Dave Farina
Appearances
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
No, I didn't. I was teaching organic chemistry at a university, and when I started the channel, it was just my university organic chemistry tutorial, so it seemed apropos at the time.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, very good question. And as you might guess, nothing. It's like with astrology, no attempt is made to explain any kind of physical mechanism as to how this could function, why these specific correlations or assignments are as they are. It's gospel, essentially. If you were to say that the color purple signifies wealth or helps you attain wealth in some way, it's a very natural question. Why?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
How? Why purple? How does purple do that? What is the reasoning behind this? What is the demonstration of this correlation? It's never described as nothing empirical. It's just blindly asserted while making vague references to mystical concepts like chi. They'll say a sparse room has too much chi and a densely packed room blocks chi or doesn't give chi room to flow, things like that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
So chi is life energy for people who've never heard of it or something like that. So chi needs to flow, I guess. Apparently, even with that, though, there should be many more questions, right? Where is the chi in the room? Is it with us right now? Apparently, it is with us at all times. It's like the force in Star Wars.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
But where is it in the room such that it is being blocked by a chair or a table? Can it go over or under furniture? How tall does something have to be to block qi? Do humans block qi? Do we block the qi? Why does qi need to flow in the first place? These are all important questions.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
No, same era. You Yeah, it's a pretty nebulous concept. And yeah, most would try to refer to chi as like a vital life force or like a life energy. But that's again, this is only good enough for someone with no follow up questions to anyone familiar with the concept of energy. It raises a lot of red flags.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
We could a little bit. I mean, it depends on how far you want to go. But if we're going to talk about energy, if we're going to be throwing around this term energy and making all these implications, we should at least elucidate the term energy. We should know what the word energy means.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, as though you trust any astronomy or geology or physics professor in the entire world, you hypocrite.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Sure, the grifters do use it that way, but the reason that they're able to do that is because they're exploiting public confusion about the term. To many people, energy just means some magical, mystical substance. That's what it is. But in physics, it has a very rigid definition. It means, here we go, the capacity to do work. That's it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
To elucidate what work is, work refers to action done to induce motion on an object. So basically, energy is the thing that allows for motion, more or less.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, for kinetic energy, this has to do with the mass and velocity of an object, and this energy can be transferred through collisions, like a car crash or something. Potential energy is energy held by virtue of an object's position in a field. The higher you lift an object away from the surface of the Earth, the more gravitational potential energy it has, and if released, it will fall.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And it too can transfer energy upon impact. Now, same thing with heat. The word heat, it means the transfer of kinetic energy from one system of particles to another. So hotter objects have faster moving particles. Colder objects have slower moving particles.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And if they come into contact, the particles collide and transfer energy until the temperature is uniform and thermal equilibrium has been reached.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Right, it's not a substance. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energies of the particles in a system. That's all it is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Completely, yeah. And the thing is that some people use the word metaphorically and acknowledge that they are using it metaphorically, and that's fine. I might even say, oh, this room has good energy. I just mean that I get a good impression from it. I like the room. It's aesthetically pleasing to me, right? I just like it. But she flows well. Yeah, sure, of course. It's got good feng shui.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
But it doesn't mean it's literally pulsating with some unique aura that can be measured and quantified. It's just an expression.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
That's right. That is all of it is they're taking metaphorical usage and then they're literalizing it. So that's with all of this stuff, chi, energy, healing, any of that stuff, it stems from a misunderstanding of what energy actually is. So again, it has this very specific meaning that we talked about And it has been bastardized by a culture seeking something that isn't there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
It's just like, what could good energy or bad energy possibly mean? It doesn't mean anything. How could one measure and categorize such things concretely? It's not a thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
No, this is actually part of why it's so easy to diagnose the origin of this kind of confusion. So like in physics, quantities of energy can be assigned positive or negative values and positive or negative meaning greater than or less than zero. It's an arithmetic.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, no, but it's just it's a linguistic coincidence that the word positive has another connotation as meaning good, like a positive experience. So if you're talking about an object that has positive or negative potential energy or plus more or less than zero, somebody might then transfer that over to the alternate connotation and think of good or bad.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
I think that's where the concept of good energy and conversely, bad energy came from originally.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Oh, various ancient Greeks and contemporaries, but also Galileo wasn't the first to figure out heliocentrism. That was Copernicus and then actually Kepler confirmed it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
