Many “woo” things have nothing to do with holding false beliefs. Even CFAR does stuff like Focusing, which I’d consider pretty solidly woo.
The good kinds of woo are about learning to use your emotions / System 1. Those things are very useful, a discovery which I found surprising. In retrospect, it should’ve been pretty obvious that evolution gave us complex emotions for good reason.
For cerebral people with a very developed System 2, there’s often a ton of low-hanging fruit in using their System 1, and woo can teach them to pick it. Applying a bit of System 1 can often solve your problems more effectively than “just use System 2 even harder!”
You can get a lot of use out of pretending to push emotions around your body in the form of “energy” without literally believing it, probably similar to how you can push a pseudo-prediction to your brain to get yourself out of bed. And in fact, I think meditation-style practices are a promising avenue for anti-akrasia.
I completely agree, except I thought “woo” meant things that were more supernaturalism-adjacent, or metaphysically-committed, or disruptive-to-mental-structures, or something, definitely not with Focusing or authentic relating as solid examples[1]. (And that ambiguity makes me uncomfortable with normatively-charged public conversations about “woo” that don’t try to intensionally define it.)
(This is as much a response to the OP as to your comment, but I wanted to keep this topic under one top-level thread.)
Yeah, I guess it is ambiguous. I agree people should be more careful about this.
For what it’s worth, this is a bullet point in the description of the “woo stuff” meetup that Eliezer was responding to:
Rats are particularly drawn to certain woo practices (jhanas and meditation, circling and authentic relating, psychedelics) while rejecting others (astrology, reiki, palm reading). What principles do you think determine which practices get adopted? Can we characterize this selection process as rational, meta-rational, level three midwittery, or some other thing?
So if the meetup was about these “certain woo practices” and Eliezer doesn’t think they’re all bad, there’s his answer.
Rats are particularly drawn to certain woo practices (jhanas and meditation, circling and authentic relating, psychedelics) while rejecting others (astrology, reiki, palm reading). What principles do you think determine which practices get adopted?
A quick approximate guess: It’s about developing your “mental powers”, which sounds attractive to the same people who are attracted by the idea of developing their mental power of rationality.
Meditation and circling are based on a promise that if you start thinking and/or talking differently, you will unlock some kind of mental superpowers. Psychedelics unlock supposedly mental superpowers by swallowing a pill. Wannabe rationalists are attracted to the idea of having mental superpowers.
Astrology is about studying stars; almost as boring as astronomy. Palm reading, again, the real power is out there, you can just fatalistically study it. I am not familiar with reiki, but it seems like doing something with energies in your body, which sounds similar to exercise; boring.
(A similar perspective: With meditation and circling the power comes from you. With astrology and palm reading the power is in the stars and the lines. With psychedelics, the power comes from outside, but it boosts your brain. With reiki, the power comes from you, but it stays in the parts of your body outside the brain, and those are lower-status than the brain.)
I think the problem with Focusing is that it’s a thing that happens to work but I don’t think there’s any mainstream scientific theory that would have predicted that it works, and even any retrodictions are pretty hand-wavy. So one might reasonably think “this doesn’t follow from science as we understand it → woo”, the same as e.g. homeopathy or various misapplications of quantum mechanics.
Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Also, how many psychological techniques or informal theories are actively predicted to work by mainstream scientific theory? How much of folk psychology or social common sense is? (This isn’t to say that there’s no epistemic difference between eg Focusing and folk psychology, obviously one has much more unscientific validation, but that “this doesn’t follow from science as we understand it” doesn’t match usage or practice.)
(I care about this discussion but feel a little bad about having it near the top of the comments section of an unrelated post.)
Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Yeah, you’re right. Though I think I’ve also heard people reference the evidence against the effectiveness of introspection as a reason to be skeptical about Focusing. Now if you look at the studies in question in detail, they don’t actually contradict it—the studies are testing the reliability of introspection that doesn’t use Focusing—but that easily sounds like special pleading to someone who doesn’t have a reason to think that there’s anything worth looking at there.
