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Merged The MANDELA Effect.

In the case of the actual Mandela effect, I think it's very easily explained:
Wasn't there this black dude, pretty famous for fighting against apartheid, and then he died in jail?
Yes, indeed! (Only, it wasn't Mandela.)
 
Fudbucker said:
What about it is paranormal? We're not talking about ghosts. We're reasonably sure other universes exist and somewhat sure they're causally disconnected from us, but stuff like quantum immortality isn't paranormal, it's just weird. The Many Worlds Interpretation of QM is very weird, but not paranormal in the least. If all these branching universes exist, who's to say we don't occasionally slip in and out of them?
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Might as well talk about ghosts because the Mandella Effect works on the same mental mechanism.

People see ghosts due to a misprocessing of visual information in the brain combined with external sensory input. In short - people mis-see see things. It's fairly rare, but it does happen. The Jaws-Holly thing is a great example where rational people swear she had braces, but the evidence is clear that she did not.

The people who thought she had braces didn't see the movie in a parallel universe, their brains made a judgement call based on the visual information in the scene where Holly is in pigtails, which in 1979 was nerdy, and for a Bond movie- definitely nerdy.

Pigtails+Glasses+Jaws=Braces...right? The assumption was Jaws fell in love with her because she had braces, and not desirable cleavage, and great legs. The viewers who "saw" braces made a visual interpretation. Later on the two are on the space station and she clearly does not have braces.

Yes, it's kind of creepy to have an image in your mind that you are sure you saw, and then find out you didn't see it. Welcome to my world.

The idea that this is all caused by parallel universes, worm holes, and whatnot is layman's Quantum Physics applied to justify woo.
 
theprestige said:
Suggesting that these parallel universes occasionally interact is the paranormal explanation. There's no evidence that such universes even exist on the macro scale.
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By that logic, you would have to claim the MWI of QM is paranormal, which would probably surprise the scientists who believe it's the correct interpretation. Like I said, the term loses all meaning if you're going to apply it to things that could be possible, but aren't yet known. You might as well call warp speed paranormal too.

You might as well say the ME is caused by time travel.
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No, we're pretty sure time travel isn't possible. I haven't heard any such claims about moving in and out of parallel worlds. Do you think Quantum Immortality is paranormal?
 
I'm halfway convinced that we're in some alternate universe right now. One of the cliches of old sci-fi stories is the premise "What if... Hitler won World War II?" (I don't think that counts as a Godwin...)

Except that in our universe, somebody put this random guy into "What if x became President of the United States?" I hate being part of some Writing 101 exercise.
 
alfaniner said:
I'm halfway convinced that we're in some alternate universe right now. One of the cliches of old sci-fi stories is the premise "What if... Hitler won World War II?" (I don't think that counts as a Godwin...)

Except that in our universe, somebody put this random guy into "What if x became President of the United States?" I hate being part of some Writing 101 exercise.
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The only thing stranger than fiction is non-fiction.
 
Veliki George said:
I don't really have an explanation. I'm skeptic and I do not believe in anything paranormal. I'm not an expert in physics and I do not know anything about the theory of parallel universes, but I was told that it is impossible just to jump from one universe to another. It does not make any sense that the result is a change in the name of some of the products, movies and other pop cultural stuff.
I would like to believe that this is just a false memory, but so many people remember the movie with an exclamation mark. I can not understand why we all make exactly the same mistake. Where did that exclamation come from?
I've never seen Them! nor other old horror movies.
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A random exclamation mark at the end of a name? Who would think to do such a thing?
 
Fudbucker said:
By that logic, you would have to claim the MWI of QM is paranormal, which would probably surprise the scientists who believe it's the correct interpretation. Like I said, the term loses all meaning if you're going to apply it to things that could be possible, but aren't yet known. You might as well call warp speed paranormal too.
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"Warp speed" isn't paranormal, it's science fiction. Warp speed as an explanation for why lights in the sky appear to violate known laws of physics would be paranormal.

Same basic principle here. MWI is a useful construct for thinking about counter-intuitive observations in quantum mechanics. You would need to show that it's a reality at macro scale, before I'm willing to accept it as anything other that woo, for explaining macro-scale phenomenon.

Especially in this particular context, where we don't need to appeal to parallel universes to arrive at a parsimonious explanation for the phenomenon.
 
