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How to de-radicalize my mom's youtube algorithm?
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the "not stressed" end, so I've gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.
That isn't the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn't working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the "not stressed" end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren't saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.
it's a skin galvanometer. It measures sweating directly based on the fact that sweat is electrically conductive, then interprets more sweat as more stress. this is a fallacy as the fact that stressed people tend to sweat does NOT imply that sweaty people tend to be stressed. this works to the advantage of scientologists because genuinely stressed people will measure high, but so will a lot of unstressed people or people who are only stressed by the fact that they suddenly find themselves in an experiment. False positives and true positives are much more common than true or false negatives, and also much more profitable for scientologists. When you successfully beat the test, the person administering it insisted you go again because it's kinda rigged and they assumed that a second reading would come back with the needle pointing strongly toward "give us a bunch of money".
this is the central fallacy behind lie detectors as well, as they measure skin galvanic response, heart rate, and other things that are correlated with stress but can have myriad other causes, then they assume that people are stressed when they lie, then they take a flying leap to the conclusion that anyone displaying symptoms of stress must be lying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodermal_activity
It's close enough to convince people. If there were no correlation between sweatiness and stress, the E-meter wouldn't be a convincing recruiting tool. If it always just went to "stressed" no matter who used it or how, it wouldn't be as convincing either. The fact that sweatiness and stress are somewhat correlated means that it can be used to bring people into the cult.
oh no one is doubting that it's a good scam. it's quantifiably a truly great scam, having bilked billions from a whole lot of people. but it is a scam, and the electroconductivity of your skin is not a measure of your spiritual state