the recipe works, even if the story to explain it is nonsense.
classic colman!
weird isnt it?
the point where reason just keels over and...accepts. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
So the reasonable thing to do is accept that the trick works, discount the woo-woo story and don't worry too much about why it works.
maybe digging the mystery of it too, that such a homespun technology, (in the same sense that knowledge of training horses is 'technology' too), should elude the intellectual understanding demanded by double-blind tests and the like.
'woo-woo' is an appellation used to distance oneself from attempting to delve deeper into meeting the experience, rather than laying back and letting it roll over you, as you say, not worrying about the why.
what especially fascinates me is that after this brief abdication of the instinct for categorisation, one's reason seems to work better.
as if it had had a refreshing rest!
not to dismiss the importance of reason, not at all, just to put it in its place as useful complement to other sources of less easily quantifiable data. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
So far we have some labels and something which twitches into life occasionally, but given what seems to go on in everyone's mind most of the time, that's about the extent of it.
How do you prove it correct?
In Jake's example of the deadly mushroom hunt, were you to partner with a shaman from a local culture it is highly likely that you would only eat mushrooms that had properties that he predicted. Scientifically minded non-botanists who were foolish enough to participate in such a procedure on their own would be subject to the same winnowing he described. Hell, even animals usually do better than that. How do they manage? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
So yes, the shaman may know which mushrooms to pick. In fact, if I had to choose between a local who's been mushroom hunting for years on end in the same area and a botanist who's never studied the particular area in question, I'd go with the local. Hands down, no contest. But that doesn't mean that the local's explanation of how you can tell which mushrooms are poisonous makes sense. It's perfectly possible to construct a memorable narrative that gets all the known facts right and yet is completely incapable of dealing with new facts - i.e. has no predictive power.
Local knowledge is, in fact, often used as a starting point for scientific enquiry - but usually the first part of the exercise is to strip out all the concrete facts and discard the fluffy narrative.
So going back to the acupuncture example, you'd start by investigating whether sticking needles into people at random points produces medically interesting effects. It's perfectly testable whether "traditional" acupuncture has stumbled upon a useful fact that sticking needles in people actually triggers a useful biological response.
The second thing to investigate is whether sticking needles into certain points produces effects that differ from sticking needles into semi-random points. Again, this is a perfectly testable proposition.
Chakras, however, are not useful at any point in this exercise, except insofar as they can serve as mnemonic tricks, similar to learning multiplication by doing times tables. The times tables aren't interesting in and of themselves, they're just a scaffolding you can use to memorise facts. By contrast, while scientific theories can serve as mental scaffolding, their greatest value is that they can be extrapolated to cover unknown situations.
Faced with an unknown mushroom, our shaman wouldn't know whether it was poisonous or not (he'd very probably know whether to eat it or not, but that's not quite the same thing :-p). The botanist wouldn't either, of course, it being an unknown mushroom. But the botanist would know how to run a chemical analysis on it and compare the results to a list of known chemical substances. For that matter, if he has a good chemist at his lab, he'd be able to extrapolate from the known toxicity of related chemicals to hazard an educated guess as to whether the mushroom is dangerous or not.
Not necessarily, because this assumes that it's the needles and the sticking which are important.
Something else could always be going on. A more interesting test would be a combination of self reporting - not for definitive results, but for pointers - with a battery of tests for a wider spectrum of outcomes.
Realigning your Chakras will cure a common cold in seven days. Doing absolutely nothing will cure a common cold in a week.
Secondly, attempting to claim equivalence between bioelectric potentials and Chi flows is just plain silly. This is precisely the kind of rhetorical slight-of-hand and "gotcha" games that makes people who actually spend some time studying science exasperated with woo-woos.
Thirdly, even if a religious ritual happens to chance upon something that works above and beyond confirmation bias, placebo effect and what have we, it does not necessarily validate the underlying model.
To illustrate this, let me tell a little story:
1000 people went picking mushrooms one by one. Each found two mushrooms - one of which is instantly lethal when consumed, the other is harmless - and each of them flips a coin to decide which to eat for dinner.
The next day, the remaining five hundred go out into the woods and find two mushrooms - one dangerous and one harmless. Again, each flips a coin to decide which one to eat.
This repeats itself on the third day.
On the fourth day, the remaining 125 people meet for a Grand Council where they relate their recent experiences in the craft of mushroom picking.
They then conclude that flipping a coin to decide which mushrooms to eat makes perfect sense - after all, it's worked for all of them for three days in a row, which cannot possibly be a coincidence.
Attending the council meeting is a botanist, who happens to have a handbook on mushroom picking. He courteously explains that his professional opinion is that using the handbook to discern between poisonous and edible mushrooms is superior to using the coin-flip method.
The coin-flippers tell the botanist that they already know which mushrooms are edible: The coin told them, and what the coin told them matches what the botanist's science tells them. So obviously the two must be equivalent. Or, in fact, the coin-flipping method is slightly superior on account of having found the edible mushrooms first and faster and with less fuss and bother. So they'll stick to the coin-flipping method, thankyouverymuch.
The council is dissolved and each coin-flipper goes his own ways to search for mushrooms.
Ten days later, the botanist is the only one attending the meeting who is still alive.
The End.
A pertinent comment in Finland at this autumn mushroom-picking time ;-)
However, you forgot to add to your story the alternative botanist who carefully collected and consumed Amanita muscaria, and who, for short periods of time, regarded the Council and its members as a cosmic energy flow in another dimension. You can't be me, I'm taken
Because firstly, most of their results are frankly not clinically interesting. In most cases (and for many kinds of woo-woo in all cases investigated), the improvement felt by the individual comes down to confirmation bias, regression to the mean and various and sundry other well-known mental short-circuits.
