Huberman is really good at taking small scale or animal studies or potential mechanisms, linking them together and extrapolating from there. Rarely does he have powerful studies in humans to back up the claims. I found much of his podcasts interesting, but the lack of powerful studies was/is disappointing.
Since MBTI is garbage, you're unlikely to get anywhere with skeptics by invoking it.
“My MBTI type is ‘the type of person who did some looking into it years ago and knows that the MBTI is neither particularly scientific nor particularly consistently applied’. Or, as it’s also called, INTJ.”
This bit is the part I find most interesting about the Myers-Briggs vs the professionals: "If you take continuous measurements (like every Myers-Briggs test ever gives you) [for each of the four Myers-Briggs axes] they correlate strongly with four of the five big five measurements."
Myers-Briggs can be thought of as hitting four the five axes of the OCEAN model -- except that it is widely used by amateurs rather than professionals.
Yes, there is more nuance than this, but this isn't a bad high level summary.
It seems like there's a lot of unrealized potential for OCEAN popularizers to create some kind of tribes or clusters with catchy idealistic nicknames, which is a big draw for MB. I'm not exactly sure what the positive nickname for a disagreeable, neurotic, unconscientious, low openness introvert should be, but there should be one, and 16 seems like a good number of combinations to have.
Don't know if they're "positive", but Similar Minds uses "limbic" and "calm" for both ends of the neuroticism trait. Couldn't you just add that to the MBTI so all 5 OCEAN traits are represented?
Then your "disagreeable, neurotic, unconscientious, low openness introvert" would just be a limbic ISTP, or a limbic Virtuoso (the nickname I found for ISTP online.)
The site 16 Personalities (an MB-based site) essentially does exactly that. They have an added axis of "turbulent" / "assertive", which is basically neuroticism by a less stigmatized name.
I've dabbled a bit in trying to identify recognizable "types" in the OCEAN model. My idle musings so far (using OCEAN - FIDS as abbreviations (FIDS: Firm, Laid-back, Introverted, Disagreeable, Stable)):
As an analogy, imagine that someone invents a "genius-moron test", which is kinda like the IQ test, except that it sorts all people into one of two buckets: "morons" (everyone with IQ below 100) and "geniuses" (everyone with IQ above 100). Also, it adds a noise of plus or minus 10 IQ points to everyone, which means that most people (those around IQ 100) will score as a "moron" one week, and as a "genius" the next week.
Would you also agree with a high-level summary that if you dismiss the "genius-moron test", you also have to dismiss the IQ tests?
I think this kind of misses the point. Part of the argument Dynomight is making is that MBTI is preferable in some ways specifically because it *doesn't* attach undesirable/stigmatized names to each axis. A genius/moron test would be doing the opposite.
There was an actual study of personality types made with proper regression, and in the end they could only identify four significant clusters, and one of them they just called "normal".
People just don't fall into 16 distinct personality types.
There's this thing that happens where A is imperfect and worse than B for the purposes of scientific study, so a funnel-plot-appropriate number of studies say A is worse than B for a given purpose, then one day a journalist notices this and claims that A has been DEBUNKED (when it may still give pretty good results) and is PSEUDO- or UNSCIENTIFIC (which is probably true but also misleading: new-age herbalists are unscientific, but if they feed you wintergreen oil you're still getting salicyclic acid in your bloodstream, and if you do yoga with them you're still getting exercise).
For reductio ad absurdum, consider Newtonian physics and whether it was debunked.
Isn't that a fully general dismissal? "Woo helps things in your life" "Well I tried it and it didn't help" "Haha silly child obviously it helped you and you just didn't realize it"
Well, it is a tough thing to gauge! If we're disentangling the physical from the spiritual effects of yoga, for instance, I think everyone would accept that you do have to put in the work and the practice to be able to be as bendy and flexible as a master. Doing a few sessions then giving up because you can't wrap your ankles around your ears would be rightly met with "you didn't stick with it".
The spiritual effects? As Westerners practice it? I have no idea. I mean, there are studies about how things like fasting etc. induce the spiritual results claimed for them because of physical effects that scientists were able to measure, but does that mean we go "everything mystical has a physical explanation" and if we do, then it really *does* mean that "you're not in touch with your body" is the true explanation for "Why didn't I get the touted benefits?" since there is a replicable programme to produce those.
Isn't that what Sam Harris is trying to do with his Buddhist meditation for sceptics? Strip away the mysticism, get the core physical practices that produce the shiny happy feelings?
What are the touted benefits, though ? If the woo is supposed to make you feel better/happier/etc., then it's not really all that mystical. Lots of things can make you feel better, like a conversation with a friend, meditation, a funny movie, prayer, a tub of ice cream, whatever. You could interview woo practitioners and see if their woo makes them feel better, then pick the woo that is most likely to work on you as well. It's not super interesting.
But if the claim is that the woo makes you shoot lasers out of your eyes, the time to start spending time and effort on practicing it is when you see an experienced woo-user shoot laser beams out of his eyes. Until then, it's not really worth your time.
Dan Harris had nervous breakdowns while performing. It took serious work with meditation for him to figure out that he had a drinking problem.
I'd mistakenly attributed this to Sam Harris, a completely different person.
This is a shorter version of my comment. In my efforts to edit it, I somehow deleted the comment and the replies to it.
I was able to recover the replies from email notifications.
Stephen Klunk: "Are you thinking of Dan Harris? I have never heard any of this about Sam Harris, and I’ve been following him for a long time."
Yes, thank you very much. I've been wrong about that for a while.
Deiseach, replying to my being surprised Dan Harris had so much trouble figuring out he had a drinking problem: "In my limited experience, when people drink too much but are functional/not yet at the stage of alcoholism, they will rationalise it all away. "I'm a social drinker, therefore I don't have a problem/I have a drink or two after work to unwind, that's not excessive/I've never been blackout drunk/Sure, I like to have some fun and get a buzz on, what's wrong with that?" and so on. The person we can lie to best is our self. And I mean me in that as well. Other people can see there is a problem, but we deny it until slapped in the face with it. Maybe what meditation did for him was strip away all the "I only/I'm not/I don't" layers of excuses and made him see the raw reality of what he was doing."
In my limited experience, when people drink too much but are functional/not yet at the stage of alcoholism, they will rationalise it all away.
"I'm a social drinker, therefore I don't have a problem/I have a drink or two after work to unwind, that's not excessive/I've never been blackout drunk/Sure, I like to have some fun and get a buzz on, what's wrong with that?" and so on.
The person we can lie to best is our self. And I mean me in that as well. Other people can see there is a problem, but we deny it until slapped in the face with it. Maybe what meditation did for him was strip away all the "I only/I'm not/I don't" layers of excuses and made him see the raw reality of what he was doing.
It seems obvious to me that the right attitude to have about this stuff is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" and to always look for the simpler non-woo explanation. Such as: damaged people desperately want to believe that something magical exists so that it can save them.
The problem with this approach is that our current measurement techniques are incapable of reporting subjective changes. People's self-report is all we've got. Dismissing people's self-reported gains sounds like gaslighting to me. Sorry if my experience doesn't match any theory you believe in, but that doesn't give you the right to dismiss the evidence I have inside me that is compelling to me.
I think people are conflating a woo-fan's personal experience with the fan's beliefs about the causes of that experience. Subjective experience is an inalienable right of the subject to describe and judge the worth of. Outside observers have no access to subjective data (by definition), so denying another person's experience absolutely is gaslighting and/or delusional on the part of the observer.
The causes of the subjective experience are objective facts that everyone has a right to weigh in on, using evidence. But this includes the subject too, and people can bring different kinds of evidence. I believe the placebo effect exists, and that tapping into it (rather than treating it as an obstacle to be overcome) is an underexplored and underappreciated route of causality. In this way, you might judge a woo-fan's beliefs about causality as delusional because you're looking at the wrong kinds of mechanisms, and ignoring placebo as a mechanism.
You: No you don't. I have an inalienable right to decide how you feel, and my theory says you're angry right now.
Evidence about subjective states is necessarily subjective. How the person feels is how they feel. That's the brute fact. It's not possible for me to be self-deluded about how I feel. I may be mistaken about why I feel the way I do, but if my mistaken belief about the benefits of some practice are contributing to my feelings based on the placebo effect, am I really mistaken?
.But there *are* measurement techniques. Self-report works. You have a treatment group, who get a particular "woo" approach, and a placebo group who get a different treatment. You try to make it as much like the woo approach as possible, except that you leave out the part that is considered the active ingredient. So if the "woo" treatment involves a quiet, low-light setting, with music; and the practitioner chants certain things while touching certain spots on the subject's body, the placebo group gets exactly the same thing, except that the placebo practitioner touches the wrong spots on the subject's body -- the spots that are not thought to be a bit helpful. Then afterwards you have have subjects report on their experience -- maybe right afterwards, a week later & a month later. It would be good to also have them answer a few standarized questions to help with comparing their experiences-- just simple things like "how do you feel now compared to before the treatment -- much worse, slightly worse, the same, slightly better, or much better?"
That's a feature, not a bug. Rational skepticism isn't gaslighting. It is much more likely that your subjective experience of woo is the result of mental illness/self-deception than the result of some heretofore unproven aspect of physical reality.
I have exactly as much right to dismiss your claims as you do to assert them. We both get to think whatever we want.
"everything mystical has a physical explanation" Of course, what else would you expect? I think the thing here is to better define what you mean by "mystical"
Having grown up in an entertainment industry-adjacent part of the San Fernando Valley, I can recall the early 1970s when yoga was fashionable among my classmates' moms. Its now back in fashion in this century, and that seems perfectly reasonable.
Personally, I've somehow managed to slide through life without almost zero back pain, but for the many people who have endured spinal discomfort, yoga seems about as promising as anything else, such as chiropracty.
We need to put a call out for people to check whatever parallel universes they have access to. Then we can get some data on how much woo practice their Scotts have been doing, and how well their Scotts' lives are going.
I'm sure standard yoga is fine for mobility if for whatever reason you need more of that, and more intense kinds might even add some cardio. Beyond that, it's magic, and the thing about magic is that it doesn't work in the real world where most of us live.
That's a big assertion. I would have thought yoga was better for calming, flexibility and concentration, gymnastics better at strength and dynamic movement, but with greater risk of injury.
Honestly mobility is overrated and can leave you at higher risk for certain kinds of injuries. People treat it like an unalloyed good and it is absolutely not.
So getting away from "woo", I don't see how it is non physicalist to note that many people from different cultures and traditions find through various practices similar neural states that are difficult to convey to those who don't experience them. I wrotre a post above putting a very basic phsyicalist description of what I think the people are trying to get at here, and it doesn't require accepting any of the duious claims about objective reality that are usually the baggae of such.
I have yet to meet a person over 30 who wouldn't benefit if they did yoga for twenty minutes, three times a week.
It's just stretching - as you say, normal yoga.
I'm unsure why there's so much skepticism to stretching in these comments and I'm always thrown off when yoga is stuck in the quagmire of bullshit like the other things in this posts title.
It could obviously also mean yoga means something completely different to people who aren't me.
I get the impression that stretching is kinda overrated. And what would I really gain from more flexibility, apart from being able to do more advanced yoga? I have what I need - what’s any more actually good for?
People that sit a lot and don't do any other physical exercise tend to get tight muscles. This can lead to posture problems like forward neck or rounded shoulders. These don't look nice, can lead to pain and other injuries.
There are some specific cases where more flexibility will help you like climbing or some funky sex positions.
Every few years I look over the research on stretching. I do this because a friend told me there are no benefits for athletics. For decades I’d stretch before sports cause it’s what you do. As a coach, I always had my teams stretch. Intuitively it makes sense.
The research I found (ignoring all the on line testimonials or lists of coaches who do this, etc) showed little to no benefits. Actually, they showed poorer performance for the first 15 minutes or so. I haven’t looked at the research again in several years; it takes time.
So, right now I don’t believe there are benefits. Every time I say this I feel like a nut. I see pics in my mind of NFL players stretching before a game and figure “it must work or they wouldn’t be doing it”. But it wouldn’t be the first time people believe something has benefits, but it doesn’t.
All that said, if someone had links to good research … I’d be ok being wrong.
Oh and I’ve only seen studies on athletics. I suppose it maybe be different for general well being, but I’d be skeptical.
Woo is obviously a result of quantum ancestor simulations retrocausally testing these hypotheses for woo. If you don't try woo or claim it didn't work, of course you won't have experienced anything from it. But the people who plausibly claim it worked will naturally be simulated in the future according to tests that assign real quale states in correspondence to woo practices, and these retrocausally interact with the "original" timeline. It's like a pared down version of a Greg Egan novel.
And while I don't actually believe this I am going to keep saying it indefinitely until someone steelmans it with a lot of math and then refutes it with even more math.