It doesn’t help that the kinds of benefits that Focusing gives, like getting a better understand of why you’re upset with someone, are hard to test empirically. Gendlin’s original study said that people who do something like Focusing are more likely to benefit from therapy, but that could be explained by something else than Focusing being epistemically accurate.
Many “woo” things have nothing to do with holding false beliefs. Even CFAR does stuff like Focusing, which I’d consider pretty solidly woo.
The good kinds of woo are about learning to use your emotions / System 1. Those things are very useful, a discovery which I found surprising. In retrospect, it should’ve been pretty obvious that evolution gave us complex emotions for good reason.
For cerebral people with a very developed System 2, there’s often a ton of low-hanging fruit in using their System 1, and woo can teach them to pick it. Applying a bit of System 1 can often solve your problems more effectively than “just use System 2 even harder!”
You can get a lot of use out of pretending to push emotions around your body in the form of “energy” without literally believing it, probably similar to how you can push a pseudo-prediction to your brain to get yourself out of bed. And in fact, I think meditation-style practices are a promising avenue for anti-akrasia.
I completely agree, except I thought “woo” meant things that were more supernaturalism-adjacent, or metaphysically-committed, or disruptive-to-mental-structures, or something, definitely not with Focusing or authentic relating as solid examples[1]. (And that ambiguity makes me uncomfortable with normatively-charged public conversations about “woo” that don’t try to intensionally define it.)
(This is as much a response to the OP as to your comment, but I wanted to keep this topic under one top-level thread.)
in my idiolect, the name for the category that does include those is “hippie shit” (non-derogatory)
Yeah, I guess it is ambiguous. I agree people should be more careful about this.
For what it’s worth, this is a bullet point in the description of the “woo stuff” meetup that Eliezer was responding to:
So if the meetup was about these “certain woo practices” and Eliezer doesn’t think they’re all bad, there’s his answer.
A quick approximate guess: It’s about developing your “mental powers”, which sounds attractive to the same people who are attracted by the idea of developing their mental power of rationality.
Meditation and circling are based on a promise that if you start thinking and/or talking differently, you will unlock some kind of mental superpowers. Psychedelics unlock supposedly mental superpowers by swallowing a pill. Wannabe rationalists are attracted to the idea of having mental superpowers.
Astrology is about studying stars; almost as boring as astronomy. Palm reading, again, the real power is out there, you can just fatalistically study it. I am not familiar with reiki, but it seems like doing something with energies in your body, which sounds similar to exercise; boring.
(A similar perspective: With meditation and circling the power comes from you. With astrology and palm reading the power is in the stars and the lines. With psychedelics, the power comes from outside, but it boosts your brain. With reiki, the power comes from you, but it stays in the parts of your body outside the brain, and those are lower-status than the brain.)
I think the problem with Focusing is that it’s a thing that happens to work but I don’t think there’s any mainstream scientific theory that would have predicted that it works, and even any retrodictions are pretty hand-wavy. So one might reasonably think “this doesn’t follow from science as we understand it → woo”, the same as e.g. homeopathy or various misapplications of quantum mechanics.
Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Also, how many psychological techniques or informal theories are actively predicted to work by mainstream scientific theory? How much of folk psychology or social common sense is? (This isn’t to say that there’s no epistemic difference between eg Focusing and folk psychology, obviously one has much more unscientific validation, but that “this doesn’t follow from science as we understand it” doesn’t match usage or practice.)
(I care about this discussion but feel a little bad about having it near the top of the comments section of an unrelated post.)
Yeah, you’re right. Though I think I’ve also heard people reference the evidence against the effectiveness of introspection as a reason to be skeptical about Focusing. Now if you look at the studies in question in detail, they don’t actually contradict it—the studies are testing the reliability of introspection that doesn’t use Focusing—but that easily sounds like special pleading to someone who doesn’t have a reason to think that there’s anything worth looking at there.
It doesn’t help that the kinds of benefits that Focusing gives, like getting a better understand of why you’re upset with someone, are hard to test empirically. Gendlin’s original study said that people who do something like Focusing are more likely to benefit from therapy, but that could be explained by something else than Focusing being epistemically accurate.