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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 wooden knobs are $400 because the manufacturer claims that they improve the sound quality.
That's rather a huge difference, IMHO.
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.
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
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.