Quale farming. Once AI has isolated the physical or mathematical correlates of quale, biological brain architectures are probably redundant for all purposes but assembling more reference data about quale. So bio entities and simulated bio entities will still be useful for generating novel quale and quale distributions and testing novel hypotheses. Then AI just takes those and instantiates them in more efficient or specialized architectures for whatever its purposes are (one possible example would be making cartoon characters conscious in a simulation with cartoon physics)
> I am going to keep saying it indefinitely until someone steelmans it with a lot of math and then refutes it with even more math.
Who does math these days anyway? If you keep saying it, GPT-5 will learn it as a fact, and if someone asks it to design an ancestral simulation, it will include it among its rules.
To varying degrees, the things you mention are forms of physical exercise as well as "spiritual" practises. Are you saying here you've tried a regular yoga practise and it's done nothing for you physically in terms of strength, mobility, balance, calm? Or just that the parts of it less related to physical well-being didn't connect with you?
Agreed, some yoga exercises have been quite clearly helpful for some of my upper back problems, in a way that seems mechanistic. (Pain in this area; stretch a muscle in that area with this pose; feel better immediately.) It seems odd to lump it in with the other things listed.
Moreover it's not really hard to imagine someone trying running, calisthenics, swimming a couple of times and feeling like they didn't get anything from them. What can we really conclude from that?
Trying something a couple of times and not getting anything out of it is better explained by the fact that you only tried it a couple of times rather than by "genetic variation." No one will gain significant muscle from only lifting weights a couple of times.
I was both surprised and impressed with how quickly you can move from "terrible" to "no longer outright terrible" with weights. Even if you're lazy like I am, there's definitely low-hanging fruit here.
"Everything worth doing is worth doing poorly", after all.
Note that the parent comment said "gain significant muscle", while this comment says "gain strength". Those are different. In the first few lifting sessions, you'll typically gain a substantial amount of strength by using your muscle more effectively, while gaining almost no muscle
I made myself try lifting weights, felt bad after doing so each time, and spent like a year before quitting. I tried cycling and liked it the first time.
If you don't get anything out of the first few times, "try something else" is a much better strategy than "try it more", because there are so many other things to try, and massive variation in what's good for people.
Both are valid strategies, and there's no great way to tell which one is better. For examples, I did cross country in junior high school and high school, and for the first 3-4 years my attitude ranged from hatred to indifference. I kept doing it, and eventually running became one of my favorite activities, including some pretty transcendent episodes of runner's high.
I don't mean to claim that everyone should run (or lift), just that there are plenty of instances where sticking with something for a seemingly irrational amount of time leads to a switch flipping in a way you wouldn't expect.
so the expectation with lifting weights is you would feel initially "bad" because the goal is to break down muscle to build it back up.
What often happens with people who have not tried before is they overdo it wind up with sore tendons or overly degraded muscles. This is actually a good example of where you have to get over the initial hump to see the benefits.
I think Scott focuses here entirely on the mental side, mostly all of the claims that woo completely changed how people feel about themselves, or that there is some kind of special greatness about woo that goes beyond just being in shape. That's why it's woo instead of "physical exercise"
Yes, and I get that but also think it's key to understanding why people are helped by these practises: there is no way to entirely separate physical and mental well-being. At least some of these pursuits can for sure make you fitter, calmer, better at knowing when your posture has gone awry, etc etc. Some people then have a very woo vocabulary for talking about the benefits, which may or may not involve some delusion. But if you decide to ignore the concrete physical benefits it's no surprise the psychological ones will seem obscure.
People are helped because people are highly suggestible, people desperately crave attention, and to feel like someone cares for them, and people hate when there is no answer.
My hand hurts all the time.
“Grow up you are 42 and you body is braking down”, is a lot less appealing than “for $50 I will spend 30 minutes softly speaking to and touching you and smooth your energy fields”.
It’s total nonsense and fixes nothing, but it makes a certain kind of idiot (a kind of idiot like half of people are) feel better.
Decay from aging should be treated as something to cure, not something to mock or put up with. If your hand hurts all the time, there's probably some stretches or strengthening exercises or massage techniques that will greatly improve the situation!
There have been rather a lot of diseases over the years that went from inevitable death to curable conditions. Who does it benefit to be defeatist? We can't entirely cure aging *yet*, but we should do what we can to ameliorate it and we should endeavour to improve our abilities for the future.
Also, on the specific thing of a sore hand - muscular and fascial issues are very much treatable and 42 is not the kind of 'old' where it's normal for your body to be falling to pieces. If you've injured it with manual labour over the years, healing it might require taking a break from that labour for a while, but you absolutely should not be ok with living in constant pain
More specificically I think, it seems that in this case, you feel getting benefit from caring contact is a sign of weakness, and to you youd rather endure pain, which absolutely is a case where your beliefs and attitude would make you get less benefit from someone who perceived that in a different way.
This 30-minute energy field smoother sounds like a rip off, but there probably IS stuff you can do to help your hand. If your preference is for exercise/physio/massage advice given in a non-soft voice and that is more 'sporty' and pulse heightening, rather than guidance given in a relaxing way, that's available too.
Think of it this way. I can probably shake 30 minutes of message out of my wife a couple times a week if I really wanted to. Would that make me feel better? Yes. Would I like that? Yes.
Do I do that, no. Because I would rather use up those "relationship credits" on having more sex. It is much more valuable to me.
Ditto all this "heal your pain with woo" stuff. I like when going to sleep relaxing sounds and soft voices, ASMR type shit (though I never have "tingles" whatever the fuck those are). I find it soothing to listen to some soft spoken British man drone on about the history of computers, or rocks, or ancient Egypt or whatever. Do I spend all my day doing that? No. There is more to life than pain avoidance/pleasure seeking.
I am in a couple book clubs, coach multiple youth sports, participate in adult sports, run a business, have a good marriage. I also love videogames. My schedule is pretty booked. Yes I could start taking some time out of that to have slightly less day to day pain (maybe), but its just not that big a deal, your body manages. You groan a bit when getting up, or rub your hand a bit after 30 minutes of typing. It is not some crisis (and when it is a crisis you can go to a real doctor!)
Someone speaking softly to you, and touching you in a caring way probably actually IS therapeutic. I think modern humans in western society tend to underestimate how much or basic genetic makeup hasnt changed since our hunter gatherer days. You perceive desiring such as weak, yet you'd prefer to experience some degree of discomfort.
I understand that is an "unfair" summarization of what you're saying, but it is a case that somewhat makes the point being made above. If your attitude is that someone speaking to you pleasantly and touching you nicely- that getting benefit from that is a sign of weakness where you feel its better to just endure pain- well, literally, a person speaking to you and touching you is going to be less beneificial for you because of yoour attitude towards it. So narrowly youve kind of examplified the point being made here
I am not saying people who want a massage shouldn't go get a massage. That would be silly. I am saying someone who hear same say "{my neck hurts sometimes", and responds "people should never hurt, you should get massages every day so you feel no pain" are IMO placing way way too much emphasis on pain avoidance versus other goods.
And woo like for instance an aunt by marriage who makes a good living doing charka healing for pets (makes even more $ than regular vets), well her clients are just silly and the people who use them delusional morons, whose brains are so malfunctioning who knows if they (or their pets) real feel better or not.
Absolutely the placebo effect is a big deal, and personal care and attention are sometimes all someone needs. Even better is getting to a place where you can solve your problems without even needing that, and get on with more productive activities.
OTOH, if you go through life as a hardened rational materialist you may be continually suggesting yourself out of observing things that a person with a more empiricist tilt of mind would find interesting and possibly even remarkable.
I can only speak to my own experience, but here's my Woo story. About 15 years ago, I threw out my back. The Workman's Comp doc put me on Cyclobenzaprine and sent me to a physical therapist. The drugs didn't do much except make me too groggy to think. And the physical therapist seemed to think that making the pain worse was somehow beneficial to my recovery. I went to a chiropractor, and she wasn't able to help my condition either. But the massage therapist who shared her office space, took me aside as I was leaving, and said, "Let me see if I can help you." I figured I had nothing to lose. So, I made an appointment with her.
It ranks up there as one of the weirdest damn experiences I've ever had. I lay prone face-down on her table, but she never touched me except for occasionally placing her left hand on my heel. Instead, she made passes with her hands above my spine and above my legs. After every pass, she'd need to belch (it almost sounded like she was about to vomit) and she'd flick her hand as if she was trying to shake something sticky off her fingers. After a few passes, I began to feel a warm tingling in my spine. Even though she wasn't touching me, I felt like she was pushing something around inside me (it was like a deep tissue massage without being touched). And she kept belching. And the smell of her belches became pretty stinky—like she was belching up something rotten. It took her about half an hour to do her thing, and when I got up off her table, and my back pain was completely gone, and I had full mobility back.
Now, it may be that I was suggestible, and it may be that she hypnotized me. But if she was able to alleviate my pain by a ritual, that would suggest that my pain must have been psychosomatic, too. Psychosomatic or not, I was hurting BAD. And after that session, I wasn't hurting any longer. I asked her about what she did to me, and she said that her mom back in the Philippines was the village curandera, and she had learned that from her mom. I'll admit I was already open to the Woo because of my heavy use of psychedelics in college. But her curendera-style cure worked better than the Flexeril, PT, or chiro. Go figure.
Agree. The benchmark shouldn't be "this is better than doing nothing", because that's such an incredibly low bar - at the barest _minimum_, you need to support the claim that it's better than going for a run or even a brisk walk, something that's readily and freely available.
It's not hard to make this case in non-woo terms though, you'd say yoga/tai chi/Alexander put the body through greater range of mobility and train more for muscle control and bodily awareness. (If you want cardio and the feeling of speed, a run is better -- incidentally there is a tonne of writing by runners about its spiritual benefits so I cannot see the distinction in terms of woo here.)
If the claim for yoga is merely "this is light to moderate exercise and enhances mobility", then I don't think a lot of people would have any objections. This isn't woo.
Given how I've heard Californian skeptics struggle with finding *any* non-Woo yoga (and in one case having to set up their own), my impression is that this is not the typical limited claims.
Hmm, might be a California thing. I would say for vinyasa yoga I've experienced the opposite, most classes are pretty much just fitness, albeit with lots of vocab involved like "Feel energy running up the front body and down the back body", which is just cueing different subtle movements as far as I'm aware.
Kinda beside the point, but it bugs me how people assume yoga is only "light to moderate" exercise. Sure, it can be, but it can also be strenuous exercise. As with weightlifting or running or biking or swimming or anything—some people will put in intense effort, some people will not.
ok. yes, youre not going to to be able to shoot fire and levitate- which admittedly is kinf of disappointing- but maybe you could be more specific in expectations versus reality here as you see it.
"...incidentally there is a tonne of writing by runners about its spiritual benefits so I cannot see the distinction in terms of woo here."
I can elaborate on this (and hopefully not hijack your point ...).
There seems to be this experience called "runner's high." It is, supposedly, great! And it is triggered by running hard-ish for some period of time -- 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. Not marathon length running though, one hour is supposed to be plenty of time for the effect to kick in.
Even better, your heart doesn't really know if you are running or on an elliptical machine or climbing a few hundred flights of stairs so, in spite of the name, you don't strictly need to be *running* to experience it. You just need to be pushing cardio hard.
I, unfortunately, do not seem to experience it. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't because I'm "not working hard enough." If you trust the Mayo clinic, I can sustain close to 85% of my estimated peak heart rate for about an hour and *still* no get a runner's high (and I have no intention of pushing beyond this as breaking something internal seems like a bad idea).
And I'm not unique. It seems that lots of people do not get a runner's high.
Still, lots of people DO seem to get a runner's high and I'm unwilling to conclude that they are all wrong.
I too am jealous of those who get runners' highs. I have had them from time to time when all is well and I am feeling fast but, mostly, I'm too hung up on twinges from old injuries to feel very euphoric whilst running.
When I was doing the "Couch to 5K" program, there's a week near the end where instead of alternating walk/jog for a few minutes, you load up the workout and it just says "run for 20 minutes". At the end of that week, I had a runners' high and felt so good I just kept on jogging down the trail for another few minutes, but I think I was just really excited to have done it. Same thing a few weeks later when I finished the program. And basically never again since then, even when I had cool milestones like first street race or a new PR.
Occasionally, coming around the end of mile 2 if I'm doing 3 miles, I get something like the feeling of a stimulant in my chest, the bit of anticipation and excitement, but nothing like the runners' high as described.
I'm pretty sure there is some combination of things that allows certain people to experience runners' highs, but hearing this suggested as a possible myth makes me want to look into other cultures' experiences with it.
Because the difference between someone who feels runner's high and someone who doesn't is likely a literal chemical one! This is the whole point of neuroscience as a discipline!
ironically, if such people cultivated belief to where they had a high rate of placebo effect, their belief not being seperate from their body, essentially what they have done is learned the skill of improving health through mind state.
As I wrote above, what the poster was probably trying to express isnt something they have the language for. The fact people cant do a job of describiing things doesnt necessariy make them invalid.
