What's an unscientific opinion that you firmly hold?

When I drop something on the floor and then blow on it in short soft bursts, it's suddenly clean enough to consume.

Anything powerful enough to make you sick from a few seconds floor contact with the food is probably gonna get you anyway.
- Not if you blow on it.
  Right?
  ...Right?

Digital/no pressure buttons are completely unreliable when used to control a physical thing.

What makes you think that's an unscientific opinion?

Do NOT say the "Q" word at work. It's the one that is a synonym for silent. I will in fact beat you when it hits the fan.

Eating boogers strengthens your immune system.

I mean, it's plausible, because the idea of building your immune system is exposure to some of those things. Not trying to invalidate the other methods because those should be a better alternative. Some studies suggested boogers can help.

I am convinced that I will come down with cold/flu if I breath too much cold air. When I walk in the cold, I always wrap a scarf around my mouth and nose. If I don't, the cold air will give me a sore throat. That sore throat will act as a Petri dish for illness to develop and spread into my lungs or nose.

I know plenty of medical professionals and all of them tell me that that is not how it works, but I have a datum of proof. In my first year of university, I had a nasty, persistent respiratory infection during the late fall/early winter. To keep my throat warm while it was recovering, I started wearing a scarf and my illness went away quickly. After that, I started wrapping up whenever I was walking to class in the cold and never got sick again.

I am now used to wrapping my face in the cold and feel wrong without it. When I don't, it seems like I am more likely to come home with a scratchy throat. I can definitely say that many of my flus start in the throat (though it could just be that the first flu symptom I tend to notice is the sore throat).

Cold air tends to be very dry, which can most definitely irritate your nose and throat (among other body parts). That irritation and drying out can make the thin skin and mucous membranes more vulnerable to attack from bacteria and viruses.
The only really unscientific part of your post is that the cold air itself is not the direct cause of illness.
People with a strong immune system might not see a big difference, but if you are already more susceptible to getting sick, then the link to cold air may be more obvious to you.
One doctor informed me that I have a chronic inflammation of the throat, which half of our large northern city also have, and best I can do is protect the throat from cold air by breathing through the nose.
I'm also rather non-muscular, particularly in regard to the neck, and thus get cold easily in the parts that aren't layered with fat. Namely, if I have the window cracked open for fresh air in the autumn or spring while I sleep, the throat gets sore and I can develop a full-blown cold.
I've also been drinking lots of cold beverages this summer, and now I really seem to have a nasty inflammation in the throat, that leads to annoying irritation and cough. This is while I'm asocial, stay inside a lot and have little contact with people.
Wrapping your face up is a good way to block the germs that cause illness. You're basically just masking up.
- Except that I am using a very porous knit scarf as a mask and only masking up outdoors (the opposite of proper masking).

Flames on the side makes things go faster

"What's your scientific reasoning for that?"
"I'm 12."
I have magnetic flame decals on the side of my Minivan, and I can 100% confirm that it is track ready.
What if they're on the side of your face, and you have heaving breaths?
- Gotta go fast!
Red is the fastest color.

The reason the Space Force has woodland camouflage is because SG1 is real and every planet looks like British Columbia

Demons are real - negative entities that attach to humans and feed off misery, pleasure, and anger.

The Costanza Rule is real, but any attempt to utilize it is a paradox.

Rule: any decision I make is the wrong decision because I made it therefore I should always do the opposite.

But to do the opposite is also a choice I am making and therefore it too will be the wrong choice.

Reminds me of a trolley problem variant I saw once. It went roughly like this:
A trolley is headed for Track A, where a single person is tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever and cause the trolley to switch to Track B, which enters a tunnel that you cannot see inside. Track B might have 3 people tied to the tracks, or it might be free of people. You can't see which.
Two hours ago, a perfect prediction machine inside the tunnel predicted whether you would pull the lever.
If it predicted that you would pull the lever (sending the trolley into the tunnel), then it tied 3 people to Track B, thus setting it up so pulling the lever would kill 3 people.
If it predicted that you would not pull the lever, then it ensured Track B is free of obstacles.
The perfect prediction machine is guaranteed to have made the correct prediction. Do you pull the lever?
- That's not a problem. It is just an exercise in reading. Two possibilities remain. In one, you kill 1 person. In the other, you kill 3 persons. (the empty track "exists" only if you do not use it).
- To me it seems like the only choice here is no choice.
  I would flip a coin (or some other suitably true random mechanism) and decide based on that.
  If the outcome has already been predicted then at least the decision was not mine.
- Is the perfect prediction machine AI? If so, I pull the lever each time.
- Time pulling the lever so the track switches while the trolley is over it, rolling the trolley. Use the distraction to steal the perfect prediction machine, which gave the false prediction because it's gained sapience and wanted to escape the insane scientists who are tying people to trolley tracks. New robot friend and I go to Vegas.
- Assuming that I am aware of the perfect predictability machine and it's affect on the situation: I move to the other side of the lever and push it. They predictability machine would be correct in its prediction that I would not pull the lever and nobody has to die.
- With no other information on how likely each is, and assuming the likelihood of each prediction stays the same, you should never pull the lever. The expected number of people in the tunnel is 1.5.
  If the probability of there being zero people in the tunnel gets above 66%, you should pull the lever every time (the expected number of people in the tunnel drops below 1).
The only effective way to utilize it is if you're not Costanza. A bystander can have a perfect life by observing the Costanza and choosing opposite at every opportunity.
The real question is this: what if our universe is a giant Truman Show, and you're the sacrificial Costanza that allows another whole civilization to live in perfect peace and harmony?
This is why I have a wife, and vehemently disagree with her on every meaningful topic before ultimately saying "fine do whatever you want, I want nothing to do with this." This seems to have broken the curse.
The hard part is that you have to be opposed to the marriage as well. She has to choose you, latch on, and then yandere you down the aisle against your will.
- The hard part is that you have to be opposed to the marriage as well. She has to choose you, latch on, and then yandere you down the aisle against your will.
  I've been single for the last decade, resisting it that much will be impossible lol
Also, it's not a lie if you believe it.

