Rob is blowing a whistle, over and over.
Bob: “Why are you blowing that whistle, Rob?”
Rob: “To keep the dragons away.”
Bob: “I see no dragons.”
Rob: “It works!”
“You just turned 100 today - what’s your secret to a long life?” - No matter what the answer will be, I guarantee you that there are millions of people in the world who do the exact same and still die young. But yeah, of course aunt Margharet only managed to live an entire century because she ate three cans of surströmming every week, no doubt. Genetics, healthcare and lifestyle have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
Edit/addendum: Weird specific example
Something similar was also my no.1 pet peeve on reddit whenever people argued about how the Blood Moon works in Breath of the Wild. It’s an in-game timer of roughly 3 hours, but the game does not tell you about it, nor does it display the timer, and back when the game code wasn’t cracked yet, there were a LOT of outrageously weird theories about how to allegedly make the Blood Moon appear.
So you just “made” a BM happen by running straight into a wall for 3 hours? Yes you got a BM, but not “because” you were running into a wall for 3 hours, but because the effing timer was up. The game does not care for WHAT you do in that time.
So you reloaded and ran into a wall again and the BM happened again? It is STILL not because you ran into a wall - you rewinded the effing timer by reloading a save file from before the event you’re trying to trigger, and then the timer was up again. (They never bothered to check whether it would happen if they did not try to trigger it with their chosen tactic)
It is really really hard to try and convince these people that they’re wrong, because once they’re convinced that a specific action yields a specific result, they WILL keep doing it over and over again until it “works” and then see it as proof. But by the same logic you can also throw tomatoes at a wall until it starts to rain and then claim that the rain happened because you just threw 547 tomatoes against a wall. And then you continue to throw tomatoes because it “worked” last time … and if it doesn’t rain then you just didn’t throw enough tomatoes yet.
The real secret is to not die.
And to buy enough tomatoes
So you just “made” a BM happen …
Poop goes in the potty.
Technically, eating three cans a week is lifestyle.
Blood Moons will also happen if the system is running low on RAM. The BM resets a bunch of stuff, like monster spawns, and since the game is no longer tracking that you killed a particular set of bokoblins or whatever there is more free RAM. This is called a panic blood moon, is very rare, and difficult to force.
A common misconception is that blood moons help replenish system memory by resetting enemy kill flags. This is however total nonsense, because enemy kill flags are just GameData flags, and all GameData flags are loaded at bootup and stay in memory forever
From the exact same source you just posted.
Well, that was dumb of me. I was going from memory at lunch and just linked a thing. Point is, you can force one, but you need to do something that eats a lot of RAM, not something silly like walking into a particular wall.
There are only seven very specific cases which can trigger a PBM, most of which the player has no control over (audio and texture loading issues). All listed in the guide.
The guy who wrote that guide is still on reddit (u/leoetlino to be precise) and has had the same discussions for years in r/breath_of_the_wild ^^° I’ve even argued with him myself back in the day when I didn’t know better, but since he’s a dataminer who reverse-engineered most of the game code, I’m now inclined to believe that he knows what he’s talking about.
However, I don’t blame anyone for not knowing better, since there are just way too many flat-out wrong but “real looking” guides claiming to know how the gameplay mechanic works, so it is ridiculously easy to fall for false info (I did, too). Heck, even the “Complete Official Guide” claims that the regular Blood Moon happens every seven days and can be forced to happen via skipping time at a campfire, which is super easy to disprove but still widely belived to be true, because how can a book with THAT title be wrong, right?
(Still, walking into a wall is worthless either way, lol … but it WAS a theory once, regularily posted as a tip/trick for the Mija Rokee Shrine on reddit and gamefaqs, and parrotted by IGN who still haven’t updated their guide even 7 years later and probably never will)
Wait I’m having so many BMs because I don’t have enough RAM? I’ll talk to my GI about this.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the post hoc fallacy, in general.
Basically in OP’s case, I did this and something did or didn’t happen. Therefore, what I did caused that something to happen or not happen.
Another comment used a survivorship bias with people that survived when others died or just living longer than other people. That’s also an example of the post hoc fallacy. The idea that the survivor did something that caused them to live isn’t necessarily true. They couldn’t just got lucky.
It’s also the foundational fallacy that connects the president to economic outcomes. Ask any economist: the president can’t control the economy, and his influence is severely limited.
I can’t believe nobody has said religion. All of it. Praying to god being a prime example.
You know, I always used to think praying was incredibly stupid, and I’m sure plenty of people treat it in a way that’s… not really in the right spirit / ineffective? But recently it’s started to make a lot more sense to me. If you’re praying to god in an effort to directly influence the real world I think you’re misguided… If you think of prayer as a time to consider what you’re grateful for and what you want for the future, it actually seems like a really sensible mental health practice. To be clear, I am and always have been an atheist, and I don’t particularly like religions as a whole, but it seems like some of these things I’ve always found odd (like prayer) stem from something that could actually be reasonable and helpful but got corrupted by some game of telephone and people not understanding metaphors lol.
Prayer can be a powerful self meditation tool. It’s effectively a way to organize your thoughts by talking to yourself. What is not helpful is sending “thoughts and prayers” every time something bad happens without actually attempting to do anything to address the problem at hand.