Independent of the effectiveness of any specific woo remedy, they could be trying to say that their mind state and shared cultural beliefs make neural annealing easier then the bayesian rationalist mindstate, and that might be true.
I’m a little surprised by the original claim. I would have thought that rationalists are *more* into yoga than average people. It seems like precisely the sort of thing that evidence-based medicine with its frequentist statistics has trouble identifying anything good about, but that rationalists are happy to identify value in.
Sometimes I'm annoyed by your willingness to take nonsense seriously, but mostly (like here) I admire your style. It's refreshing to see your reasoned openness to alternate facts.
With some things, I don't need to "take them seriously" to know there's a very high probability that they are nonsense. Given my finite life span, I'd prefer to reserve my "taking things seriously" energy for those things that are less likely to be nonsense.
> Some evidence for this: again, just the observation that the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most.
I think this is because the more perilous/treatment-resistant one’s condition becomes, the epistemic threshold for what one considers a viable treatment path plummets as desperation skyrockets, and the type of woo they become a attracted to is often a reflection of their biases/worldview. Stereotypical middle aged women flock to crystals, chakras, and bodywork, nerdy young men flock to obscure research chemicals, podcast host supplements, and wim hof, etc.
Once mainstream knowledge has failed to help (or they distrust it/reject it), they turn to their respective “cultic mileus” to find “the answers.” Because of a mix of placebo/delusion/regression to the mean, those cultic mileus will never be short of people gushing positive anecdotes and how they were once just as lost and hopeless as them, until they found the super secret hidden knowledge that saved them.
The writer Leonid Kaganov summed it up as “When humans are in a situation where they have no real powers, they start believing in unreal ones.” From prayer to witchcraft to cult leaders to woo.
Suppose one is scientifically literate, but mainstream medicine has nothing to offer for your serious chronic condition - "maybe in 5 - 10 years we'll have figured something out". What are you meant to do? Of course you try alternate approaches, even if they're individually very unlikely to work; and of course you vet them to avoid the ones with a significant risk of making things worse, but most of the time the worst case is wasted time and money, and even a small chance of a meaningful health improvement is worth a lot.
My wager/explanation is "people we think of as having a lot of power, don't really have it".
A CEO, for example, is a classic example of a powerful person, but to the extent I see a CEO's job as a constant high-stress hell of insufficiently happy shareholders, cagey directors, skeptical customers, hungry competitors, and the SEC breathing down one's neck, it doesn't surprise me at all when I see one of them turning to a priest, a self-help guru, a Nigerian prince with an email account, a virgin on top of a volcanic vent, etc.
It appears to me that by considering the "woo" practices you are missing out on half of the spectrum. Let's call "hoo" all practices pertaining to body health: going to the gym, various cleansing diets, etc etc. These are often accompanied by woo ideology.
The gym is just a place. What matters is the exercises you do. Thus going to the gym only correlates with physical fitness and there is no causative relationship. ;)
There has been a whole slew of studies like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34867275/ that show no measurable effect, so a certain degree of skepticism seem warranted
I'm not sure I fully understand the definition of "woo" here. Yoga, for example, can be a good physical exercise, strengthening muscles and improving flexibility and balance. I guess it's only "woo" if you hope to get some non physical benefit?
But that can't be right, because all physical exercise has non physical benefit. If you keep physically active, that's better for your mental health, isn't it? There must be some more specific thing than that that qualifies it as "woo".
I believe we're talking about the spiritual/meditative side of yoga here. I don't think anyone disputes the fact that yoga can be a good flexibility/core strength/balance workout, or that mild-to-moderate physical activity can have mental health benefits. The 'woo' claims are about extra benefits you can allegedly get from approaching yoga as a meditative/spiritual practice, above and beyond the generally-accepted benefits you can get from doing the same physical movements as a secular workout.
With a lot of these practices the placebo is the point. Just joining a group of people and engaging in rituals has a positive effect on many people (going to concerts or sharing a special meal). Add some "spiritual" stuff, and come away from the session believing you did something useful that will help you, and you have a powerful cocktail.
Agreed. One could say the woo non-responders are "defective" in the sense that they have managed to innoculate themseleves against this particular form of placebo.
The spiritual side of yoga does not have anything to do with asana practice. In fact, classically, "asana" means only sitting in a meditation posture. Did he get initiated into a lineage and practiced mantra, kriya or laya for a few months? That would be trying out yoga.
The gymnastics session you can book in Western countries is not "yoga" and not something that would produce spiritual effects. It is a very big Western confusion that doing bodily contortions would have these benefits.
> The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos, dye their hair, do drugs, break off contact with their families, cut themselves, and massively over-psychologize everything they do. Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors? Which are both at once, vicious cycles that convert present suffering into future suffering, and so need to be compassionately discouraged? A lot hinges on the answer!
When I factor-analyzed a bunch of variables, one of the factors I found was an ideological/political factor that seemed to pattern-match to this. (Though I didn't have these exact questions. I think Emil Kirkegaard factor-analyzed some OkCupid data and found a similar political factor?) Here's my interpretation of what's going on:
A lot of these things are memes, and probably most of the memes (like dying one's hair) are basically-harmless. But why are there such ideological correlations in memes?
I think the biggest part comes down to differences in which people you trust. When you encounter some abstract distant idea, such as "drugs are harmful/harmless", it is hard to get direct observations on whether it is true. But if you trust Serious Authorities, then they will sternly inform you that e.g. drugs are harmful, whereas if you trust certain other groups, they may argue about some other things.
The notion that the underlying cause is trust helps me make sense of why traumas might have such a big influence on them (especially because I am pretty skeptical of the validity of "traumas as damage" theories). If someone has a conflict with an authority figure where the authority figure was bullshitting a lot and got away with it, then that is logically going to reduce their trust in authorities. It's justified by Bayesianism!
If this analysis holds, then it raises other questions for how to think of this question:
* How much of what authorities say and do is bullshit? (Quite a lot, presumably; think "law of no evidence", replication crisis and other poor scientific methodology, erc.)
* Which groups are the authorities trying to suppress with their bullshit? And are their proposed alternate memes superior to those created by the authorities, or do we need a third solution which improves on both the authorities' memes and the rebels' memes?
>When I factor-analyzed a bunch of variables, one of the factors I found was an ideological/political factor that seemed to pattern-match to this. (Though I didn't have these exact questions. I think Emil Kirkegaard factor-analyzed some OkCupid data and found a similar political factor?) Here's my interpretation of what's going on:
I did, but never published that. Should get that done. What I did for those curious: I took the OKCupid dataset (https://openpsych.net/paper/46/), then filtered down to the first 100 or 200 questions with the most data that were ordinal in data type (some are nominal and harder to analyze). Then I analyzed these with exploratory item response factor analysis to get at the structure. I analyzed it for an increasing number of factors to see what would fall out of the data first, and see if they would be consistent when extracting more factors (like in this paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691400347X). The results, as I recall them, is that the first factor is a kind of political conservatism-religious factor. The second factor is an intellectualizing factor that loads on all items related to being a thinker, including intelligence (likes books, reads stuff, interested in science etc.). I don't recall the other factors.
Good questions, I'll have to meditate on that a bit :-P
This post reminded me of a book I read a long time ago, "The Feeling Of What Happens" by Antonio Damasio, which made the case that there is a feedback loop from the brain to the various organs back to the brain, which the brain uses to made emotional assessments - basically, the brain asks the guts "what do you think of this?", and if the guts say "urgh", the brain tries to avoid it. One piece of evidence was that patients with locked-in syndrome (whose feedback loop is thoroughly interrupted) appear to be remarkably equanimous about their horrible situation - they can't suffer as much, because it takes signals from the body to really suffer.
I don't know if the feedback loop theory is sound, or what it would mean for "body work" - that's out of my area of expertise, but maybe someone else can connect the dots.
That said, it bothers me a bit that the word "woo" is applied to stuff like yoga - there seems to be a slippery slope leading from breathing exercises to weird esoteric theories about the cosmos, but in and of itself, yoga exercises are great for developing and maintaining flexibility, balance and coordination, and I would hate to see them painted with the wrong brush.
I agree with your final paragraph; Scott's list of examples at the top were 4x exercise regimes with mysticism on top and 4x purely mental things. Even if the mysticism component is utter bullshit, the physical health benefits of Yoga or Tai Chi are going to be felt - the control group for those is probably a gymnastics class or something like Brazilian Ju Jitsu, which I also expect to be dramatically better than being a couch potato
It's probably hard to separate the physical and mental component for any type of workout, seeing how exercise is considered one of the best treatments for depression. Also, I can attest that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu involves dealing with a lot of emotions (fear, exhaustion, frustration, anger, among others) and learning to harness or at least manage them.
Actually compared to most animals our physical capabilities are pretty pathetic. Watch any squirrel going about its business and you'll see better balance, wilder braver moves, move grace and agility than in the Olympic gymnastics.
5. It's all made up to take money from people and doesn't work except as placebo, and when it doesn't work the cheap way out is to say you didn't try hard enough.
Why on Earth would Scott, a trained medical professional who can presumably tell that the likelihood of various forms of woo working is somewhere between minuscule and physically impossible, try so much woo, btw? Surely it can be ruled out in advance that we have "chakras" or that every disease can be cured through foot pressure points? You don't need to _try_ it to discount it.
Sometimes placebo works even when you know it's placebo. Cost/benefit of trying some of these things seems reasonable even if you only ever think any positive effects will come from placebo.
There are a bunch of things in medicine where the underlying theory is probably bunk but the treatment actually works very well. In fact, I might go as far as to say that it's more exceptional when this is *not* the case! Restricting to psychiatry makes this even more true.
So yeah, we probably don't have chakras, but the chakra people might be doing stuff that works regardless. Nature doesn't actually care if you know why your treatment works.
This simply isn't the case about woo treatments. If it were, it would show up in double-blinded studies.
(Acupuncture is interesting because it makes for unusually strong placebo while not having any other effects, and that's not nothing if nothing else works _either_.)
It depends. Since we don't actually have chakras, a "chakra treatment" is as likely to work as doing something else more or less randomly, so it's unclear whether it deserves testing. When it comes to homeopathy (at least of the dilution variant) we don't even have to test, because it's _impossible_. Testing homeopathy (dilution type) is just a waste of time and money.
The things that deserve testing are ones that at least have a plausible mechanism. Testing herbs from traditional medicine might well make sense, for instance (note that I mean as a scientific study, not just trying it out yourself because that's very likely a bad idea), because even though most won't work, you could stumble upon something that does.
It's a fallacy to assume that a "chakra treatment" is as likely to work as doing something randomly. It's possible that some woo "treatments" got the right answer for the wrong reason sometime in the distant past, and that right answer derived from wrong reasoning was passed down through the ages because the people that tried it got real benefits from it. No?
"When it comes to homeopathy (at least of the dilution variant) we don't even have to test, because it's _impossible_."
Eh, I disagree for several reasons. First off, try this. Pour some oil into a glass. Fill the glass with water. Dump out the glass. Fill it with water again. There will still be some oil in the water. This isn't magic. Oil sticks to things and is hard to wash off with water. If this wasn't true we wouldn't need dish soap. It's really hard to dilute down to nothing using a single set of glassware. Homeopathic *theory* of the 'water has memory' variety is bunk. But the notion that some endocrine disruptors have paradoxical effects at very low doses has some support for it. Bisphenol A is one potential model for these non-monotonic dose response curves. Some homeopathic dilutions have experimentally been shown to be producing low but non-zero dilutions for the reasons described.
Upregulation coupled to downstream downregulation is 'a mechanism.' There are lots of scents that smell pleasant at very low doses and 'chemically' at higher doses. Indole is said to have a floral note at low doses and a fecal note at higher doses.
And when they've actually tried to test homeopathic remedies en masse, the results tend to be mixed rather than 'conclusively, this does not work.'
It only shows up in double-blind trials if you’ve got a well-operationalized metric, and it’s possible to do blindly. As we all know, there is no such thing as a double-blind trial of something like wearing masks or taking mdma, and no one has done studies managing to show that better teachers yield better education, which is hard to operationalize.
He also lives in the capital of woo, where every woo practitioner has attempted to congregate for longer than I have been alive.
In that atmosphere, thinking "well maybe I'll try some of this stuff out", or being nagged by friends into going for some woo sessions, is a reasonable thing.
It's also possible to shout loudly and repeatedly "none of this stuff works or has a chance of working" but then you end up with no friends and possibly no patients.
What do you mean by "work"? A lot of these practices produce very specific and unusual experiences -- e.g. "fun whooshes of energy" as Scott describes above. It's different from sugar pills or homeopathy where literally nothing happens.
Whether they're good for treating any medical problems I don't know. It seems likely that perceived benefits are just the result of the placebo effect -- but in many cases, it's a very active placebo.
That's the point. If you claim that yoga is good against depression, this doesn't seem the least bit unlikely - getting out of the house and doing _any_ exercise is likely a good thing if you can manage it. If you claim that it's better than other exercises at it, this seems a bit unlikely, but can't be absolutely ruled out in advance (it gets ruled out after studies instead). If you claim it cures metastatic cancer by adjusting "energy flows", then it seems severely unlikely and studying it seems like a waste of resources.