We have higher dimensional organs and we can't see them because, well, they're from a higher dimension. The soul is one of these organs

Sounds interesting. What other organs do you think fall under this category?
- I've been told my organ has helped hundreds of men and women reach a higher state of being.
  My brain, when I was a professor.
  /boomerhuumer

Patrick's Law: If a comment thread on the internet is more than 7 replies deep, it's a slap-fight that's best avoided.

There's also a small chance it's a lame train of inside jokes, or a string of Monty Python quotes you've seen a thousand times before.
I'll start:
"This. Is an *Ex-*parrot!"
- No he isn't, he's a very naughty boy.
one
- Is

JESUS WAS AN ALIEN, AND WE STAPLED HIM TO A TREE.

NOW THEY AIN'T GON COME BACK.

That explains the miracles. He took on a humanoid form so he wouldn't frighten their simple minds, and the "miracles" he performed were just him using contemporary alien tech to heal illnesses and turn water into wine. Dude was just trying to help advance humanity, and they killed him anyway.
Imagine the insane technology we'd have today if the Romans just let him do his thing.
- "You guys know where I'm going with all this, right?" -Giorgio, his hair beckoning

There are people who are always lucky, and those who are unlucky. The lucky ones tend to win more coin flips, have less accidents, and if they fail it will be upwards.

"Luck is where preparation meets opportunity."
That has really stuck with me. It isn't so much that some people "always get lucky' it's more true to say they are more prepared to catch the opportunities that happen.
- I've known plenty of very prepared people over the last 60 years to know that opportunity doesn't show up for everyone nor can they make it happen. There is always some luck, good or bad, that happens in people's lives.
Maybe the win percentage of lucky and unlucky people are the same, but lucky people win when it matters most, while unlucky people when there is nothing important at stake
I'd use myself as a counter example. I'm pretty lucky in life. I've got a decent job, I can pay the bills, I've got a wonderful wife and supportive, friendly family. I'm doing better than the vast majority of humanity.
Games of chance? Unbelievably bad. Statistical anomaly. It once took me 25+ tries to win on a 30% odds lottery ticket.
- I'm pretty much the same, but for the games of chance; As long as the prize isn't monetary, I tend to do really good. Coin flip because two people asked the day off and only one can take it? Sorry for the other guy.
  Another thing that I'm really good at is pushing a button. If for some reason something doesn't work after pushing a button (either computers or machinery), just complain to me it isn't working. I'll ask if I can try, and somehow it always works. Actually a very usefull skill when I worked as an operator in various chemical plants. Coworkers had mixed feelings about it tough.

The moment you become rich, you will absolutely be contacted by the shadowy ring of other rich people so they can force you in one way or another not to out their pedo ring. Even going as far as assassinating you if blackmail doesn't work.

People using genAI without a care came about as a result of the genAI companies making millions of fake accounts across all of mainstream social media and performing the greatest astroturfing ever, in their favor.

The majority of actual human interaction in the future will be secretly held in spaces run under things like Usenet, I2P, Gopher, etcetera. A way to detect bots/genAI will become a game of whack-a-mole and it'll help keep these treasures safer than 99% of the internet.

Anubis ( or whatever it's called ) becomes a government funded project, with the goal being that government websites are spared from rampant AI bots crashing their sites. The downside is that it would most likely become closed source in order to ensure genAI companies cannot come in and use the source code to break through it.

Wikipedia joins one of the alternate internet things ( maybe I2P ) and poisons its own services, leaving ample notice of what they're gonna do, but not where they're going, to keep safe from the bots. It'll become a race to find where and when Wikipedia becomes available again. This is more of a firm pipedream, but I hope they do it for their own good.

Visiting the clear web essentially becomes a crime amongst all tech savy people and you'll absolutely be casted out of the safe spaces if you venture out of a genAI free Haven.

Or most likely out of everything, in a decade or less, the clock strikes midnight and once the dust settles, everyone left alive will be afraid when the wind blows.

Unscientific in a different way, but I think the universe is basically a digestive organ for some impossibly unknowable, incredible higher dimension being.

Like the big bang is when it feeds or otherwise takes in energy, then as trillions of years pass and entropy takes hold that is it effectively digesting that energy.

The great A'Tuin
Interesting!
I mean, science doesn't say it's not that.

The moon is closer to me than the Eiffel tower since I can see the first and not the second.

If the Eiffel tower was as large as the moon, you'd be able to see it.
Right before Europe turns into a giant crater.
- Would the curvature not get in the way at a certain distance?
  EDIT
  I was thinking if the moon was somehow 'resting' on the earth's surface. If you head West, to around the Boston area, it would be eventually be obscured by the curvature of the earth.
- or if the moon takes up the whole sky(really close), the earths crust nearest to moon would start to destabalize and liquiefy, and melt.

The soul is a thing, and it's what gives you consciousness

I like the idea that we're interconnected 'nodes' collectively experiencing life from our own viewpoint, but part of a larger consciousness. But fucks knows.

