Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Crimson
@Crimsonak1
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
This makes the entire topic of "woo" be somewhat disjointed. Since what you mean behind that is that science accessibility is dependent on both culture and finance.
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Atilius
@_Atilius_
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Erwin Schroedinger felt ancient Hindu scholars got a lot of the really big things right. "The grandest of all thoughts." I think that's much more significant than whether one takes the mythology of a religion literally or not.
Isaac King 🔍
@IsaacKing314
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Is religion a great example of this? There are a lot of dynamics around religion that don't exist for most other beliefs, plus even in a heavily religious culture they still have the internet.
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