QC

I suspect therapy methods work better the more you believe in and trust them. This means there's something harmful about studying how well therapy methods work and publicizing that information, which is that they can cause the methods to work less well.

I've evolved into a position where I'm committed to believing true things and building accurate models, while appreciating the raw power of human imagination as a physical machine operating in the world. I'm fine as long as I keep a firewall between belief and imagination.

Imagination generates great raw material to be processed by the model building engine, but must be filtered before the Truth flag gets attached.

There's a question here for me about how you orient towards things that have the truth flag. I think people are tempted to invest in those things a kind of... reliance... that possibly nothing whatsoever deserves.

I start with the axiom that all phenomena has a (usually boring) physical explanation and test my imagination against that. To claim that this axiom is arbitrary is to engage in a kind of motivated philosophical symbol manipulation. It's isn't arbitrary.