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10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets
The Byelorussian Strikes Again writes "Wired offers up 10 of the most awesome snake oil gadgets, from industrial cables sold as $200 ionized pain-relieving bracelets to a plastic chip that cures anything, improves gas mileage and cleans swimming pools.
One truly sad development: the infamous $500 wooden volume knob is no longer on sale."
Warning: Troll Alert!! I'm sure I'll get modded down for this but...
I would think that the latest spate of HiFi speaker wires would be right up there. The key difference between dowsing rods and these cables, is that once in a while dowsing rods seem to work. The multi-hundred dollar cables, time and time again in double-blind tests, have been shown to perform more poorly than the cheap utility speaker wire. And yet, there's a whole industry out there that argues (and markets) to the contrary.
Snake Oil indeed.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
The number of comments supporting dowsing rods based on anecdotal evidence on the article page makes me realize that we have a lot of work to do before anything like an educated majority will happen.
A product is worth exactly what it's purchaser will pay for it.
This is after all about snake-oil, not overpriced rubish. The other 9 don't do what they claim to do, the article doesn't mention that the knobs claim to do anything except that they are made of wood and can be used as a volume knob. I see no reason why they cannot be used as such.
Might as well put diamonds there as well then, overpriced when cut glass can be made to sparkle just as pretty.
Unless these knobs make some idiotic claim, they are just overpriced toys.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The wooden knobs are $400 because the manufacturer claims that they improve the sound quality.
That's rather a huge difference, IMHO.
If someone was able to prove me wrong scientifically to my satisfaction (which such a test would be, if I couldn't get the dowsing to work blindfolded then it's obviously not working at all) then yes, I would. Better to admit to once having been a fool than to continue to fight when even you know that you're wrong.
Fun article. I hadn't heard of most of those, just the Q-Link bracelets.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
That one person may be willing to pay a million bucks for something is less indicative of worth than the fact that a million people wouldn't pay a penny.
Bringing free market theories into it is good and fine, but only if you also realize the context in which they apply. The free market is a bit more complex of abstraction. There are a heck of a ton of assumptions there, such as that the products are interchangeable, there are many suppliers, etc. And most importantly in this context: the buyers are perfectly informed.
That last part is crucial here: a product is worth exactly what you paid, only if you knew _exactly_ what you're buying. I.e., that doesn't apply to scams and cons.
If you think you bought Product A, but instead you got Product B, then that whole "is worth exactly what the purchaser paid" assumption falls flat on its face. Your judgment of whether or not it was worth it was based on Product A, not on product B.
E.g., if I offer to sell you, say, Porsche Carrera, how much is that worth to you? Even second hand it's still worth tens of thousands. Now imagine that you pay that money and I give you a toy car. That's just not the product you thought you were buying. Saying that it's worth exactly as much as you paid for it, would just be stupid.
Now that's a case where the fraud is easy to spot. This kind of snake oil is the same kind of fraud, only it's a lot harder to spot for the uninitiated.
E.g., if you had cancer and I promised you a medicine that can cure you, how much is that worth to you? Quite a lot, I'd bet. People have been known to blow their life's savings on such a miracle medicine or cancer-curing gizmo, in that situation. But that was worth the price only assuming that it is what I assured you it is. If instead I give you coloured water or a box that displays random numbers, then it's just not the product for which that price was judged.
It's the same fraud as in the car example: you were promised Product A and were given ample assurance that it is indeed Product A. That's what you judged that price for. But instead you were given Product B, which isn't even remotely the same thing. That's what makes it a fraud.
Now if those things were sold honestly as snake oil (think, "this bracelet won't do jack shit for your health, but we think that industrial cable looks cool and we're charging 500$ for it anyway"), _then_ that "it's worth what the purchaser paid" idea would apply. Sure, then the buyer knew exactly what he's getting, judget it worth every cent. Fair enough. If someone knew they're buying just a piece of steel cable, and was ok with paying that price for it, I can't argue with that.
But as long as the buyer was deliberately mis-led into thinking they bought something completely different, sorry, no. Just no.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Better to admit to once having been a fool than to continue to fight when even you know that you're wrong.
Not really; you're neglecting a huge part of the psychology that makes snake oil work.
"You've proven nothing to me as long as I can refuse to admit being wrong."
The game's not over when objective reality says it's over; it's over only when the self-deluded stops deluding himself or herself, and that's a pretty tall hurdle to get over. Particularly if personal ego or public "face" is involved.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
How about this version:
Q. Whats the difference between an honest politician and a corrupt politician.
A. The corrupt politician sometimes tells the truth.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
1. Everybody has a personal investment in not being proven wrong about this crap. But the lying/fools that think Dowsing works have a MUCH GREATER personal investment in not being proven wrong than James Randi does. Even claiming the personal investment arguement makes you look foolish.
2. The Let me get this straight, you are complainging that his tests are too strict? I got news for you kid, every scientific experiemnt has FAR stricter tests than the relatively easy thing James Randi does. Why? Because CON MEN DO EXIST. You have to be pretty moronic to complain about someone making it dificult to be conned. As a stage performer, Randi KNOWS how to trick people and he is NOT stupid enough to let someone use those same methods on him.
