There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever’s in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800’s it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense… Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just “No medicine at all”, that’s exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there’s a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said “Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible.”
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest “Ya know I had to do it 'em” face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said “No” that was replaced by better evidence that said “Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes”
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.
I think it’s important to detail just how much the scientific community rejected the whole idea of washing your hands. Even though Semmelweis dropped his hospitals maternity mortality rate from 18% to 2%
“In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.”
Holy shit
“This guy washes his hands, clearly he’s crazy, take him out back; if he dies it’s a mercy killing.”
Was actually said by someone at one point.
Gah, I was going to say plate tectonics.
Heliocentricism is a good one, the story they teach in school was that “The Pope just didn’t look through Galileo’s Telescope because he believed in Jesus too much!”
In reality other practioneers of the sciences simply couldn’t recreate Galileo’s work and thought it wasn’t worth entertaining, especially since it wasn’t just an idea with evidence against it at the time, but one that was politically messy thanks to the Protestant Reformation…
I really hate it when people oversimplify history, especially to paint any organization in a harsher light than it deserves. (That and if we could get more of certain crowds to realize science is more complicated than just saying “Church bad” that would help a lot…)
So the answer is “most things”.
Continental drift was a theory formed in 1912 by a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener. Geologists balked at the idea of enormous landmasses moving and said the idea of an Urkonintent was ridiculous. And besides, he was a weatherman, German weatherman, so outside of his field and untrustworthy as a German was considered at the outbreak of WW1.
Then, 50 or so years later his theory was rediscovered when different fields were trying to understand polar magnetic drift evident in iron ore formation. The only explanation that made sense from the evidence is that mountains were not permanent and oceans didn’t exist in some areas - a lot like the land masses moved.
Wegener was eventually vindicated in almost all areas except drift speed. There was an Urkonintent, which has been named Pangaea. The continents do move but because they sit upon plates. He had taught the world about the world but died before anyone thought he was right.
An interesting detail of this story that I only learned recently was that the core ideas of Wegener’s theory were in fact generally more well-received by European geologists, with prominent advocates even in the 1920s. It was primarily North American geologists who mocked him and dismissed the theory upon its 1925 American publication, and this may have been partly due to the English translation (from the 1922 German 3rd edition of his book) having a “tone” of stilted presumption and dogmatism that utilitarian translations of German sometimes have.
That tone might explain why the theory (and Wegener himself) was smacked down with such prejudice by American geologists. In particular, we have a talk given by Charles Schuchert at the 1926 Symposium on Continental Drift hosted by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in which he mischaracterized Wegener’s theory as a facile observation of coastline similarity. In fact, Wegener based his argument on deep-sea continental slopes, where edges could be shown to fit more closely, but he didn’t defend himself at the symposium (perhaps again due to the language barrier). So unfortunately the misunderstanding of continental drift persisted in tangential American geology circles until the 1958 theory of plate tectonics took over while European geologists generally accepted the core ideas early on.
That’s so American it’s almost comical
And if you think that’s a weird hangup from the past, remember that Americans, including very educated ones, are still currently mad (like, actually mad) that Pluto got demoted to Dwarf Planet. Because it’s the only “planet” discovered by Americans.
Pluto can be a planet if you want but then so are Ceres, Eris, Gonggong, and the several other dwarf planets, else your argument stands on nothing more than naked chauvinism. Which is usually how it goes.
By contrast I never personally heard anyone in the francosphere seriously complain about Pluto’s status, nevermind keep including it in the list of planets as an act of defiance. Because who cares (the Americans, that’s who).
dude, the Smithsonian has an article about how Benjamin Franklin invented the public library, I kid you not
Plate techtonics weren’t scientific consensus until 1968-1975 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0040195177901974?via%3Dihub
The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.
But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:
- Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
- Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.
It wasn’t due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.
This is the first I’m hearing of antisemitism being at all related. Where did this come from?
Secret ruling elites is a dog whistle - it’s Nazi cabalistic rhetoric. See also Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a Nazi propaganda piece.
Okay but what does that have to do with dead internet theory? Last I saw, it just suggests that internet comments are largely bot-generated.
