I think there's an error ppl make where they conflate the ownership of frames, which destroys potentially good 'woo' research and makes lots of existing woo research really dangerous. Hard to articulate but I'm gonna try THREAD
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Assumption 1) Religious stuff, magic that would presumably be observable, probably isn't true. There probably isn't a god, planets probably don't determine personality, etc. - lots of basic, easy-to-disprove stuff, where pro arguments have to delicately sidestep science
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Replying to
I feel often a tension when talking publicly, about my feeling that there's a rich unmined resource of 'what brains are capable of', and feeling triggered by bad science of false claims about magic/religion/spirituality or whatever.
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I think that there's a mistake that people in this arena often make, of a) conflating ownership of frame and b) failing to be able to hold two frames at once
(again: rough draft struggling-to-articulate here, but:)
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I don't "actually believe" that I have energy forces in and around me, in the sense that I would be *shocked* if we found some evidence for this through tests around physics or whatever. But I still "hold a frame of belief" that there is, because this enables interacting with it.
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As in; I sometimes have an experience of energy moving through or around my body, and in order for me to make sense of this experience, to hold and reason about it, some part of me needs to step out and "believe" it. I know it's a believing part cause it makes predictions;
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As in, "If I move my arm like this, I think the energy will move through it; if I crouch like this, I think I will feel energy over here".
If I *refused* to engage with this belief part, my guess is I would have a lot more difficulty actually feeling the energy at all.
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But I think many ppl have difficulty realizing they can both hold a belief part that predicts where energy goes, and also hold another part that predicts external testing will not uncover any magical energy system; these frames *collapse* into each other, which is V DANGEROUS
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the healthier way to be is to let beliefs like these pass through you, not try to extrapolate. If you take a drug and have an experience where you're Jesus, you can just "be Jesus" for a while; if you try to extrapolate this after you come down from the drug, its gonna be rough
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Taking "I had an experience where this was my belief" and not following up with "so this indicates x about reality" is v important. This is what I mean by conflating the ownership of frames; there's *internal* and there's *external*, and moving an internal to external is bad juju
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And there's a whole list of reasons why conflating this is covered with MEGA DANGER WARNING signs; it's *very easy* to make mistakes here, to quietly slip into very poisonous areas; if you're subtly placing internal beliefs onto those around you, you are *failing to see them*
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To conflate the two is to close off being able to see each for what they are; to use external science-proof-rigor only is to override your internal actual experience; to use internal belief-experience only is to override the surprising gigantic mystery of the world
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And if you realize you can make great reads on people, this has a very insidious risk of causing you to believe your reads on people are correct when they're not; or even worse, causing *other people* to think your reads on them are correct when they're not.
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Woo beliefs are good to hold, but they must be held lightly; the vast majority of time I've seen people engage with them, the beliefs grow and overtake the person's ability to see the outside world. Woo beliefs make you feel special, powerful, in control.
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And this *sucks*, because I think there's so much interesting shit inside belief-play that is underexplored because people have difficulty putting one foot in without having their frames get conflated. If you can 'believe' energy into existence, what else can you create?
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