3. Real things work no matter what kind of strict tests you do. You light a match, it works. It works if 'non-believers' are present. It works if cameras are watching you. It works if a CHILD does it. It just works. Dowsing simply does NOT work.
4. The thing to remember is that people claiming that Dowsing work: a. make money doing it, so they have LARGE incentive to lie and cheat. b. If they did work, they would make SO money by actually doing it for real that the million dollars from Randi would be small potatoes.
5. You admit that there ARE shysters and frauds. Fine. Believe it or not but that puts the burden of proof on you. Because the rest of us do NOT admit that anyone can do it for real. The existence of shysters and frauds means there is PLENTY of doubt that ANYONE can really do it. Why? Because for a real product, the shysters and fraud get OUTSOLD by the people doing it for real. When you go buy a new car, you do not have a real chance of getting something that has no engine. The existence of REAL cars make it very hard to sell fake ones. If Dowsing etc. was real, the real people would outcompete the fakes and it would be hard to find one of the shysters and frauds. The fact that there are so many many shysters and frauds is not 100% proof that no real ones exist, but it pretty darn close to it that no real ones existed 10 years ago (because if one real one existed 10 years ago, he and his students would have put the fake ones out of business by now.
Stop attacking the guy that proves you wrong and just prove yourself right. Otherwise, everyone will continue to laugh at your foolishnes.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Sadly, selling false hope to the terminally ill is one of the easiest frauds possible.
Really? Including in the case of the fraudulent medical devices? What about the fact that most of these people pray on the elderly? People whose children, in general, are no longer dependent upon them for support -- but who now have to watch as their parents get taken for fools, given fraudulent treatment, and refuse to seek proper medical attention, and as a result die painful deaths from treatable ailments? Is that really the kind of society you think we should live in, or even somehow a step to getting to such a society?
Actually, the wooden knobs really do work. I look and them and think "my god, I'm so rich!"
Don't be ridiculous you gullible sap.
Let me clean off my monitor, geez, that was funny.
I am frequently disappointed at the level of stupidity out there amongst seeming non-stupid people. There are people who think rubber tires protect them in a lightening storm, that man walked with dinosaurs, that 72 hot virgin babes who wouldn't touch you while you were alive would have sex with you if you manage to die while killing innocent people, that jesus needs money send to a P.O box, or that any one particular god is any less ridiculous than any other particular god or collection of gods.
Fuck you.
I would assume you're healthy and if you're lucky, you'll remain so the rest of your life. You'll never experience a condition where your body shuts down or begins to attack itself. You'll never go through the helplessness of not being able to trust what you perceive yet fully aware that your body is degrading and the symptom you're feeling might be real and life-threatening. You'll never have to go through the process of working with numerous doctors who, being much more educated and experienced on the subject than you, still have to make educated guesses as to what MIGHT work to slow the damage; each drug or procedure involving reams of documentation outlining dire risks and medical details (that require years of training to really understand) as to why they THINK the treatment might be doing something beneficial. Not a cure. Just something to maintain some degree of a quality of life until maybe sometime in the future a cure can be found.
The people who prey on the desperation inherent in this situation are among the worst kind of criminal. Their victims, while perhaps lacking some of the clarity of reasoning, are still purely victims. They do not deserve to be preyed on while everything else in their lives is being torn down around them. Whats worse is the unfortunate soul who passes up on a treatment that might have actually given them something of a life in favor of one of these snake-oil treatments that simply took from them and their loved ones.
It may be termed a "donation" but that doesn't make it less than a mandatory payment. As an example, look at the wealth amassed by the Catholic/Anglican church and tell me nobody is paying for their salvation.
They forgot to mention those stickers that you can put on your cell phone battery that will magically boost your reception. While they aren't as expensive as a Q-ray bracelet, I'm sure they make up for it in volume.
I actually bought one of these - the i-tena for my iphone. Naturally, it made absolutely no difference whatsoever. There's no excuse really, thirty seconds of Googling shows these signal booster stickers do absolutely nothing. I guess I wanted it to work, so I conned myself into thinking it would...
I think it has more to do with people in business, rather than government, benefiting from people who have no critical thinking skills. Look at the history of public education. In frontier days, our schools taught people to be critical thinkers because that's what a frontier demands. With the advent of industrialization, the robber barons knew they needed educated specialists who couldn't put two and two together outside of their area of expertise. Obviously, people who could put two and two together would realize how important they were, and how utterly unimportant the robber barons were. So these early industrialists made massive donations to the public school system, with the caveat that the money would go towards buying their textbooks and teaching their lessons. And thus we have things like the four food groups including dairy separate from other protiens, even though most adults can't properly digest milk.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Bertrand Rusell is making a mistake then, isn't he? --Nobody can research teapots cruising around Pluto. But nobody is being stopped from trying out dowsing.