If you want to communicate your (valid) skepticism to woo people, I think acknowledging that their practices have real and unusual effects would be helpful. I mean here "effects" and not necessarily "benefits".
For example, it's common to hear something like "there's no evidence that meditation is really any better for stress than just sitting quietly for 20 minutes". This is probably true.
However to a meditator, it sounds very strange, because doing meditative practices is a strikingly different experience from relaxing with your eyes closed, and some of the weird stuff promised in the meditation books does actually happen. Same with many types of yoga as I understand it -- it's not at all the same as just stretching.
I very much like the result that watching nature TV is as good as meditation (because it's easier and you might learn something). There's no immediate reason not to believe that meditation is as good as any other form of relaxation, but that also seems like a very weak claim and not something you will be able to become a rich guru from.
> If you claim that it's better than other exercises at it, this seems a bit unlikely, but can't be absolutely ruled out in advance (it gets ruled out after studies instead).
That's exactly what Scott is exploring here. I think this is the answer to your question above.
Possibly his patients participate and believe in the "treatments". Scott may find it helpful in his practice to better understand the treatments so he can better communicate with his patients.
This could be a reasonable choice, especially if you only do it once or twice to see what it's about. Skeptic neurologist Steven Novella often says that it's a problem that real physicians don't know enough factual stuff about alternative medicine, because then they don't understand what they need to look out for among patients - it's definitely a good idea to ask what oddball herbal remedies a patient is taking, because that can cause some seriously weird medical interactions.
But then you wouldn't expect any strong-claim effects in the first place, and it seems Scott did?
It seems implausible that woo is a complete scam in the way you describe. Your model predicts that the only reason to be pro-woo is if you're selling woo, this does not seem to match the world I observe where lots of people are fond of woo the way others are fond of Marvel movies. They must be getting something out of it, even if it's only fun wooshing sensations.
1. What the customers think and experience. Yes, in some trivial meaning, they must be getting something out of it, even if it's just the fear of what would happen if they stopped. But this doesn't really mean anything - humans are amazing at fooling themselves, and people seem fine with joining and staying in destructive cults or risking their health by paying for homeopathic treatments instead of going to real doctors when the tiniest bit of research shows that it doesn't work and cannot work. I'm sure they think they have reasons, but these reasons certainly don't have to be related to any efficacy. It doesn't _even_ have to be about anything that makes them feel good.
2. What the people running things think. Here, the span is likely both to be massive and to differ between different types of woo. 100% of psychic surgeons and physical mediums know they're frauds - it's impossible to perform it without deliberate fraud. But at the same time, I'm sure the _vast_ majority of yogis believe it themselves when they're selling energy flows and magical health effects - they were schooled in this, and unless you're a psychopath it's easier to sell something when you actually believe in it. And you feel better about yourself when you don't feel that you're defrauding people. We have good evidence that astrologers and fortune tellers often believe in their own nonsense.
3. The system. When I say the reason we get what we get around woo is that it can be monetized, it doesn't mean everyone involved is committing fraud. It just means that you can only sell what you can sell. Very few people will be able to make a living from telling people they should take walks now and then, and few businesses will take out ads foe that. The business end only works in the first place if you can get paid for it. Therefore all the businesses and all the advertisement will be about stuff where there's actually money to be made.
Note that most of these practices (yoga, tai chi) traditionally don't take money from people to practice them. It's only with commercialisation in the US that that's started.
How did you write something pointing to "get out of the car" while at the same time not being able to get use out of the woo? I feel like I want to be impressed by the phenomenon.
I have had an experience of finding woo non existent on the obvious premise of it not being there, then later finding it to be very existent on the obvious premise of it definitely being able to be felt and viscerally apparent. I don't think either position was wrong and the metaphysics lines up on "it was probably there but I wasn't noticing.
Woo can often be described as " subtle" and because of this it can be missed by people because it's literally the small stuff. Sometimes I've seen it portrayed as noise (when from a certain perspective, there is no noise [yes this is a rationality red flag statement], only information). And at other times I have seen subtle states be so obvious that it has taken me or my friends years to notice what's been right in front of our faces. It's hard to be concrete about subtle objects, they are not so easy to put words to. That's not to excuse lazy epistemics, but merely to give a reasonable warning that it's hard work here.
I tend to tell people, if you don't see(perceive) the "woo" then don't worry about it. Until you do. One day you may meet someone who seems nuts but is operarionalising their seeming ridiculous woo in some efficient way and is doing very well in the process. Then as you get interested in it, you may be able to see it and learn it. Until then, don't bother worrying about it.
As an exercise. If I told you that gravity is always down and not-gravity is always up. That seems obvious right? Well what if you want to try a body exercise of checking where the heavy and not-heavy are. Usually while sitting, the heavy is at the earth-facing side of the body and the not-heavy is at the not-earth side of the body. Sometimes the subtle stuff organises so that it disagrees with the location of the heavy and not-heavy sensation. Sometimes people feel the "weight of the world on their shoulders". If you spend some time (1hr), just noting where the heavy and not heavy details are in the body (maybe on an inch by inch scale) then spend a day noticing the heavy and not heavy. If ever you feel a weight-of-the-world sensation and you move the heavy through the body to the earth side (sometimes with a gently postural shift), often the emotional side of the experience will also shift. This is woo, and comes in fancier language but it works for all sorts of people.
It's possible to play with your epistemics. What if we just call it down because it feels heavy? What if the heavy one was up and the other one was down? What would that be like? Try imagine it and play with it. Maybe you can cure your depression by changing your relationship with heavy and light. This is woo.
>How did you write something pointing to "get out of the car" while at the same time not being able to get use out of the woo?
Because "get out of the car" was a story, and in the story Scott could have his hero just not bother to make good objections or have his spiritual entity just not let him make them.
The get out of the car story has the situation "the supernatural entity isn't a fake, but by pure coincidence, it looks exactly like a fake". The proper conclusion to this is not "we should never think things are fakes, for fear of this happening".
Scott uses the word "woo" in a non-standard way. It has a far wider meaning.
"Woo, also called woo-woo, is a pejorative term for pseudoscientific explanations that share certain common characteristics, often being too good to be true (aside from being unscientific). The term is common among skeptical writers. Woo is understood specifically as dressing itself in the trappings of science (but not the substance) while involving unscientific concepts, such as anecdotal evidence and sciencey-sounding words."
Its very strange to me to see so many people (in the comments and the tweets), who presumably believe in "woo" stuff, use the term "woo" which in my mind (and as you point out) is used as mockery. Very strange.
I have a friend who's into woo who describes it as "woo". I think part of it is friendly, gentle self-mockery to keep themself from taking it too seriously.
Also, this wouldn't be the first time where a word is used derogatorily by outsiders and affirmatively by insiders. There's lots of cases like that.
Well, woo is like the N word, the F word, the other F word, the L word, the Q word, and the C word. All cases where a word initially is extremely offensive, but then the targets took it, started using it themselves among themselves, and eventually for the in-crowd, it's no longer offensive.
the idea that this stuff will repair your emotional life or mental health is pretty unusual I think.
Millions of normal tai chi or yoga practitioners just want some vague feel-good health benefits + fitness. Alexander Technique has its base mainly among musicians and actors, who are looking for some combination of stage presence + avoiding overuse injuries. Even Wim Hof mainly promises vague improvements in "energy" + immune system + ability to be a tough guy in the cold.
My own experience with Alexander Technique is that I was promised a narrow scope of what it would do, totally unrelated to emotional processing, and it "worked" as advertised -- but as a head-oriented person I really did have a hard time perceiving my body at first and had to work through this a little as a prerequisite.
I think other woo is similar, and that these twitter posters are talking about something real, just exaggerating the benefits of bodywork and being very smug.
"Something-something-Energy" and "strengthen the immune system" are huge red flags for nonsense. You probably don't _want_ to strengthen your immune system even if that in fact worked (which is doesn't) - an overactive immune system is how you get autoimmune diseases.
Interesting. I have the opposite impression. In my mind all of these are associated with people/groups that make big claims about repairing emotional or mental health. Then the kind of narrow claims you encountered are the exception. (this is all probably just due to our past experiences and exposures).
And this can happen within the same discipline. It both stands to reason and is supported by research that Alexander Technique can help with some lower back pain by improving posture. The opposite in both regards is true for it treating asthma, which is _also_ routinely claimed.
I think this is a great point, actually. The only counterpoint I can think of is yoga does include meditation, which has been claimed by many to improve mental health (and I think it does). Scott has posted before about how meditation didn't seem to have any affect on him. However the 'bodywork' stuff wouldn't apply to this.
I've also found things like yoga to help with my mental health, but this seems totally normal (spending time focusing on slow movements stops anxious spirals and releases muscular tension).
My experience too. I do yoga mostly for the physical benefit, but it also makes me focus on the present and not let my mind skitter away in unproductive directions. It’s a really valuable mental and physical reset, although I don’t consider it mystical in any way.
I'm surprised at seeing Alexander Technique listed as woo. It's a very materialistic approach to improving kinesthesia by (from angle) making movement easier by freeing the neck leading to freeing the back and the rest of the body (this is approximate) or, from another angle, inhibiting parasitic tension associated with movements.
I was also surprised. As a musician, Alexander Technique (and especially the Taubman approach) was invaluable in finally solving the tension/wrist issues that had caused me to drop out of my college piano program and be unable to work consistently for several years.
I really was unable to tell/notice when I was "tense" in the kind of way that could lead to injury, and it retrained me to notice and correct what I needed to, in order to avoid overuse damage to my wrists. Telling someone "just relax" doesn't work when they have no idea or experience of what the appropriate kind of relaxation feels like, and what parts of body they need to relax while holding others in tenser balance as they perform musical motions. These taught me how to activate and feel the differences, and I use the techniques to this day, to adjust my posture and wrist/hand position at the piano.
I was really confused to see it listed here as an example of "woo," as I never heard it or my instructors promise or overpromise any kind of pseudoscience nonsense.
I have found Feldenkrais interesting as some lessons (have only done Awareness Through Movement) have done nothing obvious for me whereas others have been game-changers. I'm lucky that I hit one or two of the latter early on in my experience. I am guessing that some aspects of my body functioned well already whereas others didn't.
The closest thing to woo I have found useful is a variant of Feldenkrais taught by Harriet Goslins at Esalen and other places, which she calls "cortical field reeducation" (kind of a hilarious name, like isn't that just learning??).
It involves various coordinated movements you do with different parts of your body, many of them subtle, for the purpose of reminding your body of its variety of motions and methods of coordinating movement. It's not super woo in practice, but it very much is so in her language and way of describing what's happening. Sometimes she even talks about visualization as part of what you're doing. The effects are not supposed to be spiritual, but there is an aspect of returning to knowledge you had an infancy, and integrating your body and mind better.
I did find it helpful, and I think it's subtly changed my life for the better permanently.
It's very keyboard-specific, and iirc developed by Edna Golandsky and Dorothy Taubman. It focuses on things like hand alignment, arm balance, and wrist rotation.
There's some versions of it where you put your life on hold and retrain every motion from the ground up; I had a teacher (Terry Dybvig) who leaned toward a more integrated and flexible approach when possible, and I was able to keep working most of my gig jobs as I corrected my technique. She'd address the most glaring issue(s) she saw in a lesson, and give me some tools and exercises, and I'd apply it for the next couple days on the material I was learning, emailing her if I had questions. Then at the next lesson we'd check my progress, and add new tools to my toolbox, and so on.
Things we covered included:
* Maintaining natural alignment of the hand-- learn how to take it from how it falls at your side, and get that same shape/feeling on the keyboard, and maintain that consistently. (Most piano teachers do mention/prioritize this to some degree, so I was already familiar with this. My problem was in all the other body parts I was tensing too much, whenever I focused on maintaining the hand position. And not being sure which types of exceptions and adaptations of hand position (as piano playing does still require lots of movement and contortion) were OK vs potentially damaging)).
* Bench posture: Are the sitbones solid on the bench; where are your ears in relation to the sitbones? Do you need to add some pads to the bench so you're sitting at the right height to keep hand alignment? What are the shoulders doing? (It took me quite a while to be able to tell the difference between what relaxed shoulders vs tense shoulders actually felt like, as there's always going to be some tension/support needed while playing. Experimenting with different postures and combinations, and having an instructor tell me "YES, that position you're in and that feeling you're describing right now is what we're looking for" or "no, whatever you're doing right now isn't it; try something else" was extremely valuable to me).