As the original comment said: the origins of dead Internet theory pre-date the prevalence of LLMs and are conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals of elites controlling the Internet
I feel like that commenter is inserting their own head cannon into this. Dead internet theory isn’t that old, it started in 2021 when LLMs were already well into development and in public use. And unless the guy who originally posted the theory also had some secret manifesto I’m unaware of, the theory had nothing to do with “elites” at all.
I’m fairly certain variations on the dead internet theory have been floating around well before 2021. Here’s a variation of it on Reddit from 9 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/348vlx/what_bot_accounts_on_reddit_should_people_know/
Apparently the idea stems from the IRC days where the first user to join a channel would receive admin rights. So people wrote bots to stay in channels and only grant admin rights to specific users joining. Then came more novelty bots that would stick around in channels, even bots that “chatted” with one another. When you’d join a channel and ask if there were any humans around they’d answer “just bots”, which eventually became a meme and then regular humans started saying that too as a joke.
That idea morphed into the “Everyone on Reddit is a bot except you” meme, which coupled with obvious bot activity on Twitter turned into the “Dead Internet Theory”, which basically takes the meme seriously. One of the original versions of that theory is this one: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/
Some excerpts:
Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.
Yes, the Internet may seem gigantic, but it’s like a hot air balloon with nothing inside. Some of this is absolutely the fault of corporations and government entities.
I think it’s entirely obvious what I’m subtly suggesting here given this setup, but allow me to try to succinctly state my thesis here: the U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.
In this way, the internet and social media, which was supposed to democratise media by allowing users to create whatever content they wanted, has instead been hijacked by a powerful few.
Quite clearly appears to be blaming a secretive cabal/corporarions/US government for the whole thing, so it’s definitely blaming “the elites”.
So forget that the original author blamed a Jewish cabal, and look at where we are. The causes may have been wrong (deeply wrong) but the effects are looking remarkably similar and we need to be able to talk about the real reasons without getting getting caught up in this “it’s all anti-semetic lies” trap.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a Russian propaganda piece. Russians were arguably the all time champs of anti-semitism and pograms (the word is even Russian in origin) before the Nazis industrialized them. Of course the Nazis used it, but it didn’t originate with them.
Fair point - Imperial Russia was the origin. It’s just most famous as Nazi primary school literature.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it, *NEARLY * every conspiracy theory ties back to Anti-Semitism and I’m not even joking.
Faked Moon Landing? Flat Earth? Holocaust Denial?
“Jews did it bro” - Asshole who insists he’s “Just asking questions”
Edit: Clarified hyperbole
I’m going to have to disagree with you because obviously, not every single conspiracy theory, across all time and cultures and context is anti semitic.
But that’s what the literal words you used state.
We can even test this theory by inventing our own conspiracy theories.
That’s a dumb take, when they are obviously talking about contemporary western society, and they are being reductive.
Uncontacted tropical villages probably blame other things in their conspiracy theories.
OP is inadvertantly providing another example: the phrase “conspiracy theory”. It was coined by the US government as a way to discredit ideas - to make people look like crackpots. Lots of negative propaganda was created around that phrase.
Fast forward to today and “conspiracy theory”, though admittedly still tainted in various ways, has made a resurgence. Things that would have gotten you laughed out of the room are now proven fact(like Iran-Contra, for a simple and fairly uncontroversial example).
That’s part of why that move to coin that phrase was so powerful. There are real conspiracies/intelligence agency operations (like regime changes in several countries during the 20th century), and then there are completely idiotic ideas and takes (like flat earth) and ones that were never meant to be taken serious (like birds aren’t real).
That makes it really tedious to weed out the bullshit and distinguish it from the stuff that has substance.
Dude. Just take a stroll along X (Twitter) or YouTube comments.
Sooooooo many bots linked to profiles with Ai generated images talking to each other. It’s wild.
the dead internet can easily be solved so not sure it’s that prophetic. various easy ways to verify humans exist while keeping anonymity if you wish. these same mechanisms can be used for voting.
