Rob is blowing a whistle, over and over.
Bob: “Why are you blowing that whistle, Rob?”
Rob: “To keep the dragons away.”
Bob: “I see no dragons.”
Rob: “It works!”
“You just turned 100 today - what’s your secret to a long life?” - No matter what the answer will be, I guarantee you that there are millions of people in the world who do the exact same and still die young. But yeah, of course aunt Margharet only managed to live an entire century because she ate three cans of surströmming every week, no doubt. Genetics, healthcare and lifestyle have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
Edit/addendum: Weird specific example
Something similar was also my no.1 pet peeve on reddit whenever people argued about how the Blood Moon works in Breath of the Wild. It’s an in-game timer of roughly 3 hours, but the game does not tell you about it, nor does it display the timer, and back when the game code wasn’t cracked yet, there were a LOT of outrageously weird theories about how to allegedly make the Blood Moon appear.
So you just “made” a BM happen by running straight into a wall for 3 hours? Yes you got a BM, but not “because” you were running into a wall for 3 hours, but because the effing timer was up. The game does not care for WHAT you do in that time.
So you reloaded and ran into a wall again and the BM happened again? It is STILL not because you ran into a wall - you rewinded the effing timer by reloading a save file from before the event you’re trying to trigger, and then the timer was up again. (They never bothered to check whether it would happen if they did not try to trigger it with their chosen tactic)
It is really really hard to try and convince these people that they’re wrong, because once they’re convinced that a specific action yields a specific result, they WILL keep doing it over and over again until it “works” and then see it as proof. But by the same logic you can also throw tomatoes at a wall until it starts to rain and then claim that the rain happened because you just threw 547 tomatoes against a wall. And then you continue to throw tomatoes because it “worked” last time … and if it doesn’t rain then you just didn’t throw enough tomatoes yet.
The real secret is to not die.
And to buy enough tomatoes
So you just “made” a BM happen …
Poop goes in the potty.
Technically, eating three cans a week is lifestyle.
Blood Moons will also happen if the system is running low on RAM. The BM resets a bunch of stuff, like monster spawns, and since the game is no longer tracking that you killed a particular set of bokoblins or whatever there is more free RAM. This is called a panic blood moon, is very rare, and difficult to force.
A common misconception is that blood moons help replenish system memory by resetting enemy kill flags. This is however total nonsense, because enemy kill flags are just GameData flags, and all GameData flags are loaded at bootup and stay in memory forever
From the exact same source you just posted.
Wait I’m having so many BMs because I don’t have enough RAM? I’ll talk to my GI about this.
The most prevalent has got to be, "We prayed and -insert name- recovered - it’s a miracle!
And if the person dies: “It’s the will of God.”
When doctors save a person, “God saved this person!”
No, it was Dr. Jakobs but go on
Just to play the devil’s advocate: many of those thanking God are more expressing thanks for the circumstances that led to recovery. That includes that doctor, along with whatever knowledge and skill they have as a result of years of study and hard work. i.e. God put that doctor in their lives, rather than some quack.
But maybe they could thank the doctor first.
Not taking away from the doctor and their experience and knowledge but fuck do nurses get the short end of the stick.
They do 95% of the work and rarely get the credit (or pay) they deserve.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the post hoc fallacy, in general.
Basically in OP’s case, I did this and something did or didn’t happen. Therefore, what I did caused that something to happen or not happen.
Another comment used a survivorship bias with people that survived when others died or just living longer than other people. That’s also an example of the post hoc fallacy. The idea that the survivor did something that caused them to live isn’t necessarily true. They couldn’t just got lucky.
It’s also the foundational fallacy that connects the president to economic outcomes. Ask any economist: the president can’t control the economy, and his influence is severely limited.
I can’t believe nobody has said religion. All of it. Praying to god being a prime example.