* How much pressure do you need in order to strike a note? (This was the BIG and transformative thing I personally needed to learn). I did lots of exercises where you strike a note, then release as much pressure as possible while still keeping it ringing, and rotate/relax your arm while keeping the note held, to get used to the feeling of "only this much tension and pressure is is needed" and "these are the positions your hand can comfortably be in while exerting that pressure." Also lots of exercises where one presses down a note slowly without making sound, to get used to the feeling of the "catch" of the key, and how much pressure is needed to move past it. And lots of exercises dealing with finger striking and forearm striking combinations, to learn how to minimize unnecessary movement, and to learn the "just this much tension and pressure is needed to keep the hand shape and get the sound you want" feeling.
* Additional specific drills, for example for thumb crossing in arpeggios/scales to minimize wrist contortion. Also a lot of practice in "thinking ahead" and "moving ahead," making sure the hands are over the notes you want to play, in a good and supported position to strike the notes, before you strike the notes. I also had several tutoring sessions where we troubleshot specific passages that were making my hand hurt, and we tried to figure out where I was doing unnecessary twisting of the wrist or too-much-pressure motions.
* As I look back at some old lesson notes, probably the most "woo" thing was experimenting to see if there were any "trigger" words and phrases that could help me get into a ballpark-of-correct combination of tension and relaxation and body alignment. I took a pilates class once, where something silly like "pretend your core is being held down to the ground by the roots of a tree" could sync a lot of my muscles into the right alignment, a lot more quickly and easily than thinking about each individual body part. (Which then gave me an opportunity to analyze and double-check and compare what had shifted). At the piano, I found there were some combinations of tension/relaxation at the keyboard that were easy for me to trigger by thinking of my keystrokes as being "confident" and "communicative of beauty." I'm not sure if heuristic shortcuts like that work for everyone, but I was grateful to find there were a couple that worked for me.
there's an alternate and more general version of AT going around (e.g. https://expandingawareness.org/) that is focused on something causally upstream of posture itself—on awareness, intentionality-of-responses (sort of Taoist), elimination of anxiety, and naturalness of expression, and is implemented more as a meditation practice than a specific physical exercise. A bunch of anecdotes point to it being transformative for some people.
‘Woo’ encompasses a great many ideas and therapies. Taking all of them together to answer whether they are effective is not helpful and cannot be answered in one essay.
There is good research done to study some of these therapies. I recommend you look at these. Physicians routinely refer patients with lymphadema for lymphatic massage therapy. Tai Chi can reduce falls among the elderly. Acupuncture reduces back pain. You can find this research in PubMed.
Think of it like seeing a physician specialist. If you go to an obstetrician for arthritis it is unlikely they can offer an effective treatment. Not all ‘woo’ has been shown to be effective. Most effective modalities treat a limited number of conditions. And most of the effects of temporary.
"We included 33 studies (37 articles) with 8270 participants. The majority of studies were carried out in Europe, Asia, North and South America... We found that acupuncture may not play a more clinically meaningful role than sham in relieving pain immediately after treatment or in improving quality of life in the short term, and acupuncture possibly did not improve back function compared to sham in the immediate term"
"We included 108 RCTs with 23,407 participants living in the community in 25 countries...Exercise reduces the rate of falls by 23%...Tai Chi may reduce the rate of falls by 19%"
"The reviewed articles reported conflicting findings and were often limited by methodological issues...There is some evidence that MLD in early stages following breast cancer surgery may help prevent progression to clinical lymphedema. MLD may also provide additional benefits in volume reduction for mild lymphedema. However, in moderate to severe lymphedema, MLD may not provide additional benefit when combined with complex decongestive therapy."
Yes. We know it doesn't matter where you put the acupuncture needles, and we know it doesn't matter if you actually put in the needles or just fake it. Theoretically (and not necessarily unreasonably) it might still do things to how the subject experiences pain, but in that case, it certainly has nothing to do with putting in a needle and everything to to do with the distraction of the sensation.
That is, the entire theoretical apparatus of acupuncture is demonstrably nonsense. You can't put them in the meridians because meridians don't exist, and you don't actually have to put them in at all.
Right. There is some interesting research where they do basically they same acupuncture studies but with collagen injections or steroid injections for some kind of joint pain. The results are directionally the same - getting any shot/needle/procedure makes people report feeling better regardless if there was any actual "medicine" in the shot.
A pet theory of mine is that cutting works a bit like this too. Yes, it hurts, but it hurts in a manner you have control over and it distracts you from pain, possibly existential, beyond your control.
According to one study read about, acupuncture has the second-strongest placebo known, exceeded only by placebo surgery (which you can't study in a controlled manner for ethical reasons, but sometimes a surgeon has to cancel a procedure after having opened the patient up, and the placebo here is huge).
Seems like it ought to be possible to ethically study "placebo surgery" by simply informing the patients up-front about exactly what treatment they're actually personally getting, and only maybe misleading about the context of what's being studied. Something like:
"As part of this study, I'm going to apply anaesthesia, cut something open in the general vicinity of where you've reported chronic pain, poke around in there a little bit, disinfect thoroughly, then stitch the wound closed and move along to the next study participant. This has all the usual risks of surgery - here's a pamphlet on those - and basically none of the benefits. There's a chance your condition will improve anyway, for some reason not yet well understood by medical science, which is why I'd like to try it - control groups and so on. Other people are trying other treatments, including placebos. If you'd rather quit the study instead, I can't blame you, and you'll still get [participation incentive] either way."
Then, if it can be proven to predictably do more good than harm in some context that's otherwise difficult to treat, it becomes as legitimate as any other cutting-edge intervention (pun very much intended), so investigation of causal mechanisms and iterative refinement of the technical specifics can proceed from there.
Tai Chi is a series of exercises which require you to practice balancing yourself, I don't know why it would be included in your list of 'woo that might work'. Of course it does, it just doesn't have anything to do with body energy.
That being said, using the concept of chi/ki/qi as a visualization tool could be useful, but that's not really woo either, lots of athletes do stuff like that. I say this as a former practitioner of traditional Asian martial arts, some of which are completely immersed in woo.
I want to also offer a separation, "skeptical doubt" as separate from "willing skepticism". A lot of woo does get interrupted by doubtful skepticism. It can be fragile like that. Partly because it's a delicate perspective. If you walked into the meditation room, and started loudly asking "why do they do this" they may have trouble staying in the meditative perspectives. Woo can similarly be interrupted by all manner of healthy and unhealthy skepticism. However, usually a well developed woo system will have a pathway for supporting healthy skepticism and inviting it while validating it and a pathway for working with unhealthy skepticism and a place for that perspective to not interrupt the delicate "meditators".
I predict that woo non responders can be willing skeptic and find it more responsive than doubtful skeptical will be able to find. (maybe there's an openness trait here) it also depends on the need.
I have a concept I call "not suffering enough". People who suffer badly enough, start needing spiritual solutions and start asking for them. Then they start seeing them. Before they ask they often didn't see them. (warning: suffering is pointing to the subjective experience of suffering and not the nearby experience of things like "pain" or having a "bad time". You will need to notice the suffering and in a real and genuine way to get onto the stream entry path of awakening). I don't consider this spiritual problem of "it wasn't here" to be a problem for the people who don't perceive it, they aren't worse off for not seeing it, although it does seem (to me) like the people who do see spirituality as having a better time afterwards (although ymmv). Also as per the metaphor of awakening, sleeping isn't bad, being awake isn't "better" but I sure want to be awake if I have a choice. Unless I'm tired, in which case I want rest.
Sorry, are you saying that skepticism of the practice makes the practice not work? That doesn't seem to be a very good indication of the practice actually working. Am I not understanding you correctly?
Wait, why wouldn't that make sense? If the belief itself is having an effect, then disbelief wouldn't have the effect, right?
Like, take depression. If I'm depressed because I believe I'm a loser, then changing that belief can cure the depression. Even if nothing else in my life changes. So if beliefs can have profound negative effects, why couldn't they have profound positive ones?
I totally agree with the example you give. But take or energy healing or something similar. If I am required to believe in the practice for it to work, that doesn't lend much credence to the practice actually doing something (beyond the placebo). And that can be OK if the practitioner and the client both agree on this. On the flip side, I don't have to believe in chemotherapy for it to work.
Maybe the issue is just what each of us thinks of as examples of the practices talked about in this thread. If the claim is "meditation can help you changing the way you think" thats much different than "wear this triangle on your head to cure your cancer". And our discussion about each of those would be much different.
I always viewed meditation as being built on insights and cognition pattern changes. (I cured my own chronic depression & anxiety via meditative insights, fwiw.) I don't think it works in the same way as chemo. Your brain has to be an active participant.
You could be possibly be skeptical of woo and still have it work if your cognition patterns still change. But I imagine that would be really hard to do, because in order for your cognition patterns to change, you kind of have to allow them to change, which isn't something that a highly skeptical person is probably going to do.
One very simple mechanism might be that you need to be paying attention to the process for the process to work. If, instead, your head is filled with rational thought about anything, including why the process might not (or might) work, then to that degree you won't be paying attention, and thus the process won't work.
It's not the skepticism, it's the doubt. There's a pretty big conversation about "doubt on the spiritual path" that is talked about. "doubt" is one of the ten fetters.
Imagine that you are meditating and trying to quiet the mind so that you can have insightful knowing of what's going on in the mind. Then imagine that you have an interrupting sub-mind that says to you, "nothing is happening here, we should stop meditating" every time you get bored enough. Because it interrupts, it gets in the way of clear mental perception and progress. The meditator must learn to work with themselves in order to progress down the spiritual path such that they are not having the interruption. They must achieve the personal alignment of their mind to their meditation practice so that they don't continue to have these disruptions.
This is how doubt interrupts a meditation practice but it can similarly interrupt all kinds of woo type practices.
A good "patch" for trying woo is to agree to hold the doubts out of the meditation (or other practice) window and consider them afterwards rather than during the meditation. Another good patch is to only try practices that don't trigger the doubt so bad. And another patch is self compassion about the doubt.
A test for doubt: if a highly competent expert in your field said to you that you were wrong about everything and you didn't get it, would you doubt yourself?
Now imagine if a mathematician said that about your ability to add simple whole numbers. You can probably imagine that your reaction might be be to first be confused about what they are saying, then to be willing to check if they know something you don't, then fairly quickly to be willing to ignore their expertise if it disagrees with your basic math knowledge and they can't explain why. But you probably won't doubt your own math skills. Curiosity, compassion, openness and eventually laugh in their face. This is what it's like to not have doubts about your own mathematic ability in simple arithmetic.
You probably have unshakeable self belief in your basic mathematical ability.
I think that people use the word "skepticism" for different things, some of them the opposite of the other, ranging from "lack of belief" to "strong belief in the opposite direction".
People with the "strong belief in the opposite direction" will refuse to follow the instructions, because what's the point, they *already know* it is not going to work anyway.
Sometimes it makes sense; if someone tells me "if you meditate 2 hours a day for 30 years, you will be able to shoot lasers from your eyes", I would be like "hehe, no thanks".
But some "strong skeptics" will dismiss even statements like "if you lie down on a soft bed and listen for 10 minutes to a relaxing music, you will feel relaxed" as "haha, no way, this is stupid woo", just because a Hare Krishna guy happened to tell them so. And if you insist that they try it, they will be tense, and fidget, and ask every 10 seconds "this is so stupid, could we please stop already?" that they will really succeed to *not* be relaxed after those 10 minutes. Then they will write an article on RationalWiki about how relaxation is pseudoscientific and debunked.
> I have a concept I call "not suffering enough". People who suffer badly enough, start needing spiritual solutions and start asking for them. Then they start seeing them. Before they ask they often didn't see them.
> it doesn’t seem like woo “experts” have cured themselves and become unusually mentally healthy
That reminds me of a story about Evelyn Waugh, noted Catholic (and obstreperous asshole). He was behaving so badly one evening that his hostess said "How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic!"
Do various breathing techniques (holotropic breathwork, quantum light breath, some forms of pranayama - anything that focuses on deep breathing over >40 minutes) count as woo here? Because I found that these are very useful for getting to emotions and trauma for many people. There is a reason Stanislav Grof focused on these after LSD was illegalized
The name is probably just to have something that can be copyrighted. Essentially, all the breathing techniques do the same thing, there are just differences in details and naming (because copyright)
Personally speaking, I experience what is probably a nocebo effect from a lot of these techniques. When I was having anxiety issues I tried one of the most "effective" breath techniques (cyclic breathing) and found it made me feel significantly worse.
Breathing techniques are among the things that can potentially help but don't necessarily do so (like most things, actually). I never found the good old "just take deep/slows breaths to calm down" particularly helpful myself. I suspect it's based on the idea that slow breathing is associated with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system... but if whatever is keeping stress responses going has more influence, then obviously the breathing by itself is just a waste of time at best. At worst it adds additional stress because you're getting first hand evidence that this supposed surefire technique is anything but, and you might start trying harder to make it work and "trying hard" is hardly ever a good thing to do...
By the way, the comment you replied to was about a very different type of breathing – one designed to bring out things, rather than getting rid of them. I am not convinced that these types of breathing actually work for any other reason than that people are expecting them to work (and the general potential state-altering effects of doing something that's starkly different from what you do normally), but assuming that they do, maybe that's where you ended up...