The germ theory of disease was originally very unpopular with doctors who subscribed to the miasma theory of disease. The idea that a doctor should was their hands before tending to a patient was seen as insulting. Doctors were gentlemen! Their personal hygiene was beyond reproach!
The truly horrifying part is that the guy who proposed it showed it worked, made people do it… and then when he died they stopped and the rates went back. He was committted to an asylum for his effort and died there 2 weeks later, due to…infection.
The fact that people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis originally and demeaningly called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can’t exercise.
It was first believed to be a mental health disorder where people are scared of doing activity. And patients who said exercising made them worse were treated for hysteria and kinesophobia (fear of exercise).
Now after a decade of so of biomedical research, and after research showing Graded Exercise therapy worked was discredited, we have a steady stream of studies showing different abnormalities and harmful reactions to exercise. Increased autoimmune activation post exercise, microclotting, mitochondial dysfunction, T-cell exhaustion. And most importantly with a dozen or so 2-day CPET studies, we have definitive proof that while healthy controls improve exertional capacity by exercising, these patients are the exact opposite, they worsen.
There’s even been a couple cases of young people 20-30 having a degenerative disease state that killed them.
There are unfortunately still a lot of medical practitioners out there who either don’t believe in it or know nothing about it. I don’t like disclosing my diagnosis with new doctors because you just don’t know how they will respond.
Another interesting tidbit, by the way, is that studies have found that people who are more active and athletic are more likely to develop ME. That was the case for me. It’s really rough going from being an active, semi-athletic person to being barely able to function.
Like hormesis works in reverse for them
Bacteria being the cause of ulcers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori
Sugar is the reason for the rise of heart disease that was happening in US. John Yudkin was the one to purpose that sugar was dangerous for our bodies and heart plus responsible for obesity but he couldn’t prove it and was criticized by his scientist who were paid by the sugar industry. I forget to state the sugar industry was funding scientist to blame it all on fat. It was a pseudoscience till the 70s and 80s when they found the correlation that Yudkin was missing.
A lot of science around trees and forest management has gone this way. Forest used to be seen as competitive areas that needed to be thoroughly managed to be healthy. Now we know that’s not true at all, and overall would be better off if we just let them be (in most, though not all cases). Same with the idea that trees communicate with each other and share resources. This was dismissed and ridiculed for a long time, but has now been pretty resoundingly proven true. Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees talks a lot about this.
Yellowstone burned in 1988 because we kept putting out fires. My forestry professor (only 3-years later, he was there) said the deadfalls were often 10’ high and some higher.
I remember the whole “trees communicate” thing, that one’s kinda recent if I remember correctly. Like it was after the Avatar movie came out, which really fanned the flames of ridicule.
Kind of a reverse Uno on your question, but I thought it was interesting while Nazism came to prominence, some scientists were like hey I’m just as racist and anti-semitic as you, but this race stuff you’re doing isn’t very scientific. They were dismissed as quacks. Later after doing horrible experiments, nazi scientists were frustrated that their findings weren’t adding up to their ideology.
From what I understand, there’s this myth that Nazi Scientists were pardoned because they revolutionized science with experiments too horrible for anyone else to perform, but the data we learned from this was just THAT amazing. (TERFs like to make their own spin on this by saying the genital reconstruction used in gender affirming surgeries today was made by the Nazis)
in reality, no they were just massive racists and America only joined the Allies instead of the Axis Powers because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, had that not happen we may have joined up with Hitler. So, eh, just grab a few of the doctors with operation paperclip, put em to work getting us to the moon…
From what I understand all Mengele really learned was that if you kill children, they die.
Which I’m not a historian, but I think we already assumed as much…
Yeah, used to think that of the nazi scientists, but that was done for Japanese scientists because as awful as they were they actually provided useful data. The nazi scientists stuff was pretty much useless because it was all in furthering their dumb race shit.
What is the basis of your statements that the USA may have joined with the axis?
Their actions supporting the allied powers alone stands in stark contrast to that statement.
That’s quite the assertion.