William Parcher said:
No. I think that they wanted to create a reference to Jaws in a funny way.

I believe that that commercial predates the Internet and predates the (now) widespread realization that there is a Jaws Mandela Effect phenomenon. For some people, that commercial could cause the JME when they didn't actually have it prior.
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It could yes.

But i can say for me this was not the cause as that card was never available in my country, so likely never advertised there, and also, i did not own a tv nor ever really watch one ( that is a different story)

I think this may apply to many others as the card in question and the advertising campaign the ad is taken from seems to only have been for FINLAND.

And the vast majority of the madelatards are from the USA not finland.
 
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Sunny guy from the raisin bran cereals lost his sunglasses.

Still, there are Yahoo question threads from ten years ago about why the sun is wearing glasses.
 
esspee said:
shorter than writing it out that's why
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Writing what out? He didn't say anything. If a link is deemed worthy of posting, shouldn't it contain...something? I am not objecting to the content. I object to the utter lack of it.
 
Thermal said:
Why did you link that worthless video? Some guy following his dogs up a trail talking to himself? Why bother posting that?
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Because esspee made that video. He is the creator of that video and he regularly pimps his own videos here.
 
theprestige said:
"Warp speed" isn't paranormal, it's science fiction. Warp speed as an explanation for why lights in the sky appear to violate known laws of physics would be paranormal.
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:confused:

It either is or isn't paranormal. It doesn't matter what you're using it to explain.

Same basic principle here. MWI is a useful construct for thinking about counter-intuitive observations in quantum mechanics.
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It's more than that. It's an explanation for the apparent collapse of the wave function, and it solves some paradoxes. SOME explanation is true. MWI is a leading candidate. The implications are, of course, all these universes branching off whenever observations happen.

You would need to show that it's a reality at macro scale, before I'm willing to accept it as anything other that woo, for explaining macro-scale phenomenon.
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That's odd reasoning. Are you rejecting macro-scale phenomena that are caused by micro-scale events?

Especially in this particular context, where we don't need to appeal to parallel universes to arrive at a parsimonious explanation for the phenomenon.
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Probably not, but it's fun. My only point in all this was that it's similar to quantum immortality (which is not "woo"), and not at all like "leprechauns".
 
theprestige said:
Oh, you don't like the word paranormal? My bad. Let's call it woo, instead. You're foisting pseudoscientific woo as if it were a reasonable alternative explanation.
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I just ask the same question: what makes it "woo"? Other universes popping into existence? No. Other universes having effects on this one? No. A Shroedinger's Cat death propelling you to another universe? No, unless you think Max Tegmark traffics in "woo", which would be an odd claim to make.

What, exactly, has got you riled up, The?
 
JesseCuster said:
Sometimes stupid ideas are held by smart people. I don't know what quantum immortality is, but The Mandela Effect is a stupid idea.
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It is stupid.

I think I remember reading somewhere that the "parallel universe travel" explanation of the Mandela Effect was originally proposed as a joke. I could be wrong about that - but see that's the thing; in the "home universe" that I originally came from, sometimes a person would misremember things and someone else could come along and say "no that's wrong it was this way, see look at these old things" and the first person would say "oh I see, obviously I misremembered, thanks for clearing that up for me". But obviously I've now slipped into a parallel world where when people remember something one way and are then given evidence that their memory is wrong, they now just insist their memory is impeccable and it's reality that is obviously wrong.

Unfortunately parallel-universe slippage isn't the only explanation that crackpots have envisioned for the Mandela Effect. There's also a significant number of others who seem to believe that some unknown force is deliberately editing historical events, things like movie lines and children's author's names, and others' memories of same, for potentially diabolical reasons.
 
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It's been said before, but the Mandela Effect is pure ego. Rather than admit to conflating some memories about popular culture, people prefer to draw up scenarios wherein differing universes are colliding and only special people can see it.

But other people misremember it the exact same way?! Well, here's a thought. Human brains are all made out of the same stuff, and function in basically the same way (the healthy ones, anyway). And people within a particular demographic are exposed to a lot of the same pop culture influences. Is it really so unbelievable, then, that said people might end up with a lot of the same memory mistakes?

I know we're all special and unique and ****, but there are only so many things a brain can do. It just doesn't amaze me that much. What amazes me is the hoops people will jump through to invent mysticism where only boring brain farts exist.
 
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