Apples are better than coffee

So now what? I told my mother that the difference between pseudoscience and real science is the difference between an invisible hammer and a real hammer.

The difference is that you can use the real hammer, but you can't easily use the invisible hammer. The invisible hammer is a novelty, it is fun, and it works just as good as the real hammer (supposedly), but when you need it, you can't find it.

For the past couple of school years, I've been on a real coffee kick. I drank the amount of coffee that people only joke about drinking. I had obvious results of weird sleep patterns and lack of focus, but I also have more superstitious consequences. For example, my doctor told me at a checkup (not for coffee addiction) that caffeine is a vaso-congestant. That is, it can constrict your breathing a little bit. Superstitiously, I think it was making my nose red and ruining my complexion. She added afterward that there is no amount of coffee that would really hurt me in that way.

So the real reason that I'm not doing caffeine in the way that I was is not necessarily because of health concerns so much as it wasn't helping me do what I was doing.

This brings us back to our invisible hammer. The real hammer is easily accessible, it makes sense, and we can find it when we put it down. You could feasibly swing an invisible hammer, but that does not make it easier for anyone else to find it. That does not make it a more useable tool. This is an argument by metaphor, but also by utility. If we can't find the tools, the reasoning, the intelligence, the causality behind something, there are probably other tools out there that we can find.