Thanks Jackmannii for getting to the wine. Another area is coffee - cult of the Starbuck.
Dolphins, especially in the writings of John C. Lilly, dolphin researcher and LSD guru.
Dolphins have advanced plus-que-human language and communication abilities and advanced altruistic societies. This was widely believed by a lot of new-agey people.
Real dolphin researchers (I was a lab assistant on one such project) mocked that view as “cosmic dolphin theory”.
I was about to try and find and like to a coffee-brewing method/recipe I saw the other day that carefully specified exactly how (and maybe even which direction) to stir.
But on reflection, I think coffee/espresso is actually much less woo-infused than it could be for something based around taste. Sure there are lots of arguments about differences that probably could never be detected in blind tests, and lots of mystique around particular sources of beans, etc.
But, generally, from what I can tell, the techniques and equipment arguments center around things that plausibly do make a difference in the chemical/physical process of extracting from roasted coffee beans: water temperature, size of grounds, pressure (for espresso), amount of time spent extracting, and age of beans since roasting. Even the discussion I’ve seen about paper filters versus metal ones focused on the oils that will pass easily through metal filters but could be absorbed onto paper ones.
Maybe it’s because there are good, measurable and objective reasons why a $600 espresso maker is better than a $100 one, so nobody needs to invent woo-based reasons for expensive coffee makers, or maybe caffeine stimulates the logic lobe, who knows. I’m not saying there aren’t any victims of marketing who are paying extra for a difference they can’t taste, but it seems to me internet espresso snobs are much less woo-infused that you might expect.
Massage.
Yeah, it feels good.
Yeah, it can have clear medical benefits in some cases, under the supervision of a real medical doctor.
But the field popularly borrows a lot of woo from ancient Eastern healing theory (meridians, Qi, energy flow management, reflexology, chakras, etc) and includes a lot of dodgy practices and theories — aromatherapy, reiki, etc. Massage schools will typically have courses in stuff like this.
Cite: Massage Therapy: Riddled with Quackery by Stephen Barrett on Quackwatch.
Also: A Massage School Experience, Anonymous, on Quackwatch. First-person account of massage training by a skeptical student.
— Senegoid, CMT (Certified Massage Therapist)
My ghod-there is enough bull in this one field to keep a slaughterhouse going for years.
The “why” question is easily answered. Society’s collective scientific knowledge is simply too vast for a single person to encompass it all and still function in normal, everyday life. So we trust in a LOT of stuff that we couldn’t prove or explain ourselves. If a statement sounds plausible, appears to be believed by others, and it doesn’t contradict what you already know, most people will give it a provisional trust (i.e. “let’s see how it goes”). Next, the placebo effect kicks in and because you think it might be working, it appears to and provisional trust becomes proven trust.
“woo” requires ignorance (the seller has to look more knowledgeable than the buyer) and an acceptance of vague and/or unmeasurable results.
I enjoy casual rock-hounding, though I have never licked any lapis lazuli. But boy howdy is there a massive vein of woo running through the rock business.
We used to have an electric vacuum-style coffee maker. I believe I could actually blind-taste the difference between vacuum, perk and drip coffee. Sadly, the carafe cracked from years of stresses and Bodum no longer makes them.
I think another reason has to do with purchases that you make through subjective decisions by trying out the product - you go play, drive, try on, try out, listen to or look at the things, and decide what you like for the money involved. People then have a need to try to justify their subjective decision with an objective, rational sounding reason. One that in reality might not actually make much of a difference, and is actually lest valid than, “Well I just liked A better than than B when I compared them”.
High end Restaurants.
It’s very similar to audio gear.
You pay 2 grand for a stereo, you’ll convince yourself those measured specifications (SNR, Crosstalk, THD) are superior. Regardless of the human ears known limitations.
Same with Restaurants. Spend $175 a person for a meal. You’ll convince yourself that chef is doing something magical in the kitchen. You’ll also forgive the absurdly tiny portions they put on the plate.
The food is better prepared. But is it really that superior to a restaurant that costs $25 a person?
Woo means that the person selling it believes it to be true. This is what makes it so hard to fight. You can expose a scammer and they know you’re right. But the Woo Artist isn’t listening to rational argument.
Expensive Higher Education
Like a lot of what has been listed in this thread - Higher Education in and of itself it has value. However, the marginal increase in value does not correspond to the difference in costs of the available options. In other words, a degree from a lower cost state school costs X, and results in a career paying Y. The same degree from an expensive school that costs you 5X, does not result in a career earning 5Y.
Any school is a great school if you only let in super-high-achievers. I can’t imagine that the trigonometry taught in a private school is somehow different than that in a public school.
I immediately thought of Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do. Bruce was never tested in a full contact tournament.
I sent that one to my son. I’ve learned not to touch his pans.
Oddly, I learned to appreciate my late mom’s acupuncturist. He didn’t charge much. He was supportive and easy to talk to, so she’d tell him things she wouldn’t bother a doctor with. Then he’d tell her which things she should go see her doctor about, complete with which keywords to use.
