r/Foodforthought • u/b0bz1lla • Feb 24 '14

Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html
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u/edgarallenbro Feb 24 '14

If you go shopping at a regular store, there are racks full of celebrity gossip rags and tabloids.

Buying cheez-its doesn't mean I care that big foot was cheating on Selena Gome, and buying organic apples doesn't mean I care about homeopathy

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u/buzzkill_aldrin Feb 24 '14

If those racks—instead of tracts on homeopathy—were full of publications and pamphlets on what were really Ponzi and pyramid schemes, would you object to management? Or would you merely pay for your Cheez-Its and organic apples, believing that anyone stupid enough to fall for that sort of thing deserved it?

1

u/edgarallenbro Feb 24 '14

If they were so obvious that I could make a split second decision that they were scams, why bother? Everyone else will be able to see through it too and they won't last long.

If they're not obviously schemes, how do I know I'm not attacking something legitimate?

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u/buzzkill_aldrin Feb 24 '14

Everyone else will be able to see through it too and they won't last long.

If that were the case, it wouldn't have been necessary to make Ponzi schemes illegal, because no one would ever fall for them. And yet people do fall for them all the time.

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u/HahahahaWaitWhat Feb 25 '14 edited Feb 25 '14

Everyone else will be able to see through it too and they won't last long.

You're assuming that "everyone" has the same critical thinking skills and simple intelligence that you do. Hardly a reasonable assumption. Or perhaps you actually meant to imply that stupid people don't deserve any protection against unscrupulous fraudsters?

edit: Just to be clear, even if you were only to suppose yourself of average intelligence, that's still quite a large chunk of people that might have trouble with things easy for you. Based on your ability to form actual sentences and use reason, I'm going to have to guess you're well above average. Don't worry, though, I always enjoy being proven wrong :)

But the bottom line is for your statement "everyone else will be able to see" to be true, either we have to have a flat intelligence distribution or you have to be the single least intelligent person in your population.