Unfortunately I think I am coming into this a bit too late to read through the whole thread and respond, but I would like to present a couple of related topics and see what people think.
The first is in response to 'would I like people to burst my placebo/nocebo bubble?': the latest issue of Science magazine has an article on recommendations by the American College of Medicine of whether people should be told without being asked that they have alleles that indicate an elevated risk of disease when looking at genes related to common diseases (mostly cancers and tissue defects) as a course of a full-genome analysis for another disease/syndrome/disorder (pointing out that people may already be in an emotionally fragile state from said disease). Link here<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1507.full?sid=7561e634-f578-431a-8299-e86ef03891f4> . Secondly, I agree that how likable a belief is relies not on how close to reality it is (although that helps) but how 'humble' it is, how willing to admit that it could be wrong (put another way, beliefs that come with an accurate measure of where they came from and therefore how widely they can be applied). So there is likable woo (cold fusion or the new cold fusion, LENR; based on my [admittedly minor] perusing of websites and documents the proponents seem to welcome outside experimentation/verification, and open-source device plans. That doesn't mean the device works as advertised, though) and dislikable woo (iridology?) with chemtrails in between (while it seems very paranoid, I wouldn't put it past refineries that produce jet fuel to get rid of waste chemicals through their product; and although neither that nor any other intentional human activity [unless we can count GHG emissions as intentional just through negligence now?] has effectively controlled the weather, it is not for lack of trying. Contemporary benign activities like silver iodide cloud seeding, speak to this) along with homeopathy (my school tutor keeps recommending this method, whatever that means in practice, and I just politely change the subject; While I don't understand the fractionation thing, the idea that it contains the cause of what it is treating gets some mental preparation from the idea of vaccines). <May be unrelated: the discovery of the sodium layer, and the ICE<http://photovalet.com/181459>[Ionosphere Communication Experiment] Station Otto [Not to be confused with Ice Station Zebra], outside Vaughn, NM.> Similarly, there is likable and dislikable skepticism. I think the best part of science is the experimentation itself rather than the results per se (although obviously the fruitful part for society is the resulting tech or best practices); perhaps this is related to Feynman's pleasure of finding things out (I believe it was that book in which he stirs a pot of jello that he is holding out a window to see if it will congeal faster in the cold, or the one in which he and a classmate realise they have different ways of counting, one auditory, one visual). When this turns into ridiculing people, however justified, it becomes just no fun anymore. -Arlo James Barnes
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