fake woo dismissal fallacy -aka- ego is the only intelligence fallacy
No content on this page itself — see linked references below.
7 linked references
February 18th, 2025
- another example: "stretching feet to heal forehead tension - fascia"
October 12th, 2024
- the idea that someone might get sick at some time that is convenient on some macro scale - when the sickness is a virus even
- eg me getting sick more often when me and [ex] weren't kissing much, which gave a non-relational reason for that
- eg someone getting sick at some time when they really need rest or a get-out-of-responsibility (although this could just be stress, and then an exaptation-interpretation)
September 28th, 2024
- "I just work here" is related to this
- exchange
- "it's the only way I know how"
- "then just do it a way you don't know how"
- let go of all the ways that you know won't work or don't make sense, and just watch to find out what you do
September 11th, 2024
- not sure how this fits but this definitely feels like a good example:
- the idea that ayurvedic medicine or more broadly diet-etc interventions could affect mood/cognition/medical conditions
- like there's nothing remotely violating laws of anything for this to work
- though this doesn't exactly point at a non-ego intelligence
- definitely one of the things that's going on is some sort of conflation between woo and snake oil
- which is understandable given the absurd claims sometimes made by woomeisters (that their whatever can treat anything)
- and also given that part of the issue with snake oil is that you can't understand the mechanism and see for yourself why it would work
- there's a kind of trust thing here, where someone is claiming a kind of authority about your problem that you don't really trust they could have
September 6th, 2024
- massage shouldn't really work
August 31st, 2024
- people at CFAR workshops being disturbed by how much Michael "Valentine" Smith could read their body language
August 11th, 2024
- potential names
- [incredible] mechanism fallacy
- no such communication fallacy
- there's no intelligence outside the ego fallacy
- / ego is sole intelligence fallacy
- examples
- examples of claims that activate this
- women often don't give birth while there are important things for them to take care of before they give birth
- vaginal pain when having sex with someone you don't trust
- sarno method for back pain
- your body often knows when it's the right time to wake up, even without an alarm clock
- sometimes you instinctively avoid certain people or situations that later turn out to be problematic, without knowing why at the time
- your body might crave specific foods containing nutrients you're deficient in, even if you're unaware of the deficiency
- our body can adjust your gait and posture to prevent injury, even before you're consciously aware of a potential hazard
- you might find yourself humming a song whose lyrics turn out to be relevant to what you're going through or how you're feeling, without consciously choosing it
- your body might prompt you to stretch or move in ways that alleviate muscle tension you weren't consciously aware of
- some versions of chakra-type stuff
- bringing loving attention to part of your body can sometimes help it heal
- (+ or can help you notice what might be needed in order to heal it)
- I think it needs a lil rephrasing
- and the claim is, importantly not "this will always heal everything"
- noncentral/complex examples
- that meditation or mindfulness practices could have physiological effects
- that dreams could have any meaningful content related to one's life, insisting they're random neuron firing
- body language conveying information the person isn't consciously aware of, insisting all communication must be intentional
- you might feel inexplicably drawn to a particular book in a bookstore that ends up containing information you needed
- stress-induced immune suppression leading to increased susceptibility to illness
- (this one is noncentral)
- stress or unconscious psychological factors appear to influence fertility, despite no clear physical cause for infertility
- things this fallacy maybe should reject if it were consistent but doesn't because they're too obvious
- holding your poop til you get home from a long drive (deliberately or unconsciously)
- relevant terms
- causality / causal links
- example of mind projection fallacy — person doesn't know what a mechanism would be therefore claims no such mechanism could exist
- (embodied) intelligence
- top-down bottom-up
- control
- intention
- psycho-physical
- that the low-level thing would have to understand the high-level concepts
- communication
- egoic
- adaptiveness of bodymind system
- general thoughts
- I suspect that part of what's going on is that people have some sort of generalization about something that if they questioned it they wouldn't know where to stop with other woo stuff
- and/or they've overgeneralized the idea that certain supposed forms of communication are actually confirmation bias or sampling bias
- C > maybe they would feel out of control
- oooh ego feels relevant to this
- left hemisphere / mind
- my response to Claude - hmmm these are almost like... TOO low-level or something. kinda good. but like... more like things the ego wishes it could control, but in fact it can't, but in fact some other intelligence in your body is doing so