I can tell American society is getting exponentially more stupid by how many more cheeky vanity license plates I see as time goes on.

The moment I catch a driver who has the bumper sticker or window decal of a stick figure with the 'It' on the right side humping it, that's a person with 60 IQ right there.
I raise you sovcit plates.

I got one - and it’s the only conspiracy theory I give any credence to.

All of Helen Keller’s feats were utter bullshit and were a circus side show to bring money to her family. It’s the perfect “you can do anything if you just put your mind to it” fairytale. Like hell she flew an airplane, ain’t no way she wrote a book.

Before anyone provides evidence of the contrary, I will not accept it no matter how damning it is. Hence the “firmly hold.”

It’s depressing to me that one of the top upvoted comments here is ‘there’s no way a deaf blind person could have been literate.’
You’re absolutely correct that her legacy has been used as inspiration porn, but that doesn’t reflect on her intellectual abilities at all, just what stories society and the powerful want us to hear. Even during her own life Keller experienced exactly that once she became a socialist, and suddenly all the newspapers and people who went on at length about how capable she was suddenly believed her unable to reason because she was blind and deaf. Keller herself even spoke out against using her story as a way to tell people that anyone can do anything, and specifically that the poor didn’t have the opportunities she had.
- You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
  Besides this is a safe space for batshit unprovable theories.
- Mate. Look at where you’re at. People aren’t upvoting me because I’m right, they’re upvoting me because I answered the question.
  there’s no way a deaf and blind person could have been literate
  Keep your words out of my mouth. You’re just looking for an excuse to be offended.
This "your evidence has no power here" is exactly the energy I was looking for lol.
That's a wild one I like it
At least you believe she was real unlike half the women on dating apps in this godforsaken state

Dogs are boys and cats are girls

They asked for unscientific things.
“Have you ever seen a cat penis???” - Troy from Community
- I was thinking just the other day that Joel McHale is probably going to be Leonard's age by the time the movie drops. Like tears....in rain...

Sad tummy+lemon lime soda = healed

Try kefir, it's magical for upset stomach.
- So the kind of upset stomach I’m thinking about is like stomach flu. I know you’re not supposed to have acidic or junky things when you’re so sick you can barely crawl, not sure why it’s the only thing I can tolerate when I’m sick. Hence I felt it was a pretty good answer. :p
I sip ginger ale, which works if it has real ginger.
- Trouble is most of them are sickly sweet.

In countries with over a few million citizens, the political hierarchies quickly get too far away from the people there, accumulating corruption.

Hopefully none. I do hold some that you could call a-scientific, or something, because existing science has no impact either way. Like what kinds of foods are good or bad. Or morality.

Aliens have quarantined the solar system to prevent contamination of the universe by humanity. They are waiting for us to incinerate ourselves and keeping the other races safe until we finish the job.

As we are not fast enough to their liking, they send Musk to put so much junk in our orbit, so that we may never reach space.

The best way to find something you've lost is to buy another one, then you'll find the original.

Antivaxxers are chaos cultists who want to share Grandfather Nurgle's gifts with humanity.

Sometimes my dead dogs visit me in my dreams. I know they're supposed to be dead in the dream and I give them lots of pets and belly rubs. Then I wake up feeling great. Yes I'm 99% sure it's a product of my unconscious mind but sometimes...

All animals have limited intelligence. Humans are animals, therefore humans have limited intelligence. Take a chimp or a dolphin and try to teach them calculus. Now imagine what realities lie beyond human understanding. There's a whole epistemological realm of the unknowable out there.

The best way to find something you’ve lost is to buy another one, then you’ll find the original.
Or lose yet another part of your [object], then the previous lost part will mysteriously be found again. That's kid-me with toys lol.
thats probably why we wont break out of post-fusion tech, if we even get there. let alone generating antimatter which is probably the next step after fusion, or FTL tech. in many franchises it always involve aliens help who surpassed that.

I don't believe there's a spoons worth of plastic in your brain. Ain't no way. It's suspiciously sensational, and confirms something we all believe to be true (plastics bad, humans reckless, etc.). I have zero evidence to the contrary but im pretty confident that in a few years to a decade it will be debunked.

Good news: it's already been debunked! Or at least called into question.
https://youtu.be/MedC_v-dEbY?t=48 description of the myth
https://youtu.be/MedC_v-dEbY?t=111 calling it into question
SciShow on youtube is well worth a subscription, their videos are well researched and fact checked.
- Oh nice! Yeah I'm a fan of the Green brothers they're legit.
it's in your balls
- Hey at least I put my ball-spoon there myself

I don't care how many studies are done on food safe plastics I still don't like the idea of using them on my kitchen. That's not to say I avoid them 100% but I do what I can to avoid them within reason. Like I feel after the whole BPA scare and banning them from use in food applications is a temporary thing and that it's a matter of time until we find a problem with the new BPA-free liners.

100%, I avoid using plastics as much as possible around anything that I ingest that involved heat somewhere in the production process. Not entirely possible, but I do what I can.
- Ya, I don't believe you can completely avoid it. I'm with you though, reduce the use of it in the kitchen and with food wherever possible.
  Not only do I avoid plastic where heat is invloved but I also try and avoid plastic in places where mechanical friction or cutting is involved. Using steel mixing bowls and wooden cutting boards are two big ones for me to avoid adding bits of plastic to my food.

Without the hate speech and constant invasive political discourse, most people on the internet would lose interest and go away.

