From: Bruce Howlett (brucehowlett@northnet.com.au)
Date: Sat 23 Nov 2002 - 02:02:37 GMT
What is relevant to memetics here is the power of a belief. The placebo effect is a well known phenomenon in medicine and has consistently confounded medical scientists. Legions of concoctions have become accepted medicines over the years because they seemed to produce an effect. One that was told to me by a well educated work associate, was that her mother used to have a brilliant remedy for chest colds, consisting of a slathering of goose fat on the chest covered with brown paper, bandaged on for 3 days. Sounds like torture to me but she swore it worked.
Regards,
Bruce Howlett
PO Box 1103
Armidale NSW 2350
email: brucehowlett@northnet.com.au
phone: 61 2 6775 5542
mobile: 0409 711 303
----- Original Message -----
From: Wade T.Smith
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: memetics-digest V1 #1215
On Friday, November 22, 2002, at 06:14 , Grant wrote:
> One of the religious memes we always have to cope with is the idea that
> people were smarter in the old days.
Interesting. I've always, from the skeptical perspective, noticed that
most people assume we were dumber back in the old days, otherwise, why
bother to invent a tale of aliens helping to construct the pyramids?
Fables like that are legion, especially among the so-called 'spiritual'
or 'metaphysical' newage (rhymes with sewage) hobbyists.
> The older an idea is, the more it reflects the TRUTH.
What skeptics see working, as in the ridiculous claims that ancient
chinese medicine 'works', is a form of 'if it's old, it's good', but,
that is more working from the pretense that people 'back then' were more
'in touch' with 'nature' or their 'inner selves', which could, I
suppose, be comparable to 'smarter', but, when you try to make the
'aliens built the pyramids' do the required tango with 'acupuncture must
work, it's 3000 years old', they don't hear the music together, do they?
- Wade
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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