The specific woo techniques people know probably do a better-than-random job of eliciting whatever placebo effect makes woo popular. It would be kind of weird if they didn't, surely thousands of years of developing yoga has made for more enjoyable exercises than whatever random nonsense I could invent in five minutes. But this implies there's some kind of active ingredient that "real" woo has more of than my shoddy improv woo, and in some sense that means it can't be a placebo. Sure it's just giving people a fun woosh feeling, but you can describe most recreational drugs that way and they sure aren't placebos.
I prefer an alternative name: expectancy effect. To me it describes much better what's going on: you get an effect purely because you expect it. It follows that if you manage to change your expectations, you manage the degree to which you'll encounter expectancy effects.
Of course, if you're a sceptic, you'll find it slightly hard to get yourself to expect an actual effect from "healing crystals", so if you want to utilize expectancy effects you'll be better off looking for things that don't outright conflict with your views. These would typically be rather more "non-woo" things – things that seem plausible but are inherently hard to test scientifically (e.g. because they are difficult to double-blind or even single-blind). Even then you likely wouldn't come into it with an outright expectation of an effect, though.
In the end, my answer is "yes, but": I do think it's possible, but it takes a lot of carefully balanced interaction with your current mindset, which is not at all easy for an outsider (one of those "more of an art than a science" and "inherently hard to test scientifically" things) and even harder doing it by yourself, especially if you've never done it before. I can try to explain a little more if you're interested... but I can tell you right away that there won't be any silver bullet.
I wouldn't be surprised if woo "works" via the mechanism of someone actively trying to do something to address a problem, regardless of what they're trying. If we go by the simple model that pain is the thing you feel when there is something wrong and we further assume wrong things can include emotions, trauma, and other non-mechanical things (ie, if we accept psychosomatic stuff), then actively spending time addressing pain could in principle be enough to reassure your pain engine that it can stop, since it was heard.
It wouldn't necessarily be a permanent solution if you fail to fix the underlying problem in the long-term, but it might work in the short-term. For example, sometimes I'm feeling physically hungry, with mildly unpleasant sensations in my stomach, and they go away when I deliberately make plans to eat in the near future. But the sensations will come back if I then fail to eat for a long enough period of time
Unsure if anyone else had this reaction, but my assumption is that a lot of rationalist types are unusually sensitive to physical sensations, and have lower than average tolerance for stuff like loud noises and physical contact. I don't think I'd characterise this as autism, except in the sense of everyone being somewhere on a spectrum. Hope I'm not claiming too much, but I personally get stressed by loud background noise and am very uncomfortable with being touched by other people, which I'd characterise as very inconvenient preferences to have.
Now, I'm not saying this is a healthy way to be aware of your body, I just feel like if you added the question into the next survey, the average reader of this blog would not come across being particularly detached from physical sensation. This at least seems like it contradicts some of the suggested reasons for us not being particularly responsive to "woo".
I wasn't conflating the two, I was just challenging the claim that people here are not very responsive to physical sensation. Obviously if you break it down more it will be more complex than yes/no.
+1, I'd love to see this question be asked but separated into several different sub-questions as I think "noticing physical sensations" breaks down into several categories, such as the difference between internal and external sensations (internal is things like muscle pain, external is something like the wind on your skin).
*I'm interested in this because I feel like rationalist types are really good at "noticing" but what is noticed may not be physical sensations.* For example, I'm very good at people-watching, but it wasn't until I took up modern fencing that I had any real body-kinesthetic sense (and what I have is still not that great). Other rationalist types will probably have something that looks rather like autism in that they are good at noticing things like flavor, smell, noise, or skin sensations.
It seems like this (sensory issues) could be lumped together with lack of bodily awareness in a sort of "low kinesthetic/proprioceptive IQ" category - if your suspicion is correct it would (vaugley/weakly, im just playing devils advocate) support the idea that rationalist don't get woo cause they aren't effectively processing input from their body
I have found that woo techniques work quite well as part of a balanced "Get your act together" approach. This means: do something for your body (yoga, gym), mind (reading on various topics, discussions), spirituality (meditation, prayer, others), trauma/shadow (traditional therapy, breathworks, guided psychedelics, various trauma releasing techniques), relationship, sexuality, art. People I know that work across all these areas visibly improved over the years. People that focused only on one technique or area of interest - didn't
I find it hard to comment on this one, since (1) I do instinctively recoil from "woo" (2) I can't get anywhere with things like meditation and mindfulness and (3) might as well throw this one in here - a lot of it seems to be "70s Californian middle-class nonsense because people had money and leisure and nothing to occupy themselves" (apologies to California which I am slandering as a state, but you gotta admit, you do have a reputation for 'where the nuts are').
On the other hand - (1) I'm Catholic, where do I get off calling other people's spiritual traditions and beliefs nonsense, huh? I think I've had one, or maybe partially one, spiritual/mystical experience in my life, and I don't mean that time I definitely bloody well *did* see a púca, and I have no inclination towards trying any of the mystical practices of my own faith, but I also believe in the reality of those mystical experiences (2) I really am the Poster Child for "not in touch with my body, not in touch with my emotions, barbed wire everywhere" so, eh, maybe I do need to work on that or something and (3) sorry, California, maybe you're just all pioneers in the field of being psychonauts.
Do you find yourself averse to talking about your mystical experience?
It’s deeply personal to me, I have thought about it a lot, and yet whenever I open my mouth to explain it to another person I just feel like I’m trying to explain a dream that I had because there’s a quality to it I can’t capture in words.
“Do not give what is sacred to dogs, or cast your pearls before swine. If you do they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.”
If you have had a mystical experience, sometimes it’s best to only share it with people who you can trust not to trample it into the mud and then tear you to bits about it.
> you do have a reputation for 'where the nuts are'
According to Wikipedia, California produces 80% of the world's almonds. I dimly recall a comment years ago on this site saying that if California completely solved its water problems in a rational way, almond growing would still be a major agricultural use. Mmm, almonds.
If you've gotten "zero results" from tai chi, yoga or Wim Hoff Method you're doing something wrong. All of those are very solid physical training systems; Wim Hoff's techniques have been extensively studied and documented in multiple university labs all over the world. It's also well-documented that improving physical health improves mental and spiritual health. Trying to dismiss that connection, and the systems designed to facilitate it, as "woo" betrays a kind of "fundamentalist materialism" which is a Rationalist version of Fundamentalism.
What's your specific claim? That tai chi, yoga, etc will exercise your muscles and make you feel better, in the way a lot of exercise does? Those are very plausible claims--but also completely boring. They're not what anyone means by "woo".
What does woo mean in this context though? I would say yoga and Tai chi are different (not better) than other exercises in that they teach sustained self discipline, postural awareness and resilience to stress/discomfort. Plus similar benefits to meditation (which maybe is also woo), such as increased observation powers on what thoughts and motivations are going on in the mind moment to moment. Does that sound like woo? Other times yoga uses a lot of metaphors about energy lines and chakras which I feel like is sometimes woo and sometimes just a specialised vocabulary for helping you find ways to get deeper into a stretch. I'm not sure how often the woo talk is really relying on some science contradicted metaphysics...
Can you provide any of the studies on Wim Hoff? Searching "Wim Hoff" on pub med brings up only two results, neither of which is about Wim Hoff: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Wim+Hoff
Alternatively, if you have gotten "zero results" from tai chi, yoga or Wim Hof Method, move on to something else. Maybe that will work for you instead.
The problem for rationalists whenever our worldview conflicts with others' is that we have to give them the benefit of the doubt while they are under no such obligation. As such, rationalism is doomed to failure under the marketplace of ideas. It's well-tuned to establishing the truth, but fatally flawed from a Darwinian/memetic perspective.
It feels like we've come at this from an odd direction. Can we define "woo" more precisely?[1] Does it make sense as a category? Who are the people who benefit from it and what benefit do they gain?[2] How do we know?
For example, you claim "the observation that the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most", but I don't have that observation, perhaps because I lack your background in psychiatry.
[1] The term seems unhelpful because in popular usage "woo" includes many things which are not wellness or spirituality practices.
[2] All your possibilities 1-4 seem to presuppose that the main benefit of woo involves processing emotions in the body, but I know some people who do a lot of yoga, and I'm confident they wouldn't say the purpose of yoga is to process their emotions.
I mean, Scott did a much more thorough and intense steelmanning than this back on the old blog. You should look up his article on Vinay Gupta and all the related essays.
Woo (yoga, meditation) works GREAT for me, and I'm exactly the type of person who (used to) heavily identify with my thoughts to the exclusion of the body.
In fact I would have said that such a person is exactly the most likely to benefit from woo!
Exactly, it helps you get back in tune with the body. Being stuck in your mind all the time isn’t ideal for happiness, being present in the here and now and focused on what is going on within and in front of you is a good way to enjoy life to the fullest :)
Possible data point: I'm hyper-aware of my body sensations (it's not malfunctioning, I just have standard autistic sensory filtering issues). I also have a history of trauma/diagnosed PTSD. I get absolutely nothing out of 'bodywork' woo except for a feeling of profound silliness, plus some trauma-related discomfort from versions that involve another person.
So one doesn't necessarily have to be mentally-healthy in order to be a non-responder, nor does one have to be heavily dissociated from one's body. I suspect the common factor is probably a lack of faith in the woo, as is standard for all kinds of faith healing/spiritual wellness practices.
(We could go deeper and ask if people who lack the capacity for faith/spirituality are defective. I certainly have wondered that about myself.)
chemical dependencies and other things can interfere with aligning cakras - then arthur avalon, jung and richard wilhem are good bridges from western conceptualization to more holistic spiritual philosophies... jung even has a good warning somewhere in Secret of the Golden Flower about how sketchy it is for western folks to sample buffet style from eastern mysticism
You describe all of the woo things as being "bodily", but I'd say some of them are more bodily than others. Internal Family Systems is more on the "heady" end; you definitely need some body-ness to be able to access it properly, but not _that_ much. Some of the people doing IFS say they don't even experience feelings in their body at all, but it works anyway, because it's on a pretty cognitive level.
When I first started getting into this kind of thing, I was very body-averse. I didn't like the idea of doing much physical exercise, and I _definitely_ didn't want to get into bodywork or any of the other embodied stuff some of the more woo people were talking about. But IFS felt safe; it could be accessed on a more cognitive level and I could intellectualize it and mostly explain it to my satisfaction.
And it was useful for a lot of stuff. But then gradually I started to feel like I was hitting its limits. While I could still access some emotional material, pretty often it started feeling like the core of thing remained out of reach.
And also, over time I had started shifting towards more comfortable with my body. Still not totally comfortable, but much more. I stopped the IFS sessions I was having with my therapist and have instead started doing more physical things like bodywork massages, Alexander Technique, and also started going to the gym and doing ballroom dancing for the first time in my life.
I feel like I definitely started as your stereotypical body-averse nerd who processed everything mentally until I reached the limits of that approach, but going with that approach allowed me to unlock enough comfort with my body that I've been able to now shift more into the physical kinds of approaches.
Evidence kinda against, kinda in favor of 3:
I also facilitate IFS for people. I don't work with really heavily traumatized people - I don't have the experience or training for that. Rather, I target people in the "somewhat below to somewhat above average" range, with the occasional client who's a bit more below that.
And in my experience, people who are roughly around the normal range often (but not always) take to IFS easily and find it quite effective. And then people who are worse off (but still not _so_ badly off that I wouldn't work with them) often seem to have a harder time doing IFS, being less in contact with their bodies.
This seems kinda in favor of 3, in that there seems to be a u-curve. But also kinda against, in that you seem to be suggesting that healthy people wouldn't benefit from woo - and if we define IFS as woo, then I do feel like the healthy people who I've worked with have also benefited.
Also, more in favor of this hypothesis - I definitely think that if I hit a point where I was consistently happy over a long period, I'd stop doing a lot of this. (Well, probably going to the gym and dancing would still be fun.) I can tell because gradually there have been longer and longer periods when I've actually been able to feel happy with my life and not just be an anxious ball a large part of the time, and those periods have correlated with doing less of this stuff since I've been happy anyway and haven't felt like I needed to do so much of the woo.
But I'm still quite not there, and there are still some things that make me really anxious or that I feel I just can't do, so I keep at the woo stuff.
Evidence in favor of 4:
To add a caveat to what I just said, _some_ of the woo stuff is starting to feel like it's in territory of "makes me go from neutral to good" rather than just "makes me go from bad to neutral". So I could imagine keeping up with that. Some ecstatic dancing stuff, for example, feels outright fun for its own sake. So I might very well continue with my intermittent morning ritual of "do a three-minute ecstatic dance right after getting up from bed" even after I got my actual anxieties fixed.
Ah, perfect -- I always scroll through the comments to make sure that I wouldn't be repeating some other commenter, and here I find Kaj himself making some of the points I'd intended. (Note: thanks for the multi-agent theory of mind writings; I'd already been practicing IFS but MATM helps me explain it to people.)
