a *sigh* woo clarification thread
1. not all woo is created equal; i think some forms of it are still wrong but not very predictive of curiosity/iq
2. i think its possible to approach woo practices with a framework thats compatible with science, i.e. narrative/placebo/ritual work
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to elaborate:
just cause a belief is wrong doesn't make it predictive of the person being incurious. If you lived in a hindu culture, "do you believe in hinduism" wouldnt help much differentiating the smart from the dumb people. It depends on how accessible 'right' info is.
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This is why I don't believe thinking 9/11 is an inside job is super predictive of curiosity/iq; it's basically plausible (governments doing practical things in secret), and further determination relies on a bunch of confusing details about material sciences or whatever
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I think for me, deciding if a wrong belief is predictive of the person being bad at thinking, it depends on 1. how much their society believes the thing and 2. how much access to the truth belongs in specialized knowledge
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but if your society doesn't believe a thing AND also you don't need specialized knowledge to disprove the thing (i.e., you dont need specialized knowledge to know it's unlikely people can shapeshift into lizards), then i view this as predictive of low reasoning skill
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re the initial point 2: I personally find tarot to be cool for this reason; you don't have to literally believe that tarot cards are predicting the future for it to have interesting internal effects on your psyche and it seems reasonable to play with that
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I also have a lot more leeway for beliefs that come out of clear subjective effects; i doubt energy work is "real", but there's lots of underexplored "power of our own mind to affect our own perceptions of reality" there and if ritual helps with it by all means explore!
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The thing is, Burning Man without woo would be so much more awesome, authentic, & meaningful than Burning Man with woo.
Woo is the mind-killer.
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It’s a fine line between rationalism and literalism. The first is a good net for catching ideas, but it’s a net full of holes, doesn’t explain everything. Causality isn’t 100% “true” according to physics. If goal is to understand reality, there needs to be room, even for magic.
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I find that venturing past the fringes of consensus and into what most call "woo" or "pseudoscience" are where the deepest and most interesting thinking can happen.
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Human consciousness is pretty inexplicable within a scientific framework. No evolutionary benefit. No clear electrical, or chemical process causing it.
Yet, here it is.
Woo addresses that gap in understanding. Most of it is harmless.
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