Why do so many people believe in Dean Radin

[Trollfaz]

Dean Radin is a parapsychologist and is a great pseudoscientist, his latest experiment on consciousness and the double slit experiment https://explore.scimednet.org/index...consciousness-affects-matter-dean-radin-ph-d/
is another pseudoscientific gibberish, but when I looked through many discussion sites, people apparently agreed with him. Why would people want to engage in pseudoscience?

 

[jim mcnamara]

That is a great question.

The xkcd comic has a partial answer for Physics, lack of math background:

https://xkcd.com/1861/

 

[256bits]

Dean Radin is a parapsychologist and is a great pseudoscientist, his latest experiment on consciousness and the double slit experiment https://explore.scimednet.org/index...consciousness-affects-matter-dean-radin-ph-d/
is another pseudoscientific gibberish, but when I looked through many discussion sites, people apparently agreed with him. Why would people want to engage in pseudoscience?

Probably not a subject PF will entertain for too long, but anyways...

Do you have a favorite sports team. Why? How does their winning or losing affect anyone's life. Yet fans will become very emotional over the outcome of a game.
Why go to a movie, or read a fictional book? It is all fantasy. Yet we cheer for the hero, and become emotionally involved with characters that do not exist.
One can go on with examples of where we as humans are very not 'Spock like", but irrational and illogical in our decision making.
So we have the ability to make a choice to be nonsensical, and not always calculated to be the most perfect.
Calculated choices require a lot of brain energy to be expended and calculations take time.
We may always not have the required energy input nor the time, so basing choices on limited information could be a matter of survival.
And believing what others have stated as being their experience and conclusions, lends itself to the recipient of not having to re-do the experience themselves nor attempt to formulate a conclusion - more brain power needed.
Pseudoscience may feel to some as if it is offering the answers they seek, to whatever questions they are asking.
For others it may be a fun endeavor.
Some others reasons also.
And who knows, maybe there is something there after all, in all its confusion of ideas.

The difficulty I have with it, is not so much the blind leading the blind, but the manipulative leading the gullible.
And unfortunately, sorry to say we, can all be gullible at times, and definitely not a sign of a character flaw or anything like that, but just human.

( Didn't someone say "There's a sucker born every minute." )

 

[jim mcnamara]

@256bits is correct. This kind of post can derail very quickly, and some PF staff may not find it acceptable from the get go.

My opinion is that is useful to understand why garbage like this gets accepted. @256bits mentions the gullibility argument. There are others. People dying of an incurable disease will sometimes resort to magic, or New Age hoo-hah, simply to keep up hope. IMO.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I'm afraid it is against our guidelines to discuss such pseudoscience :)