively tell you when you're dehydrated?

Dehydration skews a lot of blood values. Hematocrit is probably the most direct, since it's the percentage of red blood cells in a volume. Dehydration decreases the volume, and thus increases hematocrit. Electrolytes get out of whack too.

In practice, I don't think anyone really does this: thirst, urine/sweat, and weight are very easy to measure, and the obvious next step would be pulse or blood pressure.

I was thinking more along the lines of whether there is something like a continuous glucose monitor but for dehydration, which could beep or otherwise alert a semi-independent elderly person that they are becoming dehydrated so they could get some water before it started to stress their kidneys. Like those pill boxes with alarm clocks built in so they don't forget to take medication.

But I'm aware there are various issues with CGM's (a friend has one, which may act as an insulin pump as well, and complains that the needle needs to be moved around every so often as the attachment site stops giving accurate readings). The cost/benefit probably isn't there, if an elderly person cannot control their own hydration they probably also aren't able to adequately care for a CGM or similar monitor. If it was something you could implant into the body and poll wirelessly it might have some value.

That might be overkill.

I think you could get 99% of the way there with a reminder at 10am, 2pm, and 6pm to have a glass of water. With a few exceptions (e.g., heart failure), there's no real harm in moderately overdoing it--you'll just pee it out.

Now that I have my own children, I'm convinced this myth is a delay tactic perpetuated by parents :)

Yep, white lies. The underlying rationale is that kids do throw up in pools and you don't want to get into a public argument with a kid about how they're not going to throw up, can they go in pretty please.

It's like the thing about getting arrested for turning on the lights inside a moving car. No, you won't get arrested, but the reflection on the windshield can be annoying, and getting distracted by kids going ham on flicking the lights on and off is obviously dangerous.

See also, school "permanent records".

I think the white lie is even simpler.

As a kid, I always wanted to go swimming (swimming pool or sea) as soon as I finished eating. My parents told me not to because of the cramps. "You must wait an hour before swimming".

It wasn't about throwing up and as an adult I finally understand it: they wanted to have a chat at the table after eating, take it slowly, maybe they were a bit drowsy. What they didn't want to do was to look after kids doing potentially dangerous activities such as swimming. So that hour of waiting? A period of grace for them to enjoy their meal and maybe rest for a short while.

Exactly! Parental relief.

Nah, it's definitely the hygiene thing. Pools often forbid food and drinks at the deck for the same reason: if someone dirties the pool water, they basically need to close off the whole pool and recycle the pool water for a few hours, which is super inconvenient for all parties involved (and obviously embarrassing for the parents of the kid who made the mess). You'd be surprised at how often these things happen.

Ask me how I know :)

In British Columbia, Canada, the BC Motor Vehicle Act mentions interior lamps in connection with larger passenger vehicles. In addition to requiring that they have them, it has this requirement that they be on while driving at night:

  Interior lamp
    10.20 (1) A commercial passenger vehicle shall be equipped with a
              lamp or lamps within the vehicle so arranged to illuminate
              the aisle of the vehicle to the rear of the driver.

           (2) A person driving a commercial pass enger vehicle having a
               seating capacity including the driver of more than 12 occupants
               shall insure that the light or lights referred to in subsection
               (1) are illuminated at all times that passengers are being
               carried between sunset and sunrise.

AFAIK, that's meant for buses, and it's the same rationale as airplane floor lights (i.e. illumination is necessary to avoid falls from tripping in the dark, e.g. if the passenger is going to the toilet, which some buses have).

I can't find any other mention of interior lamps in the same traffic code document.

We had a child swim in our pool immediately after eating and she threw up. Probably where that one came from. Kind of like how it is bad luck to open an umbrella inside. It's not bad luck, but somebody might get poked in the eye.

Even if wrong, it seems harmless enough.

Even if I believed that, I wouldn't, say, avoid jumping out of a burning ship into the water just because I just had a meal.

I'm from the Netherlands; I always heard that's because you might get a bit too excited and throw up your food. The 30 minutes are to allow your stomach to settle a bit.

I don't recall the original interaction anymore but I remember confronting my mother in my early 30's about her telling me the one about gum staying in your stomach for 7 years. She had no recollection of having done that, and argued that being a nurse she would have never told us that.

But apparently younger me was convinced that story came from her and not from the schoolyard rumor mill.

An amusing thing about such myths is that instead of abandoning them outright, we wrap them in auxiliary myths such as not wanting kids to throw up.