My strong conclusions from working with (often very traumatized) people is that there are very many spectra that overlap, but for which the terms are all inadequate. Two in particular that matter here are the hyperphantasia-to-aphantasia spectrum and a "how borderline are you [capable of being]?" aka "how distinct and noticeable are your 'parts' and their activity?" spectrum. Someone who is hyperphantasic and highly partitioned (but not badly traumatized) is going to find methods that involve visualizations (and "energy") very obviously 'true'. Someone who is both of these and also very traumatized might benefit from IFS, but might also find it terrifying and disorganizing.
I've also noticed that folks on the autism spectrum (even mildly) often appear on the other end of the "partition" spectrum from folks with borderline (although I've worked with people with both).
As to the part about embodiment, I don't believe it is primarily about awareness of one's body. It's more about actually doing things with one's body -- including the ballroom dance you mention (i've forgotten what the scientific PTs call this part, increasing the neuromuscular connection density or something). I do Somatic IFS and other more 'woo' things in this space, but I won't make this about me.
A few comments down, Nolan brings up the inner verbal spectrum. I've known hyperphantasic internally nonverbal highly kinesthetic BPD folks, and wow the amount 'woo' they're capable of without drugs is astounding.
I have a mystical vision of "Kaj Sotala personally trains Scott Alexander for a month, and then both post an article about their experience on ACX". Please make it happen!
Highly suspect new agey religious claims aside; I do think there is a dissassoation issue in the modern world. From increases in self harm and trans issues.
The thing is we are violent apes who have stopped getting into fist fights, having sex, chopping wood in the winter or walking/jogging for miles at a time.
Idk why the solution to that would be "think about your body in the way the magic cystals say" and not "take a 15 minutewalk in a thunderstorm" or any other sort of thing.
For instance, the only diet you probably really need (unless you have some particular medical condition) is to eat varied food in moderate amounts, preferably with a lot of vegetables. But once you've said that, how do you make any money from it? Whereas if your proposed diet is so convoluted it requires an entire book, then you can sell the book, and probably hold courses as well.
The market for selling regular vegetables is already pretty well covered by well-funded and experienced professionals. This seems like a difficult spot to make money.
But if I don't sell merely any vegetables, but ones that I have blessed with the powers I claim to have received from godlike aliens, _now_ there's money to be made if I can find sufficiently gullible customers!
"The thing is we are violent apes who have stopped getting into fist fights, having sex, chopping wood in the winter or walking/jogging for miles at a time."
It's mostly men who did those things (aside from having sex, which is more common now than ever before for both genders). It's mostly women who are trans and cut themselves.
Interesting. I used to have a fear of public speaking. I went to a therapist who suggested that this was general anxiety (I think it’s a specific phobia) and started on these mental exercises that involved “quieting my inner critical mind”. I did that for a while until I realised I never did have an inner critic at all.
I do have an internal monologue but it’s something I control, it’s just my thoughts about stuff. Could be the weather. Or thinking about this comment before I write it. Or conversations I might have in the future.
When worried I feel it in the gut. Maybe I need some woo?
Ok, because the way you described it at first sounded like you had this helpful realization as a result of doing the exercises. (Or at least I was unsure if that is what you meant.)
That's a bizarre coincidence. A couple comments up I was responding to Kaj and mentioned Somatic IFS, but didn't go into it. One of the other spectra I've noticed in people seems related to how verbal (or how uncontrollably verbal) their inner worlds are. You sound like the ideal use-case for the more somatic version.
It's fascinating in a Wittgensteinian way how the words we use for our experience generalize so poorly. Huge swathes of the population would regard the ability to 'control' the verbal contents of their minds as adjacent to the Buddha's claims about the jhanas -- many are pursued throughout the day by unstoppable cascades of words: criticizing, arguing against the criticism, ruminating on resentments, etc. They're not schizophrenic and don't believe these words originate outside, but they are similarly helpless to quiet the words or escape them. You and a person of the type I just described would occupy different places on a spectrum, but we don't have a concise agreed-upon term for what to call it.
Yes, this also surprises me a lot. Some people seem completely ignorant of the possibility to think something on purpose, or make themselves feel something on purpose (e.g. by listening to music). Some people are even scared of the idea.
As if: "if I change my mood, it is no longer myself" (a phobia of being artificial/fake in some way?). Whereas from my perspective it's like "if it already happens naturally hundred times every day, what could possibly go wrong it I do it once or twice on purpose?". Especially if I do it so rarely that it doesn't meaningfully change the daily average anyway. (And there would be nothing wrong even if I did it often.)
I have a different interpretation that might be interesting (or, who knows, maybe even useful) to you.
In the general, I believe it's fair to say that anxiety type things are learned responses. Past experience of some sort accumulated in the mind as a conditioned response of sorts to a specific type of situation. Maybe it even started from the infamous "somebody said bad things to you in your childhood", but the actual "root of the problem" is irrelevant here. All that matters is that things from the past (recent or not) affect your immediate, "automatic" mental response to things in the present (including you thinking about the future; the thinking about the future happens in the present, too).
For the rest of this, we'll go with a contrived but easy-to-analyze example: you did public speaking 20 times and each time a few people in the audience frowned at you and now you have a fear of public speaking. In your mind, there's some sort of association between the idea of public speaking (PS) and danger (D) of criticism or whatever: PS -> D. I could call it S for "stress response" too but "danger" is a much more evocative word, so let's stick with that.
When you're reasonably well-adjusted, the vast majority of small everyday issues are something you can deal with through internal monologue and thoughts and all that, or just by noticing them and letting them slide off your back. However, if something's already a bit wonky or occasions pile up, that may no longer be enough, and this is where all of the failure modes start to creep in.
After the first time you get frowned at, that's easy to write off as an isolated situation. Situation handled with thinking, conditioning averted. However if it keeps happening, it's harder to just write it off as random chance, and the frowns start generating proper potential for conditioning to happen. Alternatively if you never really thought about the frowns, *potentially* they could result in conditioning from the get go. It would probably depend on what your internal estimator (of what the frowns might "mean") spits out.
Now, suppose you do notice the frowns, but they are getting too many for you to reason away... you might actually start conjuring up future scenarios in your head if you think about giving another talk, and feel a little nervous. Now, that's the beginning of a conditioned response right there – the conjuring up scenarios is a "somewhat automatic" response, and can quickly become an unintentional habit (at which point it's a fully automatic response). This can happen slowly or quickly. For instance, if you wallow in the worry and really get into it, you essentially reinforce it "harder" (in the same way large frights probably have a vastly higher probability of turning into a phobia than small frights).
In any case, at some point we have established PS -> D -> E+T (emotions and thoughts) happening automatically.
Now, the other big thing that virtually everyone tries for dealing with unwanted thoughts and emotions is trying to get rid of them by internally arguing against them (emphatically telling yourself that "this feeling is bad/useless", etc.) or by kind of pushing them aside. But once again, that can serve as conditioning: you end up "teaching" your mind that you don't want the unwanted thoughts and emotions to come up – think of it as operant conditioning you're doing on yourself –, and after some repetition maybe it happily obliges: the thoughts and the emotions go away… but that still leaves you with PS -> D. The path onward to E+T has been eliminated, but your mind will still try to let you know about the "danger", right? So you might be left with a rather more vague response, e.g. a racing heart, sweaty palms, a feeling in your gut or whatever, let's call it PS -> D -> G. Maybe you can manage to push that away in the same way, but then PS -> D is still there, and who knows, maybe next it will express itself as a rise in blood pressure...
Now, woo or not, the real problem is the PS -> D link. Once you've removed E+T and are left with PS -> D -> G (or perhaps PS -> D -> G+E), you can't argue with any thoughts anymore (not that this helped in the first place). However, that doesn't make "bodywork" the solution, either – at least if it doesn't, as a side effect, eliminate the PS -> D link.
Please let me know if you want to hear my ideas on necessary ingredients for dealing with the PS -> D part. I'll say up front that this is probably a little trickier to actually execute if you don't have a clear and direct emotional response to work with, but I don't believe in "impossible". :)
Fear of public speaking is a phobia, it’s not learned from previous examples not more than arachnophobia is learned, people fear spiders in countries where there are no dangerous spiders.
Of course phobias are learned (one trial learning, in many cases) – how else could they even develop? Fear bacteria? (I don't mean that, of course, I just honestly can't think of another way a phobia could possibly develop.)
You can learn a fear of public speaking by taking prior observations of criticism, judgment and shunning from individuals and generalizing this to a whole audience of people.
True... turns out I don't actually disagree with that. Admittedly I limited myself to the purely classical conditioning explanation in my previous comments, but conditioning in a broader sense might just as well happen internally, i.e. on a cognitive level. You brought up a good example for that. Similarly, someone might develop any kind of specific fear/phobia without being exposed to that type of situation even once, simply based on the knowledge that something might happen, and then worrying excessively about the possibility (to simplify a little). For example, if I read about venomous snakes and I start obsessing about getting bitten, I can develop a fear response without ever seeing a snake.
However, in my view that's still a learning phenomenon, just not one that's as easy to model as classical conditioning. (I'm not going to get into genetic predispositions and such, which I suppose would still only raise the baseline chance of ending up with some type of phobia, without actually, strictly speaking, causing it.)
A phobia is a kind of anxiety disorder like how OCD is a kind of anxiety disorder, it's not generally a trauma response to a bad prior experience. Yes, some people who were bullied go on to develop social anxiety, but that's not the standard model for all of anxiety. The content of the feared thing isn't necessarily connected to a prior experience. It's generated by a mix of genetic and environmental factors, but the environmental factors are more varied and complex than a single kind of content-related antecedent.
As it happens I do not disagree; I think I failed to fully explain my view. Sorry about that.
I definitely acknowledge that anxiety disorders can have a less obvious origin, but as far as I'm concerned that simply makes it a different type of learning-induced outcome; learning not from a concrete situation but, instead, from a cognitive construct (e.g. imagined situation). Genetic predisposition or not, this is the only way I can make sense of how anxiety could possibly develop.
Oh interesting okay, I think I understand better what you're saying.
I would say I see anxiety on a spectrum of normal human traits rather than a thing a person has or doesn't have and that therefore needs a causal explanation. Like introversion or neuroticism or ability to interpret social cues or ability to focus on things by force of will, etc.
I imagine prior experience or environment may raise or lower a person's anxiety, as well that people can actively do things to raise or lower their anxiety.
I also think of anxiety as inherent to the human mind and experience, so it doesn't usually feel to me like there's so much something to explain. If a person falls really far outside the bell curve in terms of having a ton of anxiety, I think of that as having many potential causes -- genetics, trauma, past environment, current environment, lifestyle choices, reinforcing personality traits (high neuroticism for instance), physical processes (hyperthyroid, etc), degree of psychological skill and insight, etc.
Another angle (different from the one above but still about multiple lines of unknowable causality) might be to think of severe anxiety like cancer in that it's almost always multicausal -- genetics, exposure, prior illnesses, lifestyle, bad luck, things we don't understand. There are some instances like with years of cigarette smoking where the causality is more clear, but for most of cancer that's not the case. We can go back and try to tell a story about how a particular person came to have cancer, but we have to acknowledge most of the time we're fabricating a story.
The way you tell this, goes from a lack of self understanding to a understanding of the bodily location of the fear, if you stopped there it is incomplete and you could resolve the fear with some more therapy work.
If you think about the gut type sensation and look for a first memory of feeling that gut feel, you will probably find a root cause memory that you can do reparenting on. Specifically asking "what would I have wanted to happen differently in that memory?" and then imagining that happening instead and iterating until the burden feels better. If you have no concrete memory, working with an imagined scenario can also resolve the problem.
I don’t have general anxiety. I just had a public speaking phobia which I fixed.
I feel worry - when I do feel worried - in the gut but not the mind (ie I don’t over think things). I can hardly expect to eliminate all worry from life.
And in a certain light, eliminating all worry can be done in an unhealthy way (by suppression/denial). There's a certain healthy place for worry in a balanced life.
It's only relevant to address things if they are a problem.
“The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos, dye their hair, do drugs, break off contact with their families, cut themselves, and massively over-psychologize everything they do. Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors? Which are both at once, vicious cycles that convert present suffering into future suffering, and so need to be compassionately discouraged? A lot hinges on the answer!”
What is the correlation between traumatized people and various sexual predispositions? Anecdotally, I haven’t seen much of a correlation between trauma and homosexuality, although 30 years ago, I recall otherwise, perhaps this was a case of repression leading to trauma. I don’t imagine it’s controversial to say BDSM is associated with trauma, as it’s associated with the pursuit of pain. But it’s controversial to link trans predisposition with trauma, in spite of this being anecdotally self apparent, and objectively involving hormonal disruption and intense and irreversible cosmetic surgical procedures.