You know, I always used to think praying was incredibly stupid, and I’m sure plenty of people treat it in a way that’s… not really in the right spirit / ineffective? But recently it’s started to make a lot more sense to me. If you’re praying to god in an effort to directly influence the real world I think you’re misguided… If you think of prayer as a time to consider what you’re grateful for and what you want for the future, it actually seems like a really sensible mental health practice. To be clear, I am and always have been an atheist, and I don’t particularly like religions as a whole, but it seems like some of these things I’ve always found odd (like prayer) stem from something that could actually be reasonable and helpful but got corrupted by some game of telephone and people not understanding metaphors lol.
Prayer can be a powerful self meditation tool. It’s effectively a way to organize your thoughts by talking to yourself. What is not helpful is sending “thoughts and prayers” every time something bad happens without actually attempting to do anything to address the problem at hand.
Yeah, I can see how praying could influence reality by altering your perspective or your behavior, really just by reminding yourself regularly about the things you really value.
There’s obvious ones like “God please help me be a patient and considerate co-worker”, but even “God please give me a new awesome car” - someone who prays about that 4 times a day is going to be focused on saving for it. God helps those who help themselves and all that.
On the other hand “God please make a free car park for me outside the shop” ain’t helping anyone.
That depends on experience. Plenty of people have seen religious stuff while tripping, meditating, NDE etc.
And plenty of people believe stuff just because it’s popular to think that way. Which is arguably just as bad.
Placebo buttons.
Some appliances like elevators or traffic crossings cycle automatically, but they still have (non-functional) buttons. If the buttons are removed, people complain that the wait is too long. Let them push a button while they wait, and they’ll think it’s much quicker.
Some of these actually do have an effect, but it’s difficult to impossible for a person to know whether this particular one is a placebo button or not.
This is especially the case with elevator close door buttons. Those buttons are always hooked up, because they are needed during emergency operation with the fireman’s key. They are sometimes programmed to cycle the doors marginally faster under normal circumstances, but more often aren’t.
Also, some of the traffic crossing buttons don’t make the walk cycle come sooner, but they occasionally are needed to insert a walk cycle at all, because some intersections don’t trigger a walk cycle unless the button has been pressed.
Also, some of the traffic crossing buttons don’t make the walk cycle come sooner, but they occasionally are needed to insert a walk cycle at all, because some intersections don’t trigger a walk cycle unless the button has been pressed.
Some? In my area all the lights require a button press for a walk cycle. Even if the traffic lights turn red for the cars (e.g. in an intersection for cross-traffic), the pedestrian lights will stay red too unless the button was pressed.
Certainly around my area in a UK city there are plenty which automatically go to a green man even if no button was pressed. This is usually the case on more complicated intersections where in order to keep traffic flowing correctly that pedestrian crossing would be free at some point anyway, so they just put the green man cycle on by default. Of course they still put a button for pedestrian-satisfying reasons!
In my area (San Francisco Bay Area) it depends on how much pedestrian traffic is expected. I live in the suburbs and, as I said, the walking light only goes on if the button is pressed. But if I go to San Francisco itself, lights are all on a timer (and there are no buttons at all).
There is a set of lights near me at a cross roads which has an extra stream of traffic comkng from a row of shops off one of the roads so theres north south traffic, east west traffic and then traffic from the west that came from a little side road and out of the west entrance. If that makes sense. So 3 states the lights can be in.
Anyway, the lights are automatic, they cycle in the same pattern around the 3 states and the walk/cycle pedestrian lights follow that pattern. However, if a pedestrian presees the button, then after the extra stream of traffic from the shops has gone, an extra state is added where no cars can go in any direction and all of the pedestrian walk/cycle lights come on briefly allowi g pedestrians to cross in all directions.
Always found that mildly interesting.
I think you have the elevator example crossed. My random testing suggests the door open button always works. The close button sometimes is as you say, just to make people feel like they have a measure of control.
I think I’ve only seen one elevator that didn’t do anything immediately after pressing the close door button.
