Yesterday I confessed my addictions to woo and how I realized it was all a pack of lies and nonsense. It’s been hard to learn to think more critically and skeptically about pseudo-science (the fancy grownup term for woo). Unless someone teaches you how to think critically, there’s really no way to easily pick out the slick pack of lies and shiny bullshit for what it is.

For instance, I just found out last month that Airborne is not only pseudo-scientific and completely useless, but can also be harmful. And here I was, just the day before, trying to get my husband to take it for an oncoming cold. Sigh…. The battle never ends.

For me, my bullshit radar with religion is very sensitive. Then again, if it’s about an invisible man in the sky, it’s complete nonsense, so that’s pretty easy. But when it comes to products on the market, any kind of scientific sounding news or claim, I am less sure about what to accept or what to reject.

A couple of days ago, I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast and they took the time to talk about how to spot pseudo-science for what it is. Since the list is so important and helpful, I took the time to write it down for all of us. Hopefully this will make it much easier:

Some Main Features of Pseudo-Science by Dr. Steven Novella on the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Episode 164, September 10, 2008.

Read more…

Lately I’ve been talking to Jane. (not her real name) I am having trouble talking to her, and I think I figured out why. We knew each other about 10 years ago in a state far, far away. We were acquaintances, but we had a lot in common. (here’s where I tell you some dark secrets) We were into many different kinds of woo.

Woo: (n or adj) when you uncritically believe unsubstantiated or unfounded ideas. Short for woo woo, according to the Urban Dictionary, definition 4.

I was into reiki, divination, numerology, you name it. While I was an agnostic back then, I still clung to the idea of a kind of Universal Energy. Not really an intelligence, but kind of “magical” principles to energy that science just hadn’t quantified or qualified yet. I held to the beliefs that ancient societies knew secrets that had been lost. Like the Chinese were better at medicine than modern science, or the Mayans had some secret knowledge about the Universe that we were missing out on, as seen in their calendar stopping in 2012. Read more…