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!
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
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.