Counterpoint: memes, cats, and memes about cats!
Sounds like my idea of curating a social platform devoid of "-ist's and -ism's" is doomed to failure then lol
- We've gone from "sex sells" to "hate sells" and yes, that's the sad side effect. I haven't used Facebook in ages but I hear it's not useful for talking to your friends anymore. If such a platform existed I'd go there but I think it would just be you and me.
- How dare you!!! It should be ILLEGAL to not include -ism! You filthy piece of dirty filth! That's ism ism!
This is not unscientific. This is exactly what science shows. Re-read the title.

That if you can't find something or something doesn't work, it will continue to be missing/not work until you complain about it to someone, at which point it will start working/show up and you look silly.

Kyle's Law is harsh, but fair (and rather annoying)

"titta"

Not answering directly the post, but something in line with it: I believe not all (maybe most of) knowledge is scientific, but that doesn't invalidate it. A lot of things can't be studied by the scientific method, but people intuitively understood and learned about it along the centuries.

This should be common sense, but society has gone crazy about considering only science as knowledge and now ignores valuable learnings that sometimes are more right then science itself.

This should not be confused with negating science (like global warming deniers): when you can study something by the scientific method normally you will get deeper and with less mistakes with it. But when you don't, you can still have knowledge by other methods

Do you have any examples?

People were happier in the stone age than they are in first world countries today.

Our brains did not evolve for the lifestyle we're living today.
I sure as fuck would be happier out hunting, gathering and making handcrafted tools during the day, then telling stories by the campfire wrapped in a fur at night.
Even if there's no toilet paper, I could get mauled by a bear every day, and if not, the tribe will leave me behind on the next migration when I'm too old and weak to keep up.

I'd rather live 30-60 years like that than edit another Excel sheet. Sadly, our "civilization" made that way of life completely impossible.

the tribe will leave me behind on the next migration when I'm too old and weak to keep up.
FWIW, this part is almost certainly not true.
https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/these-4000-year-old-bones-reveal-a-shocking-secret-about-humanitys-earliest-caregivers
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/878896381/ancient-bones-offer-clues-to-how-long-ago-humans-cared-for-the-vulnerable
https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2017/ancient-spinal-injury-a-story-of-survival.php
These are just a handful of these types of stories, there's loads more if you want to search for them. But the upshot is: your family or tribe would have taken care of you to the best of their ability, for as long as they could, and you would have been given a decent burial when you died.
- I know that, but what choice is there when the reindeer leave and Grandpa can't walk anymore?
I think we all feel that way from time to time, but the way I know it isn't true is that the closer you actually are to losing civilization and the comforts it provides the less you want it. Freezing your ass off in the rain? Nobody craves the stone age then.
The level of violence was fantastically high like worse than a war torn country all the time for everyone. Along with all the starvation and disease which nobody could do anything about because even washing hands or what a disease is is completely unknown.
Starving by age 5, getting your head bashed in by 20 or a really ugly disease death before 30. Also you spent all your time struggling to have enough to eat continually.
To be fair, stone age life has some drawbacks too. Few would want to potentially die to a failing tooth, die to any kind of disease or starve to death if winter is harsher than expected.
- infection, and predation, and probably starvation, or poisoning from eating a poisonous plant or animal, or dying from venom. not so much happyness.
- I agree that few would choose that life.
  I still believe those who were forced to live that life led happier (if shorter) lives.
- I think of something like a compound bone fracture. Today, with modern medicine, that's a routine and easily treatable injury. But at any point up til just a few centuries ago, a compound fracture was a death sentence. A clean single break could be reset, but multiple pieces require surgical intervention and alignment. And that just couldn't be done safely. The physicians then just didn't know how to prevent infections enough to make that surgery survivable. Plus they didn't have x-rays to guide them, etc.
  One day and you take a fall. Nothing extraordinary. You don't fall off a giant cliff hundreds of feet to your death. You fall off a small 4' high ledge. You land wrong, and you break your leg in a compound fracture. And that's it. You're now a dead man crawling. There's nothing anyone on Earth can do to help you.
Yeah, I kinda agree with this. The usual argument against this is usually something along the lines of "but you'd probably die of dysentery by the age of 40". But I think I'd be okay with that. Better to have lived a short life outside an office than to live to be a 100 spending 45 years in an office.
- Better to have lived a short life outside an office than to live to be a 100 spending 45 years in an office.
  That's a choice you can still make today. What's keeping you from doing so?
Relevant

That death isn’t the end. It might be the end of a physical group of cells but what we experience as our own consciousness lives on. Just not in this same form. And that those who have passed are communicating but we don’t pick up on the same vibrations inside of these bodies.

We’re also not in the same vibration to pick up any of our own memories of before inhabiting our bodies.

A huge amount of people who have NDEs seem to report much of this in common.

That and there is a plethora of dark energy and matter we cannot perceive. Which is scary creepy when I think about it too much. Like if this were a computer program, we’ve only physically taken up an observed 5% of the disk space. Can’t get my mind around that.

I don't agree with you, but I think it'd be pretty rad if dark matter was GHOSTS.
- What I’m finding interesting is the more I look into consciousness studies, I believe in ghosts less and less.
  Remnants …maybe? I mean the consciousness is here, I just don’t believe they exist as what we call a ghost. that it is a spirit that hasn’t ‘moved on’ to whatever form it takes after which again, is never really explained to what it moves onto. The dark matter? Interesting concept.
  we just can’t observe it…yet . So who knows what makes up the dark matter while we exist in this current consciousness. Who knows, maybe it’s our real ‘bodies’ making that up and we just can’t see it. Maybe that big old void is just you or me or anyone. And we just have these little flesh masks on while living in this simulation.
Personally, panpsychism makes sense to me. Our brains are what make us thinking individuals with memories etc, but the whole universe is conscious. So after we die, we return to pure awareness (without thought or memory)
- Yes that one is rather interesting concept. That everything is conscious. Or all encompassing.
  On that note there’s also the realization that science has not yet detected where the ‘mind’ actually inhibits the body as once believed . As there are many animated creatures with no brain. And there are humans who have lead a very normal life with very little brain matter clung to the skull bone.
  the mind possibly doesnt even take space in the body at all. Maybe we’re dipping our toe into this form or whatever.