This isn't actually true. It's probably impossible to investigate woo woo without confirmation bias on either side, and I can certainly think of at least one disconformation study with a methodology which would have been rightly ripped to shreds or ignored if it hadn't produced a negative result.
In the placebo studies I mentioned, the results were statistically significant. In fact they were more significant than the results of mainstream drug studies - not that that's a high standard, necessarily. But even so.
But that just highlights the double standard - this study was quoted by 'serious' researchers as if it was definitive and utterly professional, when in fact it was a very small data set collected under less than strictly controlled conditions as a high school student science fair project.
The trend of 20th century science has been, to a large extent, within the "narrative" of Statistical Mechanics. By definition this means a Set, therefore restricted, of Probable outcomes in the Learning process.
Shaman's invoke a Learning process on a 1:1 or, maybe, a 1:'Small Group' basis. Due to uncertainty of the affects of stimuli on an individual's neuro-psychology Shamans can constrain but not restrict.
I agree - but to take the extrem example of Shamans again, they can share their recipe between them, which creates certain outcomes, but with in their own map of reality.
But not reliably. The difference between science and woo-woo is that science works without preconditions. Science eventually turns into technology which makes outcomes easy.
I don't need to be in the right mood to make my light switch work. I don't need to spend three years living on my own, doing lots of drugs, communing with elders, invoking the spirits, having conversations with the vegetation around me, purifying my karma, sacrificing chickens and small furry animals, or waiting for the planets to line up just so.
I don't even need to know Maxwell's equation or understand the scientific model of the world.
If I want light - click - I get light. I can be drunk, I can be tired, I can be angry [1], I can be half dead from a terminal illness, I can be blind and unable to see the light after it's been turned on - it doesn't matter.
The problem with woo woo is that it's so very contingent and unreliable. You may get something from a ritual, ceremony, exercise, divination or happening, but it's just as likely that you won't. If you're a complete novice, you almost certainly won't. If you're a master you probably will, but there's no guarantee.
Eventually your map will not be the same as anyone else's map, because everyone else's map will reflect their own psychology.
It's a lot more like an art than a science. You can never tell ahead of time whether a musical or stage performance will be rockin', or a dud. You can't force it to be either, although you can increase the likelihood by practicing.
This doesn't prove woo-woo doesn't exist, but when something is this subjective, it's pretty damn hard to make share-able maps of it, or to know which parts of the map matter, and which parts are just superstition and myth-making which have been picked up along the way.
[1] Although in fact I have a history of fusing light circuits when I get really annoyed. Hmmm.
I don't need to be in the right mood to make my light switch work. I don't need to spend three years living on my own, doing lots of drugs, communing with elders, invoking the spirits, having conversations with the vegetation around me, purifying my karma, sacrificing chickens and small furry animals, or waiting for the planets to line up just so. I don't even need to know Maxwell's equation or understand the scientific model of the world.
I hope you are not serious. :-) How many years of training does a Western Healer aka medical doctor need? Here I think it is up to 10 years including internship. I do remember experiments with eggs, etc. - so I am not sure what it was all about. And btw. it used to be prerequisit that to become a Psychiatrist you had to go through a personal analysis with a mentor.
I don't there was ever any need for psychiatrists to have therapy. Psychotherapists usually try to enforce therapy on up-and-coming therapists, but I've seen the results of that first hand, and it's rarely been impressive.
Psychiatry isn't particularly impressive either, but that's not necessarily the point here.
This isn't just about medicine.
The difference between science and woo-woo is that science works without preconditions. Science eventually turns into technology which makes outcomes easy.
This is an interesting part of our western narrative of science and technology. Science gives technology, technology works thereby proving science. I really recomend The Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology: Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch: Books for an in-depth look at that relationship.
The short version as I recall it (I read it years ago, my apologies in advance to Collina and Pinch) is that technological development mostly works with different methods then scientific research. The goal is not understanding, but improving the tech which is often done from an in-depth understanding of specific - not general - properties. New technology therefore gives incentive to develop the general theories to explain the tech and perhaps develop it further. Do read the book, it is well written and full of interesting stories about drilling for oil in Sweden, US-Israel missile cooperation and english economists.
It took somewhere around a century between Watts steam-engine (which was nto the first, but an improvement) and Joules theories that explained how it worked. We have cut significant time since then, but the general model stays the same. Medicine is mostly technology in this sense, it is less about the general explanations and more about finding methods that work. Same with finding truffels. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
I can plug a TOSLINK cable into my Mac, wire it up to a DAC, and get music out of it. I don't need to know about semiconductor band gaps, optical transmittivity, coding protocols, dither, or clock jitter.
Assuming I have the very basic level of knowledge needed to understand that I'm supposed to plug it into a DAC and not my ear, and as long as something isn't broken, it will just work for me.
Obviously if you're an engineer it's your job to know more, and to understand how to wave dead chickens and oscilloscopes around. But if you do your properly most people won't need to get that hands-on.
Woo woo tends not to be that reliable. Sometimes interesting, surprising, exotic and baffling things happen, but just as often nothing significant happens at all.
Maybe if we had a unified theory of woo woo it would work reliably. Or maybe it's perpetually liminal and just doesn't work like that.
No one knows. Camps on both sides assume they do, but really they don't at all.