other critical buzzwords and I can hear them apply. I don't know too much about how people talk about feng shui, but I can definitely hear them saying the correct alignment of furniture will help you achieve a specific frequency or something like that. But again, just like with good or bad energy, this is completely meaningless.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
So frequency just means a number of cycles per unit time. So if something is cyclical, like a rotating object or like a wave, then the number of rotations or waves, wavelengths per some unit of time, that gives you a frequency. So you could have the RPM of a record or a wheel on a car or a bike. That's a frequency, how many times around per second or per minute or whatever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
You could measure the frequency of a sound wave, right, that has a wavelength. So it's just the number of waves that pass by a particular spot in, let's say, one second, right? That's the SI unit for time. So we can count that, and then the number of waves or cycles per second is called hertz. That's what hertz is. It's inverse seconds, right? Number of wavelengths per second.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
But the point is that we're talking about a concrete phenomenon. We're talking about a sound wave or... It could be electromagnetic radiation. We're talking about a frequency of something. So if someone just says frequency, but they don't specify what they're talking about, what a frequency of what is being measured, it's just meaningless. The word by itself is meaningless.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Such and such has a particular frequency. So this chair has a good frequency. Frequency of what? What are you talking about? Is the chair bouncing or is it spinning around? Do you mean the atoms vibrating inside the chair? What are you talking about? Frequency of what? This word is misused constantly. Again, often by design with the grifters, just like energy. This is what they do.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah. The thing here, though, is that atoms do vibrate, right? There are vibrations, but that doesn't make them magic. You can't just use that word to mean whatever you want. Atoms can transfer energy by virtue of their vibrations, but that's heat transfer. That's what we were talking about earlier, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
If faster moving or faster vibrating particles are colliding with slower vibrating ones, that's just heat transfer. It's just thermal equilibrium. That's all that is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Something like that. I look at what happens culturally. I look at how people are using words, what the words actually mean and the alternate connotations. And that's just my assessment of it. But to stick with feng shui, I mean, feng shui is essentially interior design and interior design can obviously be considered an art.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
To me, it's very clear. I think it could be defined simply. We're just saying that an art is anything where someone is making decisions based on a set of aesthetic criteria.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Totally. It's pretty simple in my mind. Let's say you're building like a wheelbarrow or something. We're going to be guided by a set of practical criteria. Why are you building a wheelbarrow? Because it has to hold things and then you need for it to be easy to roll. That's what's guiding the wheelbarrow design, right? So someone could include aesthetic criteria in there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Oh, I really want it to be blue or whatever. But most people who make wheelbarrows probably aren't going to do that. It holds stuff and it's easy to roll. That's it. That's what you're thinking about when you're building a wheelbarrow. So wheelbarrow building isn't really typically considered an art.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
But if you're like painting, if you're making a painting, then the criteria are completely aesthetic. The painting doesn't serve any practical purpose. It doesn't have to roll. It doesn't have to hold objects. The decisions you make, like what colors to use and how to do the shading and whatever else there, these are aesthetic decisions. I want to paint this box green because I like it green.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
It looks nice to me like that. It's subjective. And we can apply this way of thinking to any art form. So film, music, dance, writing, whatever it is, if you're dancing, why twirl this way and not another way? Or music, why write this melody and not another melody? These are just aesthetic decisions that you're making.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Exactly. That's exactly how I view all of this stuff. Virtually anything mystical, nail on the head, I think. So it's like when we say that bamboo represents growth, flexibility and kindness, or if you say that water fountains represent a flow of energy. Of course, in a certain context, those assertions are true. Bamboo is objectively flexible. Water fountains involve flowing water.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And if looking at those objects in your home changes your thought process in some way, maybe you look at the bamboo and it reminds you of flexibility and it reminds you to try to be flexible. That's fine, too. Your own thoughts. Right. Your inner monologue, your subjective experience, it's uniquely yours. No one can tell you're wrong because you looked at a thing and then you had a thought.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
That's fine. But the line must be drawn when claims are made that the bamboo magically imparts flexibility upon you like some kind of incantation. Right. Or that the presence of a water fountain makes your energy flow. It makes the chi flow. Right. Or any other absurd, concretely physical claim. That's baseless mysticism. And I think we shouldn't entertain that in our culture. This is my opinion.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