Speed limits are set below actual safe speeds for roads to drive local government revenue through speeding tickets.

Safe speeds are not whatever speed is comfortable to drive a given street. Part of the posted limit is considering how much of a wrecking ball a vehicle would be if it suddenly left the road.
The limits in suburbs where I live is 50km/h. The roads are wide enough to land a plane on and you could very easily drive most of them full throttle as they are flat and straight. With that in mind I still think it should be 30km/h.
When I was a kid a car hit a snowbank and was launched straight into someone's living room not far from my house. If they were driving 30km/h, that nightmare scenario pretty much becomes an impossibility.
We just need to stop making residential roads that look like drag strips. More curves, more trees close to the road, more speed bumps. I've driven in some places in Europe where it's very clear that it's unsafe to drive any faster than about 30 km/h due to roadside obstacles. I think that design is much safer than the NA standards.
- Speed limits are not for how fast any particular vehicle and driver could negotiate the road. They are for all the other factors in road use. How many roads/driveways intersect the road, what are the sightlines, what other users (bikes, pedestrians) use the road. Does weather make a difference? How homogeneous are the vehicle types and driving ability of those users? People who speed usually vastly overestimate their abilities to react - and then blame the other guy for what would have been prevented had they been driving at the speed limit.
As a bicyclist and pedestrian, many roads are above safe levels. Others it's well below. Tbh it's all arbitrary
they have speed cameras/ traps. the new one is the speed cameras, in the west coast they placed this at odd places , like streets or area that have very low car/bicycle traffic it doesnt make sense. cant go 25-30mph in an area where one side is blocked off by a fence so no sudden pedestrians are car. it automatically captures your cars, license and attempts to give you a ticket after a certain amount of times you "pass the limit". the city is most likely desperate for more revenue from traffic tickets if they do this.
I mean we have this as a real thing with "speed traps" where the limit just drops 10mph for zero reason for half a mile so cops can loiter and give tickets
But I feel as though speeds are already too high for the dumbfucks in giant SUVs who got their license 40 years ago and have lost every braincell related to safe driving due to a crippling alchohol addiction. I propose a "fast lane v2 electric boogaloo" on highways or long stretches thats only available once you take a special, much harder driving test that needs to be renewed every 6 months or so set at 120mph(extream flats) and can slow to 60mph(extremely weavy mountainside turns)

Reincarnation

I just can't get over the idea of:

Nothing --> Existing --> Nothing

So I figured, an unscientific philosophical guess, that existence is more like:

Noting --> Existing --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> [repeating forever]

Maybe "souls" is just an energy.

Einstein said energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So maybe, when we die, we become an energy that, by some ways we can't yet understand, just randomly becomes a part of another living being... maybe a human, maybe non-human, maybe this energy stays nearby here on Earth, maybe it somehow goes to a random alien planet and you become an alien the "next life"... who knows?

Or maybe this is just another coping mechanism my brain cane up with in face of the knowledge of certain death, influenced by the Eastern philosophy that I grew up with? Whatever...

Iirc some of the stoics believed in a similar idea. They thought the world was deterministic and it simply happened over and over the exact same way every time.
On the note of energy not being created or destroyed. The energy in your brain doesn’t wait till the universe ends to leave. It continues moving as heat or chemical reactions when we die just like it did before. The order of the system it’s in breaks down, but all that energy keeps existing forever.
Since you emit energy as infrared light just by being warm, and infrared is capable of leaving the atmosphere. It is possible, that just by stepping outside, some of your energy has already left the planet and made it to other astronomical bodies in our solar system.
If we assume there is life on any of the moons or planets or asteroids nearby, who knows, maybe some of the energy that used to be part of you has already become part of a new, alien, life form.
Many scientists concluded the conservation of energy long before Einstein.
But
There are more and more people every year.
- A alien planet got obliterated by their sun's expansion (or maybe they nuked themselves), so their energy/soul was just chillin around in space until there was enough biological vessels for them to get reincarnated.
  At least that's my headcannon on this, totally unscientific, theory.
If it helps there is absolutely no reason to believe there is a privileged NOW and everything before is gone. It's like believing that walking over a path destroys the path behind you somehow. So ultimately after a fashion you are more eternal than stars. You are an edifice erected in eternity from inception to destruction. Einstein didn't believe in reincarnation but he did believe in a block universe.
The Egg by Andy Weir

I fully understand that it's correlation, not causation, but I believe some inanimate objects want to work well, and others want to work poorly. In that same vein, there are people that inanimate objects respect and work well for, and there are people that inanimate objects dislike or enjoy aggravating.

At that point you are simply an Adeptus Mechanicus

Tailgaters (people who drive too close behind another vehicle) are idiots.

Cops are liars.

Anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy nutters, are anti-science cretins.

these are all truism, the OP wants unscientific opinions!
I agree that tailgating is unsafe and one could view the behavior as idiodic but there's usually a reason it's happening... to signal to you to move the fuck over.
If you are camping in the passing lane of a highway/freeway - I argue you are just as much of an idiot.
- Risking everyone's lives because you want someone to move over is not acceptable.
  OP is right and you should think about that.
- Most instancss I have experienced of tailgating are when people want to drive too fast or unsafely:
  I'm going more or less exactly 50 kph, which is the speed limit in the city, but someone thinks because the street is broad and straight they should be able to go 70+.
  I know the route and know some dangerous curve or sudden intersection behind a curve is up ahead so I slow down but someone behind me doesn't like it.
  Sure it happens that people are going too slow. Even then it's no excuse to tailgate. All that does is make everything less save for everyone including you. You can honk or overtake at the next opportunity, but all you achieve by tailgating is risk your own life.
- Wow. Where did this fantasy situation come from?
- Seconded. The number of people who stay in the left lane at or below the speed limit, watching people pass them on the right to get by, is too damn high. I have no idea what possesses someone to do this but in my area there is no shortage of them.

The Warp from Warhammer is real. Every mind in the universe is linked in an invisible, non-physical way, and the _{collective vibes} of those minds feed back into the physical world, creating a loop where everything people believe slowly becomes more 'true'.

Check out the comic series Department of Truth. It takes that idea further, and weaves common conspiracies into it.
so basically a psychic hivemind.

Just psychological failings, self-confidence issues and such I know are wrong. Firmly held, but wrong.

…Otherwise it feels like an oxymoron.

If I step on a crack, I'll break my Mama's back.

My moral values, such as valuing reducing suffering as far as possible, qualify I suppose.

All men are equal

Sunscreen causes skin cancer.

I know it's probably not true, and I wear sunscreen when I need to, but it just feels wrong slathering all those chemicals on my skin.

I fully believe it causes blood and bone cancer. The aerosol kind, due to benzene. My husband has polycythemia Vera secondary we think could have been caused by sunscreen. We live in a tropical area so we need it year round. Multiple doctors have mentioned it as well as a lawsuit we heard about locally.
- I am sorry to hear that :(
  Benzene is certainly a scary chemical and I hope things improve for you both.
- bone cancer is a different type of cancer than leukemia, its usually found in the long bones in growing/adolescent people, its why you see its always associated with the legs, extremely rare instance was found in the ribs or elsewhere. interesting to know how much benzene is in the spray, it usually associated with industrial exposure in a non-circulating room. sorry for the diagnosis.
  i had a cousin that never smoked, or had 2nd hand smoke but one day developed progressive coughing, with fever, and then blood in the sputum, turns out it was lung cancer that went to both lungs. hes like a gamer type so its a shutin, apparently its rare, because smoking causing specific type and its predictable, its also more likely better prognosis since it would pretty obvious symptoms, but its not so obvious in non-smokers so it displays as advanced case. we theorized it could be in house chemicals, like cleaners, i wonder if its RADON exposure since hes inside all the time, but they dont have a basement though, no asthma or allergies. the mom is less exposed, since she often goes outside all the time.
Tbh I wouldn't be surprised. The bigger question is, does it cause more cancer than it prevents
Probably does since the sunscreen makers have been lying for years about how much protection their product actually offers. People slathered with 30 or 50 when it was really only 5 or 10.
- Note that the difference was much less than the difference between 50 -> 5 and it was not true across all brands
not exactly but i think companies were caught lying about the suncreen, how much protection it gives, some gives next to none. and white people are acting like they are immune to sunlight and in the sun for a long periods of time,.

I’ve been playing around with this idea I have called “n-link civic literacy” it’s an unscientific measure of civic literacy (how good are you at extracting and understanding information from the news) that works by measuring the number of links it takes to successfully obscure bullshit from the reader.

Did you read a headline, form an opinion and react to it without reading the article? Then you are -1 link literate. Do you open the article but believe it’s claims without checking the source material? Then you are 0 link literate. Click through to the study cited by the article? 1 link literate.

Probably would not work for edge cases, but I think could work to get a rough measure of the civic literacy of a community.

I only read your first sentence and I disagree with you.
I'm down with this.
I'd add ability to perceive bias and credible reporting.
I only read your first sentence and I agree with you.

I firmly believe some days you wake up and the world just fucking hates you, yet the next day everything is chill. ¯(ツ)/¯

On those days that the world just hates you .... stay in bed until the next day.

If you have a thing, and you cut it at a diagonal, you get more thing.

Grated carrots are not food.

There's a story here. I disagree but want to hear it.
- It's like eating wet sawdust.

The firmness of my opinions is proportional to how much they have been tested.

The universe is deterministic. Quantum Mechanics doesn't really disagree with this, it's just not as popular an interpretation as the other ones. Even if deterministic QM interpretations eventually end up being ruled out rigorously, maybe we could someday "poke through" to the underlying substrate, like a video game character figuring out the seed for the RNG that determines their universe.