No matter what else might be at play, for sure early sexual trauma pulls the veil away from sexuality. The American Dream involved becoming happily heterosexual in high school (after cute harmless crushes in middle school) and going on to have a satisfying marriage and 2.3 kids. Turns out sexuality is more complicated than this, but without trauma it's easier to maintain the pretense of simplicity.
Possibility 5: it works, but it doesn't come in a flavour that I like
I'm prepared to believe that slowing down, breathing and moving my body in a very deliberate manner for a little while might make me feel better, calmer, more relaxed. But the only forms of "woo" that are available are all very close in meme-space to a whole bunch of things that I don't like, so I cannot do them without feeling silly, and if you're feeling silly and internally grumbling about it then you're not going to get any benefit from it.
What is needed is for someone to come up with a version of the same thing that is more congruent with my self-image so that I can do it while being comfortable with myself.
Sounds like the MBSR people have just the thing you're asking for. Take a minimalistic version of 'woo'-type exercises, explain how to do it in plain words, make hypotheses about its psychological effects, test them, publish.
Love the reclaiming of the word 'woo' to mean actual practices, as opposed to the disapproval of them, or of the worldviews that are often associated with them. Let's keep using the word in this sense.
Personal anecdata, you can take me as just one data point. I'm just at the spot where woo doesn't come easy for me, but I still have enough access to it to persevere, and I can say unequivocally over several decades that 'woo' has been a huge contributor to my well-being.
Having worked (and fought) plenty with with this space, I can attest that the experience of being "dissociated from bodily experience", and "processing emotions in the mind" (i.e by thinking) pretty well describe the experience I have when I stop doing any of it for an extended period. And by comparison it feels like shit. It's liveable shit - I've never had a mental health problem bad enough to be diagnosed, but the difference is very notable. Imagine having always had pretty bad fast food, and then one day trying gorgeous home-cooked gourmet food - that kind of difference.
In terms of woo itself, I've tried meditation / mindfulness, yoga, relaxation, Wim Hoff, and probably a few more. These days I'm not so much about specific techniques; what I've learned is that if I take a 15-20 minute break or two a day, where I step away from all goal or relationship oriented behavior, and just consciously give myself this time to go as deep into my inner feelings/sensations as it will go that day, just letting it be and breathing through it, there is a whole blanket of inner tension that lifts, at least a bit, and sometimes by a whole lot. The positive feeling is best described as one of integration, which is why I would tentatively agree with describing its absence as "dissociation".
I'm well aware that many people have no attraction to any of this, and don't feel any benefits when they try it, so I'm happy to see Scott express this so clearly. Which raises the interesting question about what woo is actually doing and why it helps some but not others. From my experience, I would clearly exclude option #4.
In terms of the other options, I tend towards #2. People are different in many ways, and there's no obvious reason to declare them defective if they respond (or fail to respond) to woo.
My speculation as to why this whole thing works, is to take a broad view of ourselves as evolved biological organisms. One of our core evolved senses is a general sense of well-being (or lack thereof), and I've even argued than on finer introspection, this is not a single sense, but a multiplicity of senses of valence that are not fungible with each other. To give a simple example, it's possible to be hopeful and sad at the same time. And of course every subsystem of our body feeds into these. So, by default, the idea that doing specific actions with your body/mind/attention/breath/etc should have all sorts of impacts on your well-being should not surprise anyone. It would be mighty weird if our rational centers were self-contained enough to override signals from everything else, and also to overpower signals feeding into the rest of our nervous system.
Another intesting point is that all of this requires no technology or science to function, it's low tech enough that plain old cultural evolution can explore the space and create a body of knowledge. Hence all these disciplines with old and exotic names...
More specifically, I recall a book about Wim Hoff technique speculating that a good part of what this technique does is to create some kinds of stimula that our ancestors regularly had, and that our modern lifestyle has lost. This applies to regular physical exercise too; for most of us it requires actual effort not to turn into couch potatoes, but when we do the effort, it pays off, because it's the kind of thing our bodies are built for.
Our modern lifestyles also arguably involve some kinds of cognitive stress that were not there in our evolutionary past, and that we are not so easily built to process. In this view it's not surprising the rise of technology goes together with a rise of mental problems, even when we are objectively safer and more comfortable than ever. So it's not surprising putting that attention *away* from the cognitive rational centers for a while (by putting it elsewhere) may help.
For the interesting question of why it appears helpful for some people and not for others, and restricting ourselves to Scott's emphasis on emotional processing, let me propose a tentative model with 3 variables:
1. How much emotional 'load' one generates. This probably corresponds pretty well with neuroticism of the Big 5, which like most everything, I would expect to be roughly bell shaped, and about 50% genetic. So the average person generates a fair amount, and there will be extreme outliers both ways.
2. How well the system 'processes' this load on its own, and gets it out of the way. The classic pop-psy idea is that if it's expressed rather than repressed, it doesn't accumulate. So if your system is good at that, it will get expressed through chatting with others, moving about, maybe doing some hobby or exercise or writing or art or music, and you probably won't be thinking of it as "therapeutic" or "woo". Otherwise, tension accumulates and discomfort ensues.
3. How much conscious access you have into the processing. If you manage to get some access to the accumulated load, you can learn to do specific things to ease it. So you start finding that various types of therapy or woo actually work for you. OTOH, if access is blocked, you try these things and they do nothing for you.
Hence you get different emotional styles. The rare person who just doesn't generate the load, and is genuinely fine just about all the time, and falls quickly back on their feet otherwise. The one who generates a moderate amount but fails to process it much, whose life basically works, and run around saying they're fine but looks just a bit rigid and complains of muscular tension. The one who generates lots but manages to get it out, so comes out as emotional but still has it together. The one who looks just fine but is actually getting more and more clogged until they have a breakdown. The one who generates a fair bit, has learned to work for it and manages to more or less ease it, and may become a loud advocate for their preferred technique. And the unlucky one who generates a lot and tries all kind of methods but they don't help.
Most woo systems (and I think a fair deal of psychodynamic therapy modalities) rely on an ability to think symbolically and to take that symbolism as more "true" than physical reality - a sort of Copernican turn or secret Kantianism.
The description that I've read in a number of other comments about having access to lots of low level sensation and that not working with woo practices adds evidence to this; the "magic" of woo is about taking that sensation and hammering it into a particular symbolic
This is also what happens in IFS as I understand - the client chooses to slot their psyche into the symbolic frame of IFS (child parts, protectors, self at best...) and then is able to use that frame to get particular results or resolutions to past experiences (which one can argue are also always already reconstructed in the personal symbolic of memory)
My sense is that entering into foreign symbolics is a really big ask for rationalists, but that without that entering into, none of these things really work (including organized religion?)
That's a very interesting point. There's probably a spectrum there - you can do plenty of yoga or tai-chi exercises without hearing or adopting any symbolism, but they do come with associated symbolic systems (in this case: chakras, prana, qi, etc.). Same happens with meditation/mindfulness, you can just do the exercises and put the attention to bare sensation, or you can adopt the associated symbolism, a first-person or non-dual worldview.
I think about the common factors research on psychotherapy which looks at the shared attributes that are effective in therapy that transcend individual modalities. My memory is there are three that stand out: client motivation or willingness; quality of rapport between therapist and client; and a shared story told about what's going on with the client and how to get them where they want to go.
You could see how alternative treatments (what we're calling "woo" here) enlist the same common factors and so their efficacy could fall down where those factors aren't happening -- the patient/client isn't very willing to engage with the system; there isn't great rapport between the person delivering the woo and the person receiving it; and they're not on the same page about the story they're telling.
I imagine there are aesthetic and identity kinds of considerations that go into whether a person will be drawn to a particular kind of story (ie, system of diagnosis and treatment, including use of symbols). There are obviously some interventions where one's belief in the story is not as crucial to the outcome -- getting a broken bone set or having a kidney replaced maybe. But I'd venture that most interventions, including ones fairly well inside mainstream medicine, still depend a lot on shared story-telling in order to optimize outcomes.
"the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most" => egregiously false! The main demo at meditation retreats seem to be nice, left-leaning knowledge workers. Alexander Technique is taught at professional acting school, and dancers often learn it as well. In SE Asia, mostly stolidly normal reactionaries become monks. I would say the opposite, actually, that the sickest people tend to try everything for a short time and don't stick with or progress in anything, including woo.
"here “woo” means various more-or-less-alternative wellness and spirituality practices." => Why is Alexander Technique on the list? It's mainstream in performing arts and especially acting. It's not spiritual at all.
"it is the one mental health technique which works 100% of the time" => this seems to be sarcastic, but there's no reason to think that there shouldn't be broadly effective mental health interventions. Exercise and vegetables are broadly effective physical health interventions. Listening to somebody shouting insults at you is broadly harmful to mental health, so why couldn't something be broadly helpful?
Imo there's another explanation you skipped which seems most accurate to me: there are a bunch of good practices that are probably universally good, like bodily awareness, mindfulness, etc. Woo people are disproportionately likely to want and accept a layer of dubious semi-spiritual interpretations on top of this, for a variety of cultural and personal reasons. If someone tries to sell you on the framework, it won't help unless you have some of those reasons. But that doesn't rule out the usefulness of the underlying stuff. It's also very hard to disentangle which parts are just the physical reality of human bodies and which part are in the spiritual layer, largely because it's hard to find stuff about the former that isn't soaked in the latter.
One big important question is whether hormones for trans people are important life-saving technology which keeps them from killing themselves, as its proponents claim, or it's a gnarly treatment with lots of medical risks and side effects including mood swings which dramatically increase the risk of suicide, as the available info seems to indicate.
I don’t know about “woo” but I have read a lot of therapy books and some of them place a lot of emphasis on clients’ being able to experience their feelings in their bodies. I don’t really understand this well. The best way I understand it is that the point is to experience emotions as, well, experiences or sensations and not as narratives or interpretations.
I definitely agree with your understanding... but there are also people who are so removed from their feelings that they don't even know they have them (if that notion makes any sense), and that makes the feelings particularly hard to unravel. I'm not convinced that being able to experience your feelings in your body is useful in itself, or more useful than experiencing them as thoughts and in other less kinaesthetic ways, but it could be a helpful step along the way.
Yes, I see what you mean. For me personally, though, what seems like a natural way of describing feelings is like, "I feel sad as you would if your friends all left", or "I am anxious because I am afraid I will say the wrong thing and people will laugh", but "I feel anger as a tightness in the chest" or something like that is not so natural. But some people apparently have the sense that the connection to the body is essential, or healthy somehow.
I thought about it some more and it seems to me like there is another indirect benefit of feelings "connected to the body": it serves as evidence to yourself (and, potentially, therapists you might talk to) that it's "real". For example, if you just say to yourself, "I feel sad", that doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually sad (obviously). Now I'm assuming that you can distinguish a thought of "I feel sad" that is accompanied by sadness from a thought of "I feel sad" on its own... but if there is no sensation going on in the body, it might be much harder to describe (or even understand) the difference.
Once again this does not necessarily mean that feeling emotions in the body is superior, just that it's easier to talk about.
Body-oriented psychotherapy has been having an ascendant moment in recent years. That seems good for people who find it helpful to access psychological work at that level. But its rise brings the idea that everyone "should" be able to experience and talk about their feelings as bodily manifestations, and that seems potentially problematic since there's a lot of variation in subjective experience and no one needs to feel like they "should" be experiencing their feelings differently from how they do.
There are some situations where it can be helpful if a person does have access to better interoception. Like some anxious people have a lot of chronic neck and shoulder tension and some have migraines that are set off by psychological stress manifesting as tension in the body. So helping people link up the tight jaw, for instance, as an early warning sign in a stress cycle fed by anxiety can be helpful.
Dissociating from bodily sensations is a common response to trauma for some people and so helping them recover interoceptive awareness can help further recovery.
I don't think anyone should feel obligated to talk about their feelings as something they experience in their bodies. There are therapists who will come at clients repeatedly asking "where do you feel it in your body?" and I think it's fine to ask, but if it's repeatedly asked to someone who doesn't experience feelings that way, it can convey a kind of normative standard that isn't warranted.
As someone who feels ambivalent about woo - I’ve seen and experienced instances when it both worked and did not work - I appreciate Scott’s efforts in exploring this topic. With that said, I also think that psychiatry has a lot of woo in it, and I would also love to see him explore that area more.
Your mind is part of your body. All bodily sensation is within the nervous system, and inseparable from mind. If you feel emotionally fine in either your body or mind or both or neither, then what is the problem you are trying to solve?
I have a PhD in cognitive psychology, thesis involved neuroimaging, and perhaps as a result have perpetually got hung up on what we're talking about when we talk about "processing" esp wrt the body. What does it mean for the body and the mind to process something? I can invent explanations, some of which are more satisfying than others, but the term got such heavy use in the article that I suspect it's been treated formally somewhere. Can someone point me that way?
I suspect that it's more of a metaphor really, for "cognitive activity" (which, of course, is not directly measurable: you might be able to see neurological activity but I don't think we're at a point where you could derive from that a sequence of thoughts and symbolic matching and whatever other things we