We're not accounting for that. And inevitably, anyone who reports a greater feeling of being energized when the plant is there is definitely reporting a placebo effect. That is certainly the case. And then, of course, the non-believer who would report not feeling a difference would be chastised for not having an open mind or whatever it is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, I did. I encountered this too while I was reading is apparently mirrors equal water. There's some equivocation there with water. So one of the things is that we need to keep our heads above water. So mirrors should be hung below head level.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Why not air? Yeah, the sheer reflecting the atmosphere. Why isn't it air? But with the head level thing, right? Another question is whose head level? Who are we talking about? Babies are people. If a baby crawls into a room, they're pretty close to the ground there. And there's a mirror in the room. They're under the level of the mirror, right? So do they suddenly experience bad chi?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Should we not have any mirrors in any room where a baby might be or they will drown in chi or something?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Depends how they do it. I'm sure that in ancient China, there were practitioners of feng shui who were incredible interior decorators. And you look at images or... This dungeon is fantastic. Or a temple, you know, whatever. These really nice spaces inside homes or buildings. A palace, right? A palace is probably incredible. And they instill this impression of serenity or peace.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And I'm sure that plenty of people have had an incredible talent for knowing how to place fountains and sitting areas and where to put art and what kind of art and all these things. And they have attributed all of that to the principles of feng shui. In actuality, they're just really talented interior decorators. Some people could look at what they've done in the past and become trained that way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And like, that's fine. It doesn't make the magic real.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah. Some of these principles in feng shui, they make for good decorating in a practical way. But again, that doesn't make the principles of feng shui necessarily true precisely as they're described with all the mystical aspects. It just makes them seem to be true intuitively. if you want to believe them. So again, a modern interior decorator could do the same.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
They could follow all these principles and might help them be really good at their job. And honestly, that's fine. Bet some do that and they know that it's just referencing an ancient art form and getting ideas from somewhere. And then they just keep the mysticism to themselves or they don't even believe in the mystical aspects. It's just a pamphlet, a guideline, you know.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, it's like if you give a sample of some molecule to some chemists and say, figure out the structure of this molecule, and they all go and they do their NMR spectroscopy and they do their other eye or they do all their characterization techniques, they're all going to get the same answer. If you didn't get this one, you're wrong. That's the structure of this compound.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, so that's why it's pseudoscientific, right? If there's something rigidly empirical about it, we should all agree on what the answer is. Same with astrology. Yeah. But we're beating a dead horse. Yeah, indeed.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Totally. Yeah, I've always been fascinated by this and I really knew why. I mean, I've seen it. It is ubiquitous. And I think luck is just the English translation of fortune or prosperity. But everything is lucky or unlucky. It's everywhere. Like you said, Chinese restaurants that, you know, Lucky China Buffet or whatever it is, or businesses, other laundromat or something.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, well, no, it is. Yeah, fortune, same thing, right? And that's also their desperate attempt to spice up a cookie that tastes like a manila folder.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
I think it's just that they view good or bad fortune as something tangible that can be managed and manifested in predictable ways. In a way, that's like the ultimate reality of it, right? It's all about the luck and the fortune, the prosperity, right? It's an attempt to situate their environment so as to maximize good qi. which is supposed to then in turn bring good fortune.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And then all the areas of the Bagua represent an attempt to direct that good fortune to specific areas of one's life. So whether that's improving your career or your family life or your love life or your friendships or whatever is lacking for a particular person. And then objects can have lucky energy, which you can activate with intentions and aspirations according to yin and yang principles.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
It's self-delusion after a certain point.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah. You put the desk here instead of the Orion is going to do something to you or Capricorn. And it's not a surprise that feng shui has a lot of overlap with Chinese astrology. The more I look at this stuff, the more I see it all as one big thing. It's just a big old pit of mysticism that takes on different forms.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
I go back and forth. You get back and forth.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
spoiler you kind of are yeah but as you mentioned this is a concept of chinese origin and it's quite old and i'll be honest i really didn't know too much about it beyond the absolute basics so i did do a little bit of research for this conversation so that we can dive into the minutiae of it all but to start the very basics feng means wind and shui means water so this is a clear allusion to nature and to fluidity and to humans being connected with the flow of an environment so
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Of course, energy will be a big buzzword, as it is with all mysticism. But anyway, feng shui is the practice or art of arranging objects in one's living space to create balance with the natural world. So the goal is to attain some kind of perfect harmony with one's surroundings, a concept that, of course, is quite alluring at face value, even if it's meaningless on a deeper level.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, it's an exercise in human psychology. This is the way I look at it. It just sort of mirrors the human condition. So we are finite. We are flawed. We are imperfect. Speak for yourself. Oh, yeah. But we are intelligent, sentient beings that we can conceive of infinity and divinity and perfection merely as abstract concepts. So we naturally lament that we are not those things.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
