What other fields besides high-end audio are susceptible to 'woo'?

I’m always suspicious of people who tell me that the newer aluminum bikes have a much harsher ride than their old steel bike.

The Sovereign Citizen Complex (used as an umbrella for a whole host of related pseudo-legal idiocy) is a big, obvious example of legal woo, but there are numerous small examples.

One is the idea that disclaimers can protect you from copyright claims. This ties into the idea that copyright is primarily concerned with giving credit to the original artist. Credit is important, to some extent, moreso in some countries than others, but giving credit is, one, not necessarily mandatory, and, two, not going to help if one of the rightsholders (not necessarily the artist) sends a DMCA takedown or similar.

More generally, though, disclaimers can’t do a lot of the things people seem to think they can, and a lot of disclaimers you see every day are bullshit, legally. Disclaimers which seem to force you into binding arbitration might be completely without force, for example. Law has the concept of the leonine contract, the contract of adhesion (or the boilerplate or standard form contract), and unconscionability, all of which can combine to negate all or part of something the weaker party theoretically agreed to were it to actually make it to court. Therefore, the woo is spread by the stronger parties, to keep people from taking them to court in the first place.

Politics and economics have always been full to the brim with woo.

You might find this amusing. I saw it a few weeks ago, and it’s a little long, but I found it interesting how the judge used the defendant’s own logic (for lack of a better term) against him.

Right. And I can protect mine from rusting and squeaking for fractions of a cent without sacrificing any performance “gains” over the $200 dollar lube job.

Performance enhancements from chain lube are certainly woo since the power transfer efficiency of a bicycle is so high to begin with, but that doesn’t mean you should just soak it in WD-40 either. Chains have tons of tight nooks and crannies where the lube needs to flow into and stay there, while also not trapping moisture or accumulating grime. A dirty but still lubricated chain will wear itself and the rest of the drivetrain out faster, and it makes a mess. A clean but un-lubricated chain will rust and squeak and cause premature failure such as breaking or seizing up. A $15 bottle of good chain lube that lasts years under normal use is fine, and while it’s not just any old oil, it doesn’t require application by geishas after a blessing from the Pope either.

If you want more of that kind of thing, there’s a whole subreddit full. It’s called AM I BEING DETAINED, appropriately enough.

Martial Arts can be heavily infected with woo. I can’t count how many videos I’ve seen where the woo practitioner gets hurt badly when “reality” hits them in the face

Ethan Weiner had a wonderful article explaining why subjective audio testers hear the differences they claim. In short, it’s not the cables, but the fact that their ears are not in the exact same place twice, and they hear the acoustic comb filtering effects of the room.

I would be interested in a double-blind test of video games being run at absurdly high frame rates. I’ve been editing video for decades, and simply cannot believe that anyone could see any difference above 70 frames per second.

I’m not sure if it quite counts as woo, but product design on crowdfunding sites seems to go there - people get excited about products that are no more than artistic impressions of a thing that would be utterly impossible to make. Here’s a debunk of a good example: Cicret Bracelet DEBUNK - YouTube

Heck, the other sports too apparently. Stuff like guys always wearing their favorite undershirt for big matches - hopefully it still only has as many holes as it left the factory with.

Jewelry. Usually as a subdivision of medical woo, but it can also include love charms and the economy.

racial politics…

Cryptography is another big one. There are lots of companies out there selling snake-oil “unbreakable industrial-strength encryption systems” to businesses. These systems are sold based on buzzwords and claims of secret, proprietary technology, but haven’t undergone any meaningful review or penetration testing by real cryptographers or security experts.

Oh, and that reminds me of a historical example: data compression. Back in the 1990s, when digital storage space was at a premium, a lot of companies claimed to have invented lossless data compression algorithms that offered incredible ratios (say 100 to 1) and that were guaranteed to work on arbitrary—even completely random—data. But this is a mathematical impossibility: if you really had an algorithm that could losslessly reduce an arbitrary file down to 1% of its size, you could simply apply it over and over again until the file was down to just one bit in size. The idea that you could regenerate the original file from this single bit is absurd. (In fact, it’s reminiscent of homeopathists’ claim that molecules of distilled water retain the memory of the substances they were once mixed with.)

The products offered by these companies turned out to be vapourware or otherwise fake. (For example, at least one company put out a “compressor” that left the original file data intact, but fiddled with the file system to make it underreport the size.) However, that didn’t prevent these companies from parting a lot of investors and customers with their money.

Fortunately, things have gotten better since then, partly because a number of decent compression algorithms are now baked into most operating systems and Internet protocols, but also because bandwidth and storage space is plentiful enough that compressing data as tightly as possible is no longer a concern for most people.

My father used to record classical music from the local NPR station. He had a prettyfine tuner, a motorized FM antenna and a pair of high-end Nakamichi cassette decks – the dual capstan models with the retracting tape guides than insured exact tape transport speed, along with Dolby B and C and, IDK, L? I played one of his (hundreds of) tapes for a friend and told her that he had recorded it off the radio. She was not believing me.

Now, of course, we have all digital stuff, so all those features are basically meaningless. But back in the day, there really was a big difference in a lot of those components. Monster cable, though? Meh, whatevar. Unless you sit there and pay full attention to the music for hours on end, it is just overkill. Who does that? Music at home for nearly everyone is mostly ambience and background noise. And I doubt that my dad ever played more than a quarter of those hundreds of tapes.

All fields are susceptible to woo. But it is much more prevalent in some vs. others.

Yea, golf was the first thing that came to my mind.

Building computer gaming systems. This stuff is easily testable, but there are so many configurations of woo that it’s impossible to test them all.

Beer.

Last weekend I drove 90 minutes and stood in line another hour or so to be able to buy eight 16 ounce cans of beer. It was a New England style IPA, exceptionally juicy, a pleasure to drink. But I don’t think I could ID it in a blind taste test versus other craft NE style IPAs.

Oh, and it’s a variety best enjoyed fresh. No cellaring this beer! But, the brewery is the current cool spot.

On the other hand, I’m sure high-level oenophiles can easily reproduce notes of cherry, oak and lapis lazuli in their preferred wine vintages over different tasting sessions.

As mentioned, gardening features quite a bit of woo, including the basic “green thumb” nonsense, on up to various homemade and store-bought potions for improving plant growth. I think this phenomenon particularly afflicts hydroponic and pot growers, based on the many expensive and exotically-named fertilizers and growth aids on the shelves in the hydroponics stores.
I am not immune, seeing how often I have used this brand of snake oil.*

*it won a prize at the 1940 World’s Fair.

Where do you draw the line between “woo” and just outright scams?
I get gobs of emails every day claiming that I can generate FREE ENERGY if I only click on their link…