On the other hand, how long does it take to know that your kids haven't gotten food poisoning from the food that would be served near a swimming pool?

It's presumably not just food poisoning--it'd be exercise-induced.

I would say that the best part of the scientific method is that you don't have to have blind faith in it, nor take it on the faith of others. You can look around at all the ways people most often get things wrong about the world, and then analyze the steps of the scientific method to understand how they directly counter those mistakes. Not to mention, you can look at all the things the scientific method has been able to accurately predict, vs any other method of understanding the world, and that should bolster its credentials.

Is the scientific method perfect? No, of course not; as long as humans are involved, nothing will ever be perfect. But to paraphrase Wigner, science is and has always been "unreasonably effective" at getting things right, far more than any other way humans have looked at the universe, and as such is the best we've got to understand it.

Appeal to traditional science only works for knowledge that you've actually studied the science on, and not papers cherry-picked for you by your own bias or others recommending them. That's so hard that almost nobody does it except scientists themselves and even then, only in their narrow field. So normal people can't really appeal to science as why they trust their beliefs. What most people believe instead is what their peers told them they're supposed to believe to make them a respectable person and just tack "science says" onto it.

That’s why you need to defer to the scientific consensus, when it exists. (And note that the deferral to expertise heuristic is different than the appeal to authority logical fallacy.)

When I was a kid I read a story about the oil field fires after the first Gulf War. That planted a seed to look at how different cultures solve the same problems. Not unlike code reviews and relationship advice, the problem is always so much easier to see when you're not in the middle of it. Some things are easier to forgive, others harder.

My culture is very efficient at solving some problems, barely equipped to solve others. That's true of everyone. Some holidays or traditions are quaint, even silly, others make me envious. Some ideas are mutually exclusive, but others complement each other.

For the [oil field fires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires) the real story is stranger than I had recalled. Apparently the Hungarians mounted a MiG engine onto a tank and used it to power the water cannon. I had recalled the tank (high thermal mass rather than expensive heat shielding), but not that the water was jet powered.

I really love that whole story. The tank is obviously very badass of course, but there were a lot of other cool ideas too.

Folks from Texas just thrown explosives on the fire until it blown it out.

There was some other nation who lifted in a long pipe over the fire, forcing the oil to go in the pipe which obviously kept burning at the top of the tube. And then they suddenly tipped the pipe to the side. The oil was still flowing of course, but when they got the timing right they could remove the oil stream fast enough from the heat that it got extinguished. That looked like a very ingenious solution from the lower-tech side of the spectrum.

> ... but not that the water was jet powered.

I found this video[1]. It sounds like it's not really that the water was jet powered. They were blowing out the fire with the oxygen-depleted exhaust of the jet engines and they mixed water into the exhaust to further enhance the process with the cooling effect. Or at least that's what the guy in the red helmet next to the machine says in Hungarian.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Ss3BMrscE

I think at one point they told the UN it might take 5 years to put out all of the fires. At the beginning they were doing one well a week, sometimes less. By the end they were doing 2 a day. They started in April and were done by November. In six months they were going over 10x as fast. Which means they probably put out half the fires in the last 8 weeks.

Wiki link to tanks mounted with water spewing jet turbines:

https://second.wiki/wiki/aerosollc3b6schfahrzeug

But it was never used for its intended role:

> When the vehicle was completed, however, the fires had already been put out by Hungarian turbo fire engines. The vehicle was used experimentally and showed good results. Even so, it was no longer used.

At least that one. Sounds like they had others that were smaller that were used instead?

There is one theory that "fan death" has been a cultural cover-up for suicides that occur when people are at home by themselves.

That's the reason why I love flat earth.

Obviously the earth is not flat, or... is it? I suggest you take a look at all the flat earthers arguments, they can explain a surprising amount of things. I particularly like the one that explains gravity using a variation on the Einstein elevator thought experiment. I know it is all wrong, but try to let go of your preconceived ideas and look at their arguments for what they are.

What is good about flat earth is that it is a safe and well "documented" exercise in epistemology. Arguments are relatively easy to disprove even with minimal scientific knowledge, and besides ridicule, it is a harmless belief. I mean, flat earth doesn't suggest that you should kill people or anything like that.

My understanding of flat earth was that it's about coming up with convincing arguments for something that you know (or at least assume) to be false. There are a large number of people who participate and they've been doing it for a long time. I'm sure they've heard and come up with solid refutations for every possible argument against flat earth. There are a lot of people who genuinely believe as well, but I've come to see it as more of "a lot of people who enjoy playing a rhetorical game"

On the one hand, flat earth doesn't suggest killing people. But on the other hand, you don't want them in very many roles in society.