We want to be those things. And we seek ways to convince ourselves that we can attain some kind of cosmic perfection if we just believe a certain thing or we behave a certain way. We seek to become whole.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And if someone wants to believe that you can do that by collecting crystals or contorting their bodies or arranging their living room a certain way, they might just convince themselves of that reality.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, it all comes back to the cosmos. All forms of mysticism inevitably have a kind of crossover like this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah. Okay. So let's get into the details here right up top. Feng shui has three principles, those being commanding position, bagua, and five elements. So let's imagine a room of some kind where we've got a bedroom or office or whatever, and we can start with commanding position. So this refers to the part of the room that you will spend the most time in.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
So if we're talking about a bedroom, that's going to be the bed. Could be a couch if it's a living room. If you're talking about an office, that's going to be your desk and so forth. Feng Shui says that this object should be as far from the door as possible and at a diagonal with respect to the door. So not immediately next to the door and not immediately across from the door.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense just in terms of like how to use a space most economically.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Don't get too far ahead. The second principle is a bit out there. So next, once the primary piece is placed, you consider the bagua or the energy map that has to be. Yeah, so we're right to the energy stuff. This is the energy map. It's got to be superimposed on the floor of the house or an individual room.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Pretty much, yeah. And as one would predict, inevitably, the energy map, it has eight areas relating to specific things. So these would be family, wealth, helpful people, children, knowledge, fame, career, and partnerships. And it's laid out in a grid type format.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yes, that's right, Yari, if you want to put it there. And beyond this, the concepts that comprise these areas have associated shapes, colors, seasons, numbers, and elements. So like for family, there's a family section. The shape is columnar or rectangular. The associated colors are green, blue, and teal. The season is spring. The number is four. And the element is yangwood.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And finally, at the center of this map, so you've got eight around the edges, and then in the center is the ninth area, which represents your overall wellness.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, that's a good question. I would bet there's not really a satisfactory answer to that. I guess a practitioner would say, oh, you can just distort the grid in whatever way you want to keep pretending it means anything.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Totally. I thought about this too. So if you place it over the whole house, then let's say there's one room that is entirely in the knowledge area. So from the perspective of the house, that has to be like the knowledge room. But then if you put the bagua over that room, you have a smaller map. Now all eight concepts are represented suddenly. And that's not all.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, it's supposed to work for your whole house, but it can work for a whole city block or like a town, like any scale. So the energy map of any area can change in any arbitrary way, depending on what you're looking at. And that just to me, it leads to all these contradictions.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, the energy map, they would say, is in a constant superposition until you observe a specific part of the house. And then the wave function collapses to give you a discrete energetic experience.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah. So the last one, we have the five elements which are earth, metal, water, wood and fire. So the point with these is that you can identify some area of your life that needs work and then you can implement one or more of these elements strategically to address those needs.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah. So let's say you're stressed or tired or something, you would need rejuvenation. And so presumably the bedroom might be the place where you would do that. And so you want to reconnect with the earth and rejuvenate. And so you would use earth tones and you could have clay pottery in the room or stones or crystals or other things from the earth.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
And that would bring you the rejuvenation that you seek.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'd be inclined to probably think of water first, too, if you take a nice bath or something. And I bet some of the practitioners might go to that first and would suggest the water element or wind element right for a breath of fresh air or something.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
But thus enters the complete and utter ambiguity of all of this, which negates any shred of empirical validity it could hope to have.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
This goes way, way back. Ancient Greece and maybe even before, usually metal isn't one of them because that's maybe the bonus one. But the other four, you know, fire, earth, water, wind is usually we hear about these all the time. And we know now that it's totally meaningless, like it's just wrong. They're not Right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
Yeah, totally. And someone else could get some other subjective impression of that sort of a design scheme. And ultimately, that's all this really is. We're talking about interior decoration with a splash of mysticism. And if people would just embrace that fact, there would be no issue. That'd be totally fine. We could even whimsically refer to the ancients and say, oh, the Chinese...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
In ancient times, they used to do this or that. And you get like a little sense of the passage of time in doing so and add some weight to what you're doing. But the problem is when assertions are made about energy or other rigidly physical concepts and that there is a correlation with these design elements that ought to be measurable and describable.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday
You should be able to do something scientific with these things if these claims are true.