You had a bunch of “America First” movements, protests in favor of the Axis Powers, Hitler being Time’s “Man of the Year”
Hitler even based a lot of the Nazi movement on shit America was literally already doing
So basically you’re saying because some people supported it and because Hitler borrowed from eugenics programs in the USA that we were potentially going to join the axis powers?
That’s the basis of your assertion? That is seriously weak.
The U.S. supplied more than $600 billion (in 2023 dollars) in lend-lease aid, mostly to Britain and the USSR, starting in March 1941. It’s ludicrous to say that they were ever considering joining the Axis powers.
I think most of the german scientists the USA took were in fields like rocketry and physics.
See also: Jesse Owens.
Lmao geology oddly enough
edit: I recommend “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson, super fun and goes in to a lot of things relevant to this post.
“Rocks don’t exist.”
Two others that really opened my eyes to the history of geological study are The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester, and The Great Quake by Henry Fontain.
Both very informative and entertaining
You’ve led me to quite a Christian Scientist rabbit hole, but I cannot for the life of me find the requirement to start smoking. Rereading, is that maybe a typo that should’ve said they required people to stop smoking? I can’t find that either, but it seems to make more sense to me.
You can’t stop smoking until you start smoking…
Same. All it made me think of was that show The Leftovers (I think??) where you just see clumps of people staring at other characters while dressed all in white and chain-smoking.
Yeah it was a typo…
The movement claimed that God made man in his image, therefore man was divine and had been tricked by the illusion that is the material world into creating his own problems and illnesses.
So church members in order to correct this error and cure these mental diseases were required to abstain from substances (anything besides food and beverage basically), as taking them meant you were “reinforcing the delusion that the material world was real.”
This meant people couldn’t take vitamins, caffine, alcohol, medicine (morphine was the exception because morphine was used when the founder originally “discovered the Christian Science power”), and they couldn’t smoke.
No one realized “Hey, you stopped smoking and going to doctors at a time when people believe smoking was good for you and medical science had a high death rate because they still believed in giving pregnant mothers whisky laced with heroin to balance their humors! This is actually saving your life”
Later in life the woman realized it was all bullshit, but her income and fame were based around it so she kept making loopholes in the holy books to say “Oh no it’s okay if I go to the doctor, because… shut up that’s why.”, and would claim that her illnesses late in life were caused by her enemies practicing “Animal Magnetism” on her, and were “So numerous in number that her power alone could not fight them.”
So she had a bunch of people live with her to combat the Animal Magnetism, including live-in chefs who’d make two of her meals… One to present her with for her to say “Oh it’s full of the Mesmer Poison, get rid of it!”, and a second for the chef to say “Look, I cured the poison, see how much fresher it is?”
It absolutely was a typo, everyone thought smoking was good for you, but this crazy lady said “Jesus said we shouldn’t smoke if we wanna awaken our God powers!”
And… people believed her because when they stopped smoking they stopped dying.
Funnily enough, the woman in question used to practice Homeopathy and when coming up with her Christian Science ideas she sought to prove it by replacing the homeopathy meds of someone in her care with fakes. Which of course were just as effective, proving that
_Homeopathy doesn’t workhe activated his Hamon Breathing and cured himself of Dio’s evil poisons.Thanks for clarifying and just to make sure I didn’t misrepresent myself, I was absolutely not trying to bust your chops. I could see it going either way given the time period.
Idk Val Kilmer is always smoking like a chimney in all his early movies. But then he also went against the church to get chemo so…
I hear he’s mute now
So they say. Guess he lost his vocal cords during the process. Wonder how it would have been if the church just let him get medical help…or never told him to start smoking in the first place ;)
They were more likely trying to tell him to STOP smoking
Yeah, it was a joke. Thus the ;)
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) was originally dismissed by a lot of community doctors as well as more academic medical people. There are still a few who don’t believe in it and dismiss it as a behavioural or attitude problem. Thankfully those people are in the minority now. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they’re not in influential positions.
One surprising contributor to validating ME/CFS is long covid, which seems to be the same condition but catalysed by a different virus.
I’m not a medical expert and could have mistakes in the above post but it’s generally correct.
I hate to be so selfish, but as someone with ME, the research that has accompanied Long Covid has been a real blessing. Prior to Long Covid, so little was being done and few people took ME/CFS seriously.