I think traffic lights depend on the skill of the person setting them up. They’ve got a bunch of sensors (car waiting over magnetic sensor, visual sensor detects something other than road in magic area, pedestrian button pressed, time of day, timer since last transition, emergency vehicle override) as input and different intersection states as output.
Someone could program a cycle to just ignore all of the sensors and run through the various states on a timer. Or they could make a more complex cycle loop that lengthens the main state at night, switches sooner if a sensor is triggered, and tries to be smart about it. Or you could go for an even more complex statistical model that not only takes sensor states into account but tries to predict those sensors for even more accuracy.
My guess is that there’s great variance in both the skills of the person doing the programming and their managers and politicians/administrators calling the shots. And that variance in skill includes ones who don’t bother trying anything more complex than the defaults as well as those who do but aren’t good at it (eg: I’ve noticed that some intersections make their main cycle longer at night and don’t cycle unless someone is waiting but make them wait longer than they would during the day when night time means that interrupting the main cycle affects fewer people so they make people wait on the side streets for no good reason).
And there’s also the question of persistence. If they need to be reprogrammed any time the power goes out, they might just go with the easier route if they can’t restore backups.
I’ve never encountered a traffic crossing that cycles when there’s no one waiting.
I think they’re regional. I don’t remember seeing one either, but I don’t know if that’s because I haven’t encountered it, or because I didn’t notice.
Herbal supplements, magnets, crystals, horoscopes…
My neighbor is big into essential oils.
Amazing.
“that’s the way we’ve always done it” at any job ever.
Well there’s the optimal way to do it for individuals working alone. And there’s also the optimal way to do it when working in a group. They can be pretty different.
And the way they tell you to do it is never either one of those.
Cargo cult mentality?
Like how island natives after WWII would build ritual airstrips to summon American cargo planes.
Did it work?
It did not. No more MREs and rifles.
The TSA
I actually think the TSA helps, a lot.
TSA fails 95% of their assessments
https://fee.org/articles/tsa-fails-95-of-the-time/
What they successfully do is pose enough of a barrier to entry that most people trying to skirt TSA don’t try. If they genuinely tried, they’d likely succeed
They do things like not knowing their own citizens, locking up innocent people and looking through their phone and making you believe you’re a liar while at the same time not knowing their own rules. They’re fantastic.
I X and it rained; for X in:
- Washed the car
- Hung out the washing
- Watered the garden
- Rain dance And we’re not clear on this one, but:
- Seeding clouds for rain
- Refilled the pool.
Nah this is that other thing. I want to say Survivorship bias but that’s just because I can’t think of the right term.
Edit: confirmation bias!
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You could throw a bit of “sunk cost fallacy” in there (he bought an anti-dragon whistle, he’s spending his time and energy blowing it),
And popularity bias (if anti-dragon whistles are popular)
And convention bias too of course (everybody knows that anti-dragon whistles keep dragons away. It’s right there in the name).
And authoritarian bias (if the authorities are recommending anti-dragon whistles)
Also, any evidence-based assertion-maker could be accused of making his assertion on insufficient evidence. Which might be the case here. But as opposed to what?
Hmm. What else? Specious reasoning?
But what we want is examples. Speak to me, awakened ones. Tell me what fools these sheeples are.
Post hoc fallacy
I always liked the expression “asteroid insurance”
“Specious reasoning” is all I can think of. That’s what Lisa Simpsons says when Homer thinks the Bear Patrol is working like a charm (because there’s not a bear in sight).
It’s a logical fallacy called “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”. The assumption that an event is caused/prevented by something that preceded it.
Nuclear weapons.
I think you’re missing the point of the post. Nuclear weapons are an actual deterrent, not just a perceived one.
Taking echinacia (sp?) to get rid of a cold. I’ve given up trying to tell my friends they’re wasting their money because they believe it works, because they start feeling better, and won’t be told that that was going to happen anyway.
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That sounds very wrong. And probably dangerous.
Can’t catch a cold of you’re dead!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