As for proof? I would suggest that there are plenty of people who have studied dowsing and come back with positive results, but there are several problems. One is that dowsing only seems to work for some people. Another is that the mechanics are not understood. Another is that there is a bias against even looking at the problem. There is a tendency for people who study dowsing or any of the other "taboo" subjects to be ostracized for coming back with anything other than a negative finding. And then we slip into the decidedly un-scientific realm of egomaniacs like, James Randi. We get people saying, "There is NO PROOF!" despite the fact that obviously some people have had experiences which they have found convincing enough to tell others about. --Except such findings do not count because there are conditions on proof.
The primary condition being, from what I can tell, is that the TV people, the Arbiters of Reality, declare on the 6 O'clock news that the proof is valid.
Yes. That's the big one. But to make that happen, one must spend a great deal of energy publicizing a finding, arguing to validate that finding, and that's hard enough to do when the finding exists within acceptable boundaries. Really, only the big companies and big university labs can afford to do alter the shape of public perception. But the moment you step outside those boundaries, people start to actively attack you and push back. I mean, it's a grim scenario; when James Randi is a self-appointed arbiter who openly attacks people for even approaching him with their ideas, and people actually use him as some sort of yard stick of respectability. . , well it's a bad scene.
What I'm saying is that people who attack either have a messed up agenda, like Randi, or they don't know what they're talking about. They say, "There is NO PROOF!", when really they don't know one way or the other. --Which is why I always say that people really need to stop swinging fists and actually go explore the available material in order to know what they're talking about. Anybody who does this honestly tends to come back quite shocked by the actual state of reality. But most people simply don't bother looking, choosing instead to resort to poorly fitted arguments like, "The burden of proof is on the one making the claim! I refuse to look!"
And so they don't look. They wait until the TV people and James Randi tell them what to believe next. --And they continue to repeat canned meme arguments like, "The burden of proof is on the one making the claim," and think that they've actually said something meaningful when really their brains are on auto-pilot. When people actually set aside their biases and start thinking for themselves, (and this is profoundly difficult to do and I suspect most never manage it for even a few minutes every few years), then suddenly the world opens up.
Perhaps you can understand why those for whom things like Dowsing have become useful and functional tools in their lives can feel a bit frustrated with others.
-FL
First I never said that real dowsers would drive all fake ones out, that is your bad argument (called 'a strawman fallacy'). What I said is that the existence of real dowsers would make it very hard to find a fake one. Because real stuff beats good ones. And yes that means that bad building contractors ARE much less common than good building contractors. Most buildings made by building contractors stand up. The prevalence of known and proven fakes is far far greater in Dowsing than in building contractors.
.
Straw man fallacy? Now, that's hardly fair. Please re-read what you wrote, the last line in particular, (such as it is), and tell me again that you honestly think I wasn't responding squarely to your assertion:
5. You admit that there ARE shysters and frauds. Fine. Believe it or not but that puts the burden of proof on you. Because the rest of us do NOT admit that anyone can do it for real. The existence of shysters and frauds means there is PLENTY of doubt that ANYONE can really do it. Why? Because for a real product, the shysters and fraud get OUTSOLD by the people doing it for real. When you go buy a new car, you do not have a real chance of getting something that has no engine. The existence of REAL cars make it very hard to sell fake ones. If Dowsing etc. was real, the real people would outcompete the fakes and it would be hard to find one of the shysters and frauds. The fact that there are so many many shysters and frauds is not 100% proof that no real ones exist, but it pretty darn close to it that no real ones existed 10 years ago (because if one real one existed 10 years ago, he and his students would have put the fake ones out of business by now.
As for there being few bad contractors. . ? You should talk to somebody who has had work done on their house sometime. I've known a lot of people like this, and many of them complain bitterly about over-billing, poor construction, and being held hostage once the side of their kitchen has been knocked out and then left while the contractor abandons the project for weeks to pick up new clients. There are a LOT of shady or incompetent contractors out there. The analogy may not be entirely apt, (being an analogy), but it is not nearly so far from the mark as you suggest. --And it's still a lot better than your, 'cars have engines' thing, which is the whole reason I brought it up. --And in case you're wondering, that isn't a straw man I'm knocking down. It's you.
I am presenting my ideas well (See the "insightful" ratings I got). The problem is you have already made up your mind and every time I present something, you refuse to read what I wrote, instead you make up something similar, but not quite true. Then you argue with it.
Insightful? Oh, please. You're playing in your home stadium, so don't let the applause go to your head; Your arguments are very shaky by all rational standards. As for refusing to read what you wrote. . . That's completely unfair and it makes me wonder if you are reading what I write. It doesn't seem like it to me. Case in point. .
Part of the problem is the very fact that you attacked Randi at all. That is called "Ad hominem" fallacy - when you attack the person instead of their argument.
Look, Albert Einstein was a great scientist. But he also cheated on his wife. People don't bring that up much, because it has nothing to do with his science. Similarly, you have no business attacking Randi. If you dislike something he did than attack THAT PARTICULAR THING. Talking in a general way about how bad he is, then telling other people to research him is pretty much proof that you have no good argument. If you did, you would describe the particular thing you that he did wrong, not try to bring in a bunch of unrelated stuff.
Einstein cheating on his wife bears no relevance on his mathematical equations, but the way Randi manages his 'challenge', and I described some of those ways, is entirely relevant to the argument. Again to correct your analogy,