Flat earth isn't harmless. Conspiratorial beliefs like flat earth don't exist in a vacuum, but within ecosystems of more dangerous beliefs and insular communities which spread those beliefs among members. If "they" can hide the true shape of the world from everyone, then any conspiracy theory seems plausible in comparison.

Maybe "they" did fake a pandemic to slip mind-control chips into the vaccine. Maybe "they" are plotting to take control more overtly, more violently. Maybe "they" aren't even human, they just appear human. Maybe "they" are among us, hiding within a certain religious or ethnic group.

I worry more about those misconceptions shared by most cultures, as they are hardest to spot yet also likely to be most relevant. The single-minded pursuit of economic growth and all the values wrapped up in that comes to mind. Exponential growth is the antithesis of sustainability, yet we collectively claim to pursue sustainability through growth...

> I rack my brain for any scientifically indefensible convictions I may hold myself.

Me too... except for the jinx. If someone says "This project is going great" it strikes terror deep in my soul.

My ex-gf was Korean and she assured me that fan death is scientifically backed. Her logic was that running a fan in a closed room can result in asphyxiation due to CO2 accumulation. But she said that this only applies to Korean rooms, which are smaller than normal rooms.

I’ve never thought of that before! I had heard of the effect and always thought it was a freak case that spiraled into fame, but CO2 accumulation actually makes perfect sense.

So, would that not normally happen without a fan? If a room is that small, and that pooorly ventilated, how does a fan make the co2 concentrate in a more dangerous way?

Not sure if you're joking, but no, that doesn't make any sense. Asphyxia is a lack of oxygen, not an excess amount of CO2. Even slight increases in CO2 will make you feel extremely uncomfortable, long before you actually run out of oxygen.

Unless your fan has a gas motor, it's not going to produce any CO2. The tiny Korean room, which I'm betting is not any smaller than your average New York City bedroom, would have to be pretty poorly ventilated indeed for you to not survive the night.

One thing that is overlooked is historical context. In Korea, there's a type of building called an Ondol[0], which is basically a building w/ underfloor heating (traditionally via smoke from wood fire). There's also a bed variation called a dol bed.

When you take into consideration that there's a literal CO2 spewing furnace underneath your room that you can't easily turn on or off, the introduction of electrical fans into the picture becomes the next obvious thing to watch for.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondol

> the introduction of electrical fans into the picture becomes the next obvious thing to watch for

How is that in any way obvious? I don't see any connection, like at all. The furnace does not vent into the room.

See this layout[0], for example. Notice how the black soot marks are directly underneath the windows.

[0] https://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/newsV2/images/202104/301...

> I rack my brain for any scientifically indefensible convictions I may hold myself.

But you'd never deliberately cause harm to someone over such a conviction, so it's not urgent.

You might want to self-scan for convictions that are likely to cause you inadvertent harm.

That can be lazily evaluated; in any situation in which you're making some critical decision where the wrong one could cause harm, check those convictions that are inputs to it.

Well I certainly hope to be as sure of that as possible, and do what I can to 'look beyond myself', but I won't pretend to do it any better than the next person. I think humility is the key there. The second you become convinced your convictions aren't harming anyone, you've developed a conviction that may lead you to harm someone :].

Take conversion therapy for example. My understanding is that many, if not most, proponents of sexuality-focused conversion therapy truly believe that it is not only not harmful, but in fact directly beneficial to its subjects, for a variety of (mostly religious) reasons. I suspect the agony felt by the people subjected to such things is seen not as so much as harm by the people promoting it, but more as the pinch felt from a vaccine shot: a momentary sting in service of an eternal afterlife of painless happiness and purity.

Of course there's tons of predatory money to be made in the business of religion, and it's likely that most of today's religious bigwigs dgaf about anyone's eternal salvation, but that's due to a separate set of convictions.

That getting a cold does/does not come from exposure to low temperatures is a strong conviction I've encountered in both versions.

Those I can understand. It doesn't really take magical thinking, some viruses perform better at colder temperatures.

Things like magnetic bangles, crystals and other stuff does appear in the west. I can't say how prevalent. Anecdotally it wasn't common amongst western researchers I've known, at least not outwardly.

Ah, I can point out some along those lines, too. Acupressure. Chiropractors. Horoscopes.

