Take It Or Leave It?
Recently I started evaluating a “healthy living” type of web site, for my own personal use. I was skeptical, of course, of the usefulness of the site at the beginning. It had all the flashy banner ads, weight loss pictures, and testimonials of many other sites I had seen in the past. Most of those had turned out to be useless to me, and I found my initial impression of the latest site to be dubious. However, I did find a useful meal planning and grocery list tool, and given the exercise equipment I owned, the site was able to come up with a reasonable 30 minute routine for me for each day of the week.
Like other sites, you could put in your starting and goal weight, and how soon you wanted to get from the former to the latter. I tried my usual trick of entering some false data. I stated I weighed well over 400 lbs and wanted to get to a slim 125 by next weekend. Many sites I’ve done this on before would return the calculation with, “Of course we can help you lose 100 lbs per week!” Right. In this case, I was greeted with a popup that stated what I wanted was not possible, and I should lose no more than 2 lbs per week. Now I was impressed, so I signed up for a free account and began using the various tools the site offered.
As I was browsing around the new site I started reading several articles on the main site and looking through the message boards. Ah, there’s the woo. I found everything from wacky diets to extreme exercize routines and much in between. While I was looking through an article on the effectiveness of 100-calorie snack packs or something like that, my wife looked over my shoulder and asked if what I found there was any good. “Well…”, I said, “…the site has some useful tools, and it seems to be reasonable when it comes to goal setting, but there are some really goofy things on here in the forums and in some of the articles. I suppose you can take what you want, and just leave the rest.”
“Take what you want and leave the rest.” It’s a common phrase uttered by psychics, astrologers, diviners, mediums and those of similar practice. It’s meant to imply that some things offered as part of a reading or study may be considered useful to you, so you should concentrate on those. Anything that doesn’t make sense can be safely ignored. For example, a psychic states that you will be lucky in love, and your pet rabbit will be, as well. You don’t have a pet rabbit? Well, maybe you did have a pet rabbit in the past or maybe will have one in the future, so you can leave that for now. Well, if you’re happy about the idea of being lucky in love, then you may very well be tempted to just leave Bunnykins aside and take the luck with you when you leave the psychic. Who knows who you might bump into on the way home? Though you will hopefully not run over any rabbits.
So when can we take what we want and leave the rest? Maybe when there is something worth taking, at a price worth paying. In many cases, such as with psychics, or mediums, you can take away good feelings, but the cost of belief is way too high for me, personally. Not to mention that there is often a monetary and an emotional cost invested in such things. I’m not about to suspend my rationality or open my wallet just to talk to dear, departed Uncle Joe for a brief moment. Especially when all Uncle Joe seems to remember is his first initial. Likewise I am not going to buy into a diet and exercise program that can promise me quick results if I have to drink some odd fruit juice every 4 hours and pay through the nose for a case of it every week. Pseudo-Scientists and Paranormal Claimants: You have nothing I want. At least, not badly enough to pay that kind of price.
However, I’m willing to put up with a little woo on the forums if a site has decent tools I can use to plan out my own fitness routines. Likewise, I’m not averse to a nice massage at a fair price, even if the person giving it to me wants to light a few aromatherapy candles. And things such as meal planning tools and massages are useful to me, independent of their sources, if they work in a way that jives with good science and sound thinking. There, I can get what I want without having to sacrifice my critical thinking skills, and leave the rest for the mods to deal with.
Though I will admit that the temptation to jump in on the forums and bring a little skeptical smackdown on the diet fads is pretty high.
Thanks for reading.
-D.
2 comments
This is a really interesting question when it comes to things like health food as well. I like to eat healthy things, sometimes vegetarian, but it’s annoying that the assumption in health food stores and the like is that the desire for health equals desire for detoxifying foot pads. I’d like to see more consideration of this sort of thing in skeptic circles.
I think, as skeptics, a grocery store is a great place to practice our spotting of logical fallacies. I think I see two logical fallacies here, one being a false dichotomy, and the other, a false continuum.
The false dichotomy is that what you can find in the health food store (HFS) is going to be somehow better for you than what you can find in your average grocery store (AGS), even if the two stores sell roughly the same products. i.e., Vitamin supplements, vegetables and fruits, lean meats and fish, etc.
The false continuum is present in the HFS where you find a variety of products that are geared towards promoting better health. (Thank you DSHEA…) Some of these are pretty clearly good for you, and some aren’t or have no effect at all. I think we can draw a pretty clear line in the sand, grouping those products into, ‘worth it’, and ‘don’t bother’.
Anybody else have a comment?
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