Things Educated People Believe that's Crazier than UFOs
If you think UFOs are science-defying, you should hear these whoppers.
Believing in UFOs is crazy in that it’s a minority opinion among college-educated Americans, and has an association with nutcases.
UFO belief isn’t crazy in that it doesn’t contradict the fundamental premises of any empirical discipline. Most astrobiologists believe in extraterrestrial life, and physicists have calculated that self-replicating probes could cover the galaxy.
In contrast, many smart, educated people happily believe things that break entire fields of study they claim to respect, but don’t get pushback because those beliefs aren’t seen as silly or dangerous. Three examples are below:
1. Disbelief in Calories-in-Calories-Out (CICO)
I’m talking about “Hard CICO”, the physiological principle, rather than “Soft CICO”, i.e., calorie-counting as a dieting strategy.1
Hard CICO is simply the principle of conservation of energy2, that all energy entering a system must be accounted for. “Calories in” from food must be either stored as body mass3 or leave as “calories out.” To store fewer calories, there must be a calorie deficit: Calories in + Stored energy = Calories out.
Not everyone will get the exact same calories from food. If you’re lactose intolerant, for example, you’ll get fewer calories from milk. However, most people are concerned with minimizing calorie intake, and the available chemical energy in food is the hard limit on how many calories you can extract from it. It’s possible to harvest less energy than food contains, but you can never harvest more.
Though human bodies are complicated, the thing about conservation laws is that they always apply. They can therefore be used to characterize any physical system, no matter how complicated, from CERN to stars. Not only are they useful, but they’re actually necessary for the Standard Model of physics to work.
I realize many of you will still not be convinced, which is fine. What I want to show is that disagreeing with Hard CICO is the same as disagreeing with the first law of thermodynamics, which is crazier than believing in UFOs.
2. Homebuilding Won’t Counterfactually Reduce Housing Costs
Economics is squishier than physics, but one of its pillars is supply and demand. Aside from rare and well-characterized exceptions like Veblen goods, when the supply of something increases, holding other factors constant, the price decreases.
There are proposed exceptions, in that perhaps more housing in an area creates valuable network effects, increasing demand, and thus price. However, this is a testable theory and has been shown to be empirically untrue; building is consistently associated with price reductions.
That means the premise disagrees with both the foundational theory of economics and the body of evidence. This is worse than “there’s no evidence for this,” it’s “there’s much evidence against this and it contradicts the basic principles of the field.”
3. The Blank Slate
Tabula Rasa, literally “blank slate,” is the theory that “humans are born without any ‘natural’ psychological traits and that all aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behavior, knowledge, or sapience are later imprinted by one's environment.”
If nothing is inborn, then everything can be a human social construction, a position popular in certain subcultures and academic departments.
However, this contradicts a fundamental fact of genetics: traits are heritable. A meta-study of ~3000 twin studies covering ~18,000 human traits found about 50% heritability across them.
UFOs haven't been disproven, whereas the blank slate has been disconfirmed nearly 3,000 times.
I’ve become more comfortable with the idea of UFOs once I realized that, though they’re considered weird or silly, they still don’t fundamentally contradict any of the sciences. You can do much worse than “not yet enough evidence.”
What works psychologically is different for everyone, and I myself have never calorie-counted when trying to change my body weight.
Technically, the conservation of mass-energy.
Body mass without chemical energy, such as water weight, is not included and can be gained or lost rapidly, regardless of energy expenditure.
Regarding CICO, I assume Calories Out includes calories burnt. I'll only note that the latter can vary; that's why anyone trying to lose weight should avoid near-starvation diets, since their metabolism will slow down and (aside from being miserable) take longer to lose weight.
Great points! I agree that believing in UFOs is epistemically more defensible than these other obviously wrong ideas.
There's another dimension though, which is how salient the belief is. I would argue that holding an irrational view on an issue that's important to your life is probably worse than holding a *very* irrational view that has little practical effect (such as housing, where the average person's view has ~0 impact).