Strong agree. What requires a larger logical leap: that everything is random and quantum states can propagate instantaneously across any distance regardless of the speed of light and without any theoretical mechanism beyond math, or that time is an illusion and the universe has hidden non-local variables?
No idea how particle physicists can sleep at night just accepting the Copenhagen Hypothesis because the math works and it says not to worry about how.
- There's also superdeterminism.
I agree with you and would even go as far to say that it is the most popular class of interpretations: Everettian and hidden variable theories are both deterministic, and the only interpretations more popular are, when you really get down to it, more like statements of agnosticism than interpretations in their own right.
I don't really understand QM. At a human level, does this affect free will?
- IMO free will is commonly misunderstood. It's not an absolute property, it's a relative statement. In other words, something doesn't "have" free will, the term is merely shorthand for "behavior that can't be predicted". To me, a rock doesn't have free will because I can use relatively simple physics to predict its behavior perfectly. Other humans have much more free will because it's much harder to predict their behavior. A bug is somewhere in the middle. To a superhuman intelligence (supercomputer, aliens, deity, take your pick), humans don't have free will, because our behavior can be perfectly predicted.
  That squares with my opinion on QM in that even if deterministic interpretations of QM are eventually rigorously ruled out, I would still be of the opinion that if we could poke through the underlying substrate and query an intelligence there, our behavior would be perfectly predictable. Much like a video game character discovering the math behind the RNG that controls their universe. So they're kind of orthogonal concepts, but somewhat related.
- Not really; as far as science can tell, human behavior comes from brain chemistry/architecture, which is very unlikely to be affected by quantum effects
Quantum mechanics is made up because physicist can't figure out math.
- Everything in science is made up, including math. Then it is tested if it passes scrutiny.

Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) was a great game.

Santa Claus is real, and the reason why most of you don't believe in him anymore is because you were naughty kids.

The only reason I still believe in him is because I heard the sleigh bells. I was a naughty child, too.

I'm no medicinologist but, anecdotally, I am convinced that anti biotics help recover from the flu much much faster, and can also help prevent complications.

My home country was pretty lax on drug enforcement, and doctors would prescribe antibiotics if your fever hadn't broken in ~3 days (or sooner if you nagged them enough). Getting started on anti biotics would lead to recovery in a day or two at most.

The govt. bodies are getting stricter now, and it's harder to get antibiotics. Pretty much everyone around me has longer and longer recovery times. In just the last two years, 3 people I know (granted, they're 60-70 year olds) have had to be hospitalized (2 pneumonia, 1 I don't remember) after their condition deteriorated.

I know that's it's widely accepted that antibiotics don't help fight the flu, but it's my pulled-it-out-of-my-ass hypothesis that it does help ward off all the other crap allowing the immune system to fight the viruses more effectively leading to faster recovery.

Also, in my home country we used to get paracetamol/acetaminophen injections when the fever spiked too much. But I'm currently in Canada and the recommended "just eat soup and hydrate" is BS. We're just left to fend for ourselves with no option minimize harm /discomfort/symptoms unless you're on deaths door. I'm guessing that most of the rest of the developed world is like this too?

Sincerely, Suffering from flu

Oh boy. I mean, I guess you’re following the prompt you made…but woof.
- Yeah, I know that it sounds ridiculous. I am almost certainly wrong lol. I just want something to make this coughing stop though -- I don't care if it's opium like I'm in the 19th century, or if it's a sugar pill pretending to be an anti viral.
Even if that worked, the problem is that we're already overusing antibiotics and breeding all kind of multiresistant bacteria. We have to use them sparingly or we'll run out of usable antibiotics in the near future.
- Crazier idea: let's abuse the hell of one and only one antibiotic. Select the antibiotic that has so many resistances that it's practically useless in a clinical setting. Then prescribe THAT antibiotic to anyone who wants an antibiotic for the flu. The doc can truthfully tell them they're being prescribed an antibiotic. They get their big fat placebo, and nothing of value is lost.
- How much over use of anti biotics (and related issues) is from humans and how much of it is from farming? Is a human taking antibiotics for 3 days a year really the issue when farmers use it like it's straw on a daily basis?
- This is the answer.
Have you heard of the placebo effect?
You're not the only one who thinks so. Never tried it myself, but I've heard the same story from several people. Sure anecdotal evidence is not evidence, and so on. I'm convinced there is some truth to that, but not because of the direct causality.
Maybe it's a strong placebo (most likely). If you look into placebo effect you'll see it can be really powerful. Or there is something else in the human body that antibiotics stimulate. Like it's not directly attacking the virus, but doing something else that makes it easier to recover.
... no mention of whether you got the flu vaccine this year. The most important piece of this puzzle.
- I did, over a month ago.

Clinical Depression isn't real, and psychotherapy can makes mental health worse by keeping the mind focused on problems.

Yeah, that's pretty unscientific. Fuck right off with that one, buddy.
This one seems really dangerous for some people to believe.
Presumably YOU aren't clinically depressed so this is like refusing to believe in women because you personally don't have a vagina.
Hey, I didn't know my mom was on Lemmy. 💀
"Just go outside, son!"
The outside: Literally ICE Agents everywhere

Climate change denial is a psy-op by reptilians who want to make the world warmer because they're cold blooded. Anti-vax influencers are there to cull the xenophobes before the reptilians come out of the egg.

Okay maybe I really want to believe there are cool reptiles who are kinda dumb but ultimately want to be our friends because otherwise we're making ourselves stupider and deader and we don't even get to meet scaley twinks.

Döner macht schöner.

Bananas are awful. Terrible texture and taste, too many calories.

The best way to eat banana is as dry chips, sprinkled with Indian spices. Raw bananas are trash compared to that, though I do tolerate them as quick snacks.
Assuming that you are either North-American or European, I assume that you mean the Cavendish variety. I know several people who claim that those are horrible when you have tasted the more local varieties. The Cavendish is easy to transport and has a long shelf life, but apparently, the taste is inferier to other races.

“Space Lord” by Monster Magnet is a classic banger for the ages and it’s a tragedy that it’s been all but lost to time.

Negasonic Teenage Warhead is so good that they named (created) the comic book character after the song, not the other way around.
They still play it on their concerts, thought. Really cool to see it live.