One example was a big cyst that she had removed. He got her to go back in to be re-assessed because there was still a lump and “sometimes things shift after the first surgery, so that parts of the envelope that weren’t accessible the fist time become easier to reach.” If he hadn’t put that slant on it, she’d have just let the lump slide, for years, because it was much better and she’d have felt like she was accusing the surgeon of not doing it right.
I think she told us about him urging her to go to the doctor so that it wouldn’t look like she was being oversensitive about things that ought to just be endured without complaint. It was still woo, but we decided not to complain.
I would classify that as superstition, rather than woo. Admittedly the distinction is hard to see at times, but no one is selling those ball players some special kind of underwear that are only good in big games.
Baseball is especially big on suprerstition. Look at the players during the World Series and how many had facial hair. Usually a lot more than during the regular season. Superstition against shaving during the playoffs or after you’ve had an especially good game.
Agriculture has been mentioned a few times, but I think Biodynamic agriculture is worth bringing up. It’s very popular among those that grow grapes for wine.
It includes thing like putting manure or powdered quartz in a cow horn and burying it in your field. Most of it is basically sorcery.
Heh. In my college days you would have been describing your experience with
Coors
I bet if you ever tried the massage on the dolphins you’d have a change of heart.
That’s how the Cosmic communication works, Man! It’s all through the hands and the fins. If first you align their chi they’ll let you in on their secrets.
Amazing to think that humble Lab Assistant **Senegoid **would be the one to bridge the species gap and usher in the new age of Aquarius … or Pisces or Porpoise Poop or something. 
Doesn’t have to. If it earns you 4X more over your lifetime you’re money ahead (ignoring timing issues).
Nowadays there’s a lot more of an inside track for the serious loot than was true 30 or 50 years ago. If you go to Harvard you *might *get on that inside track if you work it hard with the right skills and connections. If you go to Ohio State you have no chance to get close enough to the inside track to even catch sight of it.
If you (any you) are like I was then or am now, you never had a chance at that inside track even if you had gotten into Harvard, so spending the money for Harvard tuition would have been a waste. But if you (any you) are at least 1% competitive for that shot at the serious brass ring and are so motivated, it seems short-sighted to concede defeat before you even begin by just going to Ohio State to save a few dozen grand a year.
Yoga count?
I really enjoy the physical and mental/meditative benefits, but I couldn’t handle the metaphysical woo.
No, some Yogi somewhere did NOT stop his heart and respiration. Sorry. And I really do doubt that this pose is “good for digestion.” No, nothing about this is going to “detoxify” me.
That’s a good individual practitioner in a field that’s inherently woo. And, yes, acupuncture is woo: It doesn’t matter where they stick the needles in. Sticking needles in isn’t the whole of acupuncture, they have a more elaborate theory, and the theory as a whole is bullshit.
I’m taking a hard line because soft-soaping this stuff just confuses people. The acupuncturist your mother went to sounds like a good person who probably wouldn’t deliberately scam people, and he definitely did good work. It would have been better had she found her doctors more approachable. Bedside manner matters.
This has to be qualified a bit.
Getting an expensive undergraduate education should be a waste of money if you discount the value of networking. That’s what accreditation should control: An undergraduate degree from any accredited post-secondary institution should have exactly the same value if you compare like-for-like. However, what job interviews it opens up still depends on who you know, and that has traditionally been the value proposition of Harvard or Yale.
Postgraduate education depends on your advisors. PhDs, in fact, can be traced in lineages, such that this doctor got their doctorate from working under that doctor, who got their doctorate from working under the other doctor back before the Earth had cooled. Thus can you trace the intellectual continuity of the field, and the important lines of descent won’t be found in obscure freshwater universities you’ve never heard of. Or not in theory, anyway.
I wonder about the whole field of martial arts as distinct from military unarmed combat techniques.
In the military, there’s at least a theoretical risk of having to use your unarmed combat techniques in, you know, unarmed combat what happens without no weapons. That isn’t a tournament. There ain’t no Cobra Kai, there’s just live or die. In theory, that keeps them honest about which punches actually work and which will totally explode the other guy’s heart from just a touch but will kill you if you try to use them in reality.
Martial arts, as taught to normies, looks like either dance meditation or Internet Tough Guy Mall Ninja Technique sold on the basis of defeating the omnipresent stalker mugger what will stab you up and do unspeakable things to your credit card, unless you use said card to purchase this handy-dandy black belt. Oh, and maybe some light cardio with yelling an shit. Order now. Even the ones that aren’t outright scams are oriented to winning tournaments, tournaments where everyone goes home uninjured unless something actually goes quite wrong. If you optimize for tournaments, and point-scoring, how do you know what works outside that realm?
My point is, there’s a disconnect. In theory, it’s possible for someone to be more skilled than someone else in the ancient art of not dying when you are faced with a credible threat and you left your gun in your other pants. In practice, there seems to be a disconnect between being able to win a tournament and being able to avoid getting knifed in an alley.