Now let's come back to the question of cost. Suppose that Chiu could convince people that the rings can work without wearing them at all. This would be a considerable improvement on having to wear them. Likewise, if he offered them for, say, one dollar instead of 27 dollars, he would get a lot more customers - or perhaps not, as pseudo-science is sometimes more attractive when it's more expensive. Higher prices sometimes instill in people the belief that the product is of a higher quality, depending on the product. Either way, the perceived benefits are higher than the perceived costs.
As a materialist, naturally, I consider the perceived benefit is zero or close to zero. But we must also reject the idea that we should balance perceived benefit with perceived cost. Suppose that someone accosts you on the street and tells you that he has the power to bring you a fatal illness in a week, unless you give him a dollar. Apart from the fact that this is tantamount to blackmail, would you obey him ? Probably not, because regardless of the threats (or in our balance, the costs) he can fabricate, the actual threat his voodoo poses to your health is zero, for all intents and purposes.
This idea that we should concede greater fabricated risks is part and parcel of folk epistemology. In fact, it has a name : the precautionary principle. This principle consists of giving in to high announced risks and take action against them, even if the evidence is lacking or absent. We see it most obviously in environmental scares, where masses protest companies, and politicians pass laws, on the basis of nothing more than a thin correlation, always found later to have meant nothing at all.
The Alar scare, now the stereotypical example of environmental propaganda, started on the basis of a study that showed that drinking 5000 gallons of apple juice a day could be carcinogenic. An entire industry was devastated on this basis. Let me tell you something, if you drink 5000 gallons of apple juice a day, you should be more concerned about blowing up like a balloon, or the number of times you have to go to the bathroom. Another good example of the precautionary principle is the Kyoto Treaty, which costs the world billions of dollars with an infinitesimal predicted result.
