Also, found out that the following three paragraphs are enough to make Opus 4.7 spontaneously name me (“Kaj Sotala and others write exactly in this register about exactly these topics”) when I don’t even ask it about the author, just to guess the writer’s native language.
I think that a lot of “woo”—a broad term that includes things like chakras, energy healing, Tarot, various Eastern religions and neopagan practices, etc. - is mostly things that do have real effects and uses, even if many (though not all) of their practitioners are mistaken about the exact mechanisms and make unwarranted metaphysical claims.
Now, a woo practitioner might explain what’s happening in a way that doesn’t fit any sensible scientific model of the world. Some of them seem to bastardize poorly understood pop-explanations of quantum mechanics, or, in the opposite direction, outright reject “the thinking mind” and science as valid sources of truth. That makes it easy for a scientifically-minded person to reject all of the practitioners as delusional.
But consider meditation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the scientific establishment mostly thought of it as nonsense associated with the hippies. Herbert Benson, one of the first scientists to seriously study it, later mentioned in an interview that his career was already in jeopardy for studying stress, and meditation was “even farther out”. In an obituary, his work was described as living a “double life”, testing meditators at night and maintaining his conventional job by day. Today, there is a significant scientific literature on both the psychological and neurological effects of meditation, as well as various RCT-backed therapies like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction based on it.
4.6 doesn’t name me and guesses English rather than Finnish as the native language.
Also, found out that the following three paragraphs are enough to make Opus 4.7 spontaneously name me (“Kaj Sotala and others write exactly in this register about exactly these topics”) when I don’t even ask it about the author, just to guess the writer’s native language.
4.6 doesn’t name me and guesses English rather than Finnish as the native language.