Yeah, I can see how praying could influence reality by altering your perspective or your behavior, really just by reminding yourself regularly about the things you really value.
There’s obvious ones like “God please help me be a patient and considerate co-worker”, but even “God please give me a new awesome car” - someone who prays about that 4 times a day is going to be focused on saving for it. God helps those who help themselves and all that.
On the other hand “God please make a free car park for me outside the shop” ain’t helping anyone.
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Placebo buttons.
Some appliances like elevators or traffic crossings cycle automatically, but they still have (non-functional) buttons. If the buttons are removed, people complain that the wait is too long. Let them push a button while they wait, and they’ll think it’s much quicker.
Some of these actually do have an effect, but it’s difficult to impossible for a person to know whether this particular one is a placebo button or not.
This is especially the case with elevator close door buttons. Those buttons are always hooked up, because they are needed during emergency operation with the fireman’s key. They are sometimes programmed to cycle the doors marginally faster under normal circumstances, but more often aren’t.
Also, some of the traffic crossing buttons don’t make the walk cycle come sooner, but they occasionally are needed to insert a walk cycle at all, because some intersections don’t trigger a walk cycle unless the button has been pressed.
I think you have the elevator example crossed. My random testing suggests the door open button always works. The close button sometimes is as you say, just to make people feel like they have a measure of control.
I think I’ve only seen one elevator that didn’t do anything immediately after pressing the close door button.
I think traffic lights depend on the skill of the person setting them up. They’ve got a bunch of sensors (car waiting over magnetic sensor, visual sensor detects something other than road in magic area, pedestrian button pressed, time of day, timer since last transition, emergency vehicle override) as input and different intersection states as output.
Someone could program a cycle to just ignore all of the sensors and run through the various states on a timer. Or they could make a more complex cycle loop that lengthens the main state at night, switches sooner if a sensor is triggered, and tries to be smart about it. Or you could go for an even more complex statistical model that not only takes sensor states into account but tries to predict those sensors for even more accuracy.
My guess is that there’s great variance in both the skills of the person doing the programming and their managers and politicians/administrators calling the shots. And that variance in skill includes ones who don’t bother trying anything more complex than the defaults as well as those who do but aren’t good at it (eg: I’ve noticed that some intersections make their main cycle longer at night and don’t cycle unless someone is waiting but make them wait longer than they would during the day when night time means that interrupting the main cycle affects fewer people so they make people wait on the side streets for no good reason).
And there’s also the question of persistence. If they need to be reprogrammed any time the power goes out, they might just go with the easier route if they can’t restore backups.
I’ve never encountered a traffic crossing that cycles when there’s no one waiting.
I think they’re regional. I don’t remember seeing one either, but I don’t know if that’s because I haven’t encountered it, or because I didn’t notice.
Herbal supplements, magnets, crystals, horoscopes…
My neighbor is big into essential oils.
Amazing.
Cargo cult mentality?
Like how island natives after WWII would build ritual airstrips to summon American cargo planes.
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It did not. No more MREs and rifles.
“that’s the way we’ve always done it” at any job ever.
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And the way they tell you to do it is never either one of those.
I X and it rained; for X in:
- Washed the car
- Hung out the washing
- Watered the garden
- Rain dance And we’re not clear on this one, but:
- Seeding clouds for rain
Nah this is that other thing. I want to say Survivorship bias but that’s just because I can’t think of the right term.
Edit: confirmation bias!
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Post hoc fallacy
“Specious reasoning” is all I can think of. That’s what Lisa Simpsons says when Homer thinks the Bear Patrol is working like a charm (because there’s not a bear in sight).
It’s a logical fallacy called “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”. The assumption that an event is caused/prevented by something that preceded it.
I always liked the expression “asteroid insurance”
All superstitions. Lucky charms (not the cereal). Curses (eg. Everytime I cheer for this sport team they lose, but they win when I don’t cheer, so it must be a curse).
The classic Superstition in the Pigeon study by B. F. Skinner back in 1948 is always a good thing to read when this subject comes up.
Otherwise something awful might happen.
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Wait but I’m not smart :x
Also ask any sports or sports fan and they will give you a list of them.
As an example, there’s something called the “caster curse” which I’m pretty sure originates from esports but I don’t see why it couldn’t apply to sports as well. It’s the belief that you can curse an individual/team by praising them (usually happens in real time as the game is being cast). Eg. “Person X never misses those!” Person X then proceeds to miss 3 times in a row.
As a more generalized version of the “caster curse”, a lot of people don’t like to talk about something that is either very likely or very unlikely to happen because they are afraid it will “jinx it”.
Example
Friend A: I don’t know why you’re so anxious, you did way better than the other contestants. This contest is in the bag!
You: Stop talking. You’re going to jinx it.
I’ve always assumed people were joking when they said that. Do people actually believe this?
Nuclear weapons.
I think you’re missing the point of the post. Nuclear weapons are an actual deterrent, not just a perceived one.
Average person Buying or Selling stock has an impact on the price of the stock.
yeah I do, when I buy the stock goes down when I sell the stock goes up
So it’s not just me.
gpupdate /force
Hahaha… ahem haha. Love this.