Less fringe, but also less magical: the notion that a wild animal will abandon their young if a human touches them. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, but only on a second thought.

If a human touchea a young wild animal, the human will abandon life soon; is that what you meant?

There's an entire trend of witchiness with the secular, where they disavow traditional western beliefs but subscribe to paganistic beliefs on spells, charms, and magic. This stuff isn't uncommon at all honestly

It is easy to understand why people might assume so. There is a correlation. In colder temperatures people gather in indoor spaces and that helps spread the virus.

The reasons respiratory illnesses tend to be more prevalent in winter are not so definitively understood.

I'm not a medic but it would seem rational to me that if viruses spread from one person to another then when people are close together in a group in a room for longer periods of time and the same air circulates in the room rather than get blown a way by wind outside, then it is much easier to spread the virus.

From what I've understood, being cold weakens your immune system. So while the main cause is the closer contact to others, the cold weather does make it more likely to get sick.

That's a very wishy-washy response without an effect size, though.

It's the kind of thing that's hard to quantify. But we have good reasons why cold weather weakens your immune system with how it effects mucus production. And people with weaker immune systems get sick more often. Therefore, stay warm to reduce chance of illness

Unless it's like half a percent of the base rate, in which case you're wasting effort and failing to enjoy situations for no good reason.

Getting sick less is a secondary benefit of not getting hypothermia. Being cold isn't really an enjoyable thing.

> Being cold isn't really an enjoyable thing.

Sometimes it can be.

Sometimes there are tradeoffs.

If it was as simple as "don't do the thing you hate", nobody would ever get cold in the first place, regardless of it makes them sick.

So it matters whether the sickness effect is negligible or not.

>Sometimes it can be.

Nope. I guarantee people would like skiing more if you were possible at ~70 degrees. Snowmobiles can be fun, but they'd be more fun without the twenty extra layers of clothing you need to put on. Warming yourself by a fire can be nice, but it's the warming that's enjoyable. Being cold sucks.

Again, being cold leads to hypothermia. Just wear a coat, it's not that big of a deal.

If it was as simple as "don't do the thing you hate", nobody would ever get cold in the first place, regardless of it makes them sick.

Peer-reviewed canonized science has a reproducibility problem. That's your Nigerian who can change into a cat.

Shhh that's the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Peer reviewed studies using the scientific method is why we assume we are more logical than others. With that in question, we might have to admit we don't know a lot of things

Love is the most common one in the west. The idea that you can know another person completely, and that your strong feelings are proof of future dedication. Love is ultimately just feelings, and in a more logical society we wouldn't value feelings that evolved to make us pass on genes and anything but a strange quirk. Many people can even recognize that others are probably just fools in love, but they are always convinced their love is really a supernatural force rather than a simple feeling

I'd never heard of "fan death" but wow, what a rabbit hole that is. It's like the pseudoscientific version of a hat on a bed.

"Pre-menstrual syndrome" and "children become energetic after eating candy" are both widespread beliefs in the US which are generally not mirrored in other cultures.

PMS is not a "belief".

Not sure if you're referring to the fact that it's not well understood, but that doesn't make it less real.

It has as much evidence going for it as fan death does.

I don't think the NHS has a page about fan death

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pre-menstrual-syndrome/

You really seem shockingly self-unaware given the thread you're posting in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death#South_Korean_governm...

> The Korea Consumer Protection Board (KCPB), a South Korean government-funded public agency, issued a consumer safety alert in 2006 warning that "asphyxiation from electric fans and air conditioners" was among South Korea's five most common summer accidents or injuries, according to data they collected. The KCPB published the following:

>> If bodies are exposed to electric fans or air conditioners for too long, it causes [the] bodies to lose water and [causes] hypothermia. If directly in contact with [air current from] a fan, this could lead to death from [an] increase of carbon dioxide saturation concentration and decrease of oxygen concentration. The risks are higher for the elderly and patients with respiratory problems. From 2003 [to] 2005, a total of 20 cases were reported through the CISS involving asphyxiations caused by leaving electric fans and air conditioners on while sleeping. To prevent asphyxiation, timers should be set, wind direction should be rotated, and doors should be left open.

That's not the NHS :) And it's also not a health institute/system.

Maybe you should explain what you think the problem is with PMS, because I don't get it. It seems to me that the scientific consensus is to acknowledge the existence of something called PMS. What it encompasses (e.g. including "mood swings" or not) and whether it's a medical problem is, however, debated.