I struggle with this one, because I think a lot of it comes down to the stigma around mental illness not being treated as real illness. Bear with me.
Hypothetically, if ME was a behavioural issue (i.e. a mental illness) and was treated properly, the person would get better and they’d be happy with the diagnosis as it led to a treatment with stopped their suffering. However, because mental illness is treated so poorly, people want it to be a “real” illness so it gets taken seriously and they can get help.
The medical community has basically been in a battle with their patients on the definition of the syndrome. “Chronic fatigue syndrome” was deemed dismissive, they relabed it “myalgic encephalomyelitis” - big words to mean “spinal/nervous-system issue with muscle soreness”. Honestly, I think the best name is “post-viral fatigue syndrome” which does at least point to a triggering condition.
We still know nothing about why it happens, or how to treat anything except the symptoms. It may very well still be a psychological condition of some kind AND THAT’S OK! The important thing is finding a good treatment and helping people. That will be best done if we follow the evidence rather than letting social dynamics dictate what is acceptable to investigate.
I prefer the term post-viral fatigue too. However it’s incorrect to say that we don’t know if it’s a psychological or behavioural issue. GET and CBT have been thoroughly rubbished as interventions. Not only are they ineffective but they are dangerous.
I get to hear the leading experts* once per year talk about this and they have absolutely honed in on immune response and mitochondrial dysfunction as most probable causes. They are at the stage of proposing diagnostic criteria now. Things could get worse before they get better but we can confidently say that this is a medical condition now.
- I’m thinking of Dr. William Weir and Dr. Nigel Speight, among others.
A lot of mathematicians made fun of imaginary numbers when they were first proposed. In fact, the name “imaginary numbers” was actually given by skeptics to make fun of it. It kinda makes sense, imaginary numbers are all based off of a couple fairly strange assumptions, but they make otherwise difficult problems solvable.
The whole thing kinda ruined math though. Nowadays, mathematicians spend their entire careers building frameworks based on silly assumptions in the hopes that one day it’ll be useful.
People had similar responses to the ideas of negative numbers and irrational numbers when they were identified. There’s a story that a follower of Pythagoras was drown for identifying irrational numbers. I suspect it’s not true, but certainly it seems people had a hard time grasping the concept.
Funny how this happened with negative numbers (subtraction) and irrational numbers (logs and roots), but no one was bothered by fractions (division).
Reminds me of the Big Bang Theory, which was named that as a joke. The story goes that a Catholic Priest pitched the idea and scientists basically laughed, labeling it a “uniquely catholic idea that is more scripture than reality”
Then they proceeded to look into something called “Steady State Universe” to show that Priest how silly his “Big Bang” was…
Apologies were owed when Big Bang turned out to be true, Einstein had himself photographed with the guy even.
Which is why I find it funny that today the Big Bang Theory is not only used as proof against God’s existence by secular communities, but is fiercely objected too by fundamentalist ones.
Many scientific hypotheses started out as what seemed like crazy ideas at the time. When Galileo and Newton challenged the ideas of Aristotle, this was seen as fringe and radical. When Einstein challenged the accepted Newtonian dogma it was seen as scientific heresy at first. These ideas only seem mainstream to us with hindsight.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
Planck’s Principal
A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists. However, a more recent study on life science researchers found that following the deaths of preeminent researchers, publications by their collaborators rapidly declined while the activity of non-collaborators and the number of new researchers entering their field rose.
So, not really accurate. Throw it on the pile with horseshoe theory.
Naw, Horseshoe Theory’s definitely real, just talk to some tankies.
I actually had some argue that “LGBT Rights are a distraction from important issues and forcing white values onto other culture and are therefore racist”, unironically. Which myself being a transgender woman, I was not amused by.
So sorry you had to deal with that.
It’s so frustrating to see people try to say “progress and human rights are the most important thing” while simultaneously ignoring the people in their own back yard who have to face and live with laws that take away those very rights.
One day, we queer folk will be free, in spite of those useful fools.
Wearing masks to not catch diseases when treating patients.