I have a pet theory on air humidity and flu or cold. Apparently the scientific consensus is that cold and flu are more prevalent in drier air. However, I see an uptick in both when the temperature is low, but the humidity is 90+%. It is purely anecdotal, but there you go.

In addition to what the other commenter said, when the outside is cold and 95% humid, the inside of a building would be warm and far drier. So the inside humidity % is much lower than 95%. Maybe this contributes to the issue?
You might actually both be saying the same thing here. Caveat being that I have no idea what the science says about cold/flu, but when talking about humidity when the air is colder it is drier. 90% humidity at 35F is not the same as 90% at 85F. As the air cools it is able to hold less moisture. So your observation that there's an uptick during colder weather at a higher relative humidity could be the same as saying it's more likely in drier air, because the air is drier when it's cold, even when the relative humidity shows the same percentage.
colder air tends to be drier, because theres little to no evaporation, plus you also stop sweating which is another factor. atopic dermatitis is pretty bad during late winter and when it ends. cold temperature also constricts your bronchial tubes slightly too, if you allergies, or ashtmatic its worst, so that induces coughing more. warm temperature would cause your lungs/tubes to dilate so to allow more air in. also the fact that allergies, cold/flu and even covid causes your lung to produce thick sputum which triggers the cough response.
normal sputum from allergie sis clear. while infections is thick and white, or yellow midly brown, sometimes tinge of blood. alot of green means it could be bacterial pneumonia.

The universe was created. Not suggesting any particular creation account, just mathematically it makes more sense that it wasn't random. And anyone who believes in things like a cyclic universe or infinite universes to explain it is just afraid of being associated with religion (as we have no real evidence to support those theories).

mathematically it makes more sense
Care to show your work?
- Not really. I sat down years ago and actually did it, but it's not something I kept. I elaborate on my reasoning in this comment, though.
I recently realized that the concept of “before” is an assumption we try to place on the universe without any basis that it exists outside the universe.
Like we are used to deterministic phenomena. Effect follows cause, something followed from something else. But that’s only true from our perspective inside universe.
The universe might not change at all from an outside perspective. What if every moment exists simultaneously? Only from within a moment does the concept of before and after make sense, but outside the universe there’s no concept of before. Everything just is.
Maybe it’s a ring, maybe it’s a multidimensional volume containing all the possible moments that could ever happen, maybe it’s bounded “temporally” in certain directions, maybe all the moments chain together in a crazy space filling curve such that all possible moments/worlds would eventually be reached if you started in one and kept following the curve to the next. But nothing has to actually be changing. The paths don’t need to change, they didn’t need to be created or destroyed.
Point is that the “before” of the universe might not exist at all even if the timelines within it start and stop at defined points. We feel the need for things to have a reason because that’s what we’re used to experiencing, but we’re only used to that due to the rules within our part of existence.
The concept of “change” or “creation” or “time” might not exist at all outside our experience.
- Time likely doesn't exist outside our universe--at least not in the same way. I figure it might be like how we can write a book--the events in the story are all there on the pages at the same time, and yet there is a concept of time within the story that doesn't restrict our own in any way. The reader can move through it freely, and in some cases, choose different paths through it.
  That being said, I still think our universe had a beginning. The fact that everything here is bound to time suggests the universe itself is temporally finite. But it's possible it originated from something outside of time, possibly without our concepts of beginnings.
  In any case, my main point was on the origin of life within our universe. I believe, purely based on the math, that it's more likely that life was planned than that it happened randomly.
- Physically speaking isn't all 'creation' we expirence just transformation anyway?
I personally think there has to be a loop of some kind. It exists because it was made, and its creation results in the creation of its makers.
Like it's all just a strange paradox.

Probably belongs in unpopularopinion, but: Chicken is a waste of spices an herbs.
"But you gotta season it, man!!"
I know. Put the same seasoning on any other meat, and it'll immediately be a better dish.
Anything you can do with chicken can be done better with pork.

Ok, maybe not wings if you wanna be pedantic about it.

See, this is where dark meat always seems to get left out. My hot take: dark chicken meat is superior to white chicken meat. Better balance of fat, more flavor.
Perhaps a qualifier: any meat that isn't delicious with just salt isn't worth other seasonings.
- I gotta argue with you on your last point. Any meat that's delicious with just salt should only be seasoned with salt. Anything more and you interfere with the flavor.

Half Life 3 will be teased on 3rd Dec, and fully revealed on 11th Dec at The Game Awards

That conflicts with my own theory. Back in 2013, Half Life 3 was quietly released as an easter egg hidden inside a random indie title somewhere on Steam and nobody has noticed yet.
- I also had a similar thought where Valve is just waiting for someone to solve an ARG that no one has noticed for the last 10 years lol
Half Life: Alyx is awesome, though.
- For all the 12 people who played it, at least.

That there is an as of yet undiscovered loophole to either the no cloning theorem or the more general no broadcast theorem. I can understand the problems that are generated by either being true, but FTL communication and dataships are just so darn cool.

Dissociative identity disorder. I have been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, a condition that is recognized by some psychiatrists but not universally accepted within the field.

I bet there's another side of you that believes in it, though.
- I believe in it. It matches my experience. But I'm aware of the scepticism.

I wouldn't call this unscientific.

Its a serious consideration when trying to resolve the Fermi Paradox

Insecticides (which are based on disrupting insect sex hormones) are making men more feminine. The industry says it's impossible, that they are only parts per billion of what you eat. Still.

Müller forcefem world champ lfg

The more you learn the more you realize how little you know.