"Effectively disproven" with regard to religion. I'll take a stab at this, because it's a personal grievance of mine. As a result of the Enlightenment, empiricism became the de facto standard for verifying or justifying what is "real" or "true". But empiricism is blind to many things that we still interact with in our everyday lives, and consider "real" and that we have ongoing beliefs about.

Numbers are an example. Numbers are a strictly metaphysical set of categories and rules, and they can relate to physicality, but there is no physical evidence for the idea of "seven", for example. Logic is another example. Cities are another example.

Ok, cities might need a little explaining to show what I mean, because you say "A city is physical!" and I say yes, but it's also metaphysical. I'll reduce it from city to a mayor to explain more clearly. Does the mayor exist? If you walk into the city office, you can meet with the mayor. So the mayor is real. However, if you go to the bar with the mayor and he starts talking about his car insurance or his marriage after a couple of drinks, you're no longer talking to the mayor. You're talking to Steve, who acts as the mayor during the day, but is also a person with a private life. Now, if Steve dies that night on his way home from the bar, does the mayor cease to exist? Well, in a way, yes, but in a few days, a new mayor will be appointed and in the meantime there will be an "acting mayor". So is the mayor real?

We could say the same for a city. It has physical boundaries, and if you don't pay your water bill "to the city", then the "city will turn off your water". Is it some entity called "city" who comes to your house and turns the valve? No. It is a member of the city's "body" that comes and turns off your water. So is the city "real"?

Marriage is another example. A couple that is married acts differently than a couple who is not married, and if the marriage ends, that can have drastic, real effects on the people in the marriage. So is marriage "real"?

I mean... OK. But those are just names for things that are useful to think about. Saying marriage is real isn't the same type of thing as "Korean fan death is real" or "God is real".

Right, I think "metaphysical" sounds too mystical for most people. A better word is "abstract". Numbers are abstract things. You don't have to believe in them because in a sense they don't exist, they exist only as a definition.

Anybody can come up with a definition but the usefulness of doing so is based on whether the definition is self-contradictory or not and whether there are useful rules of deriving more abstract things out of them. 1 + 2 = 3.

Fortunately abstract things like numbers can be made semi-concrete by representing them in a physical medium such as pen and paper or computer-memory. Then we can observe how they behave and verify event by observation the soundness of our rules for manipulating them. 1 + 2 seems to always be 3.

"Just names for things that are useful to think about" for which you have no empirical evidence, but they are identities/categories that you find useful, interact with, and that exist through time. Are they real?

This just sounds like one big confusion of the map for the territory. What you are describing are abstract concepts. The fact that concepts are not 'real' in that they are not physical entities isn't much of an indictment of empiricism, nor does science claim to employ empiricism alone without any foundation of conceptual rationalism.

What is the empirical evidence for conceptual rationalism?

I had no intention of treading into the real-or-not quagmire. I thought I safeguarded myself against that with the concession that I consider belief in general science exactly that—a belief. But perhaps that was unclear.

The 'disproven' part was also deliberately parenthetical and only indirectly linked to religion, with the used notions of proof and veracity both subject to the aforementioned concession.

Forgive my defensive parsing here, but it's important to me that I don't present myself as someone who feels he 'knows the truth'. My intent was to say that I don't.

What I was trying to point to, with a fumbling attempt was pointing to your idea of "scanning your mind for scientific data that might be wrong" and coming up empty, was that just the idea that scientific empiricism is the only or most reliable way of establishing what is "true" is actually a presupposition that is a result of the Enlightenment, and is not the basis for traditional societies when they are determining "how we know what we know" and "what is the hierarchy of meaning"?

I was just trying to point out to you that you might be open-minded regarding what evidence you are willing to consider, but just he point that you consider evidence as a way of establishing truth is a presupposition that can, and should be examined.

Ooh, okay. I gotcha. Thanks for clarifying!

Empiricism is autoreliable. And is perhaps the only thing that is. It continually reconceptualizes our understandings and produces its own reliability. See how things like the indifference assumption of statistical mechanics is now empirically generated. Empirical science in limited domains can explain its own reliability and justification.

But what you’ve done is none empirically assert numbers are “this”. Cities are “this”. No non-empirical claims have the same weight as empirical science. It’s not that empirical science should talk about things it does not yet know, rather we shouldn’t make claims like yours. We should only go as far empirical science says if you want to match empirical science’s reliability, and it doesn’t say numbers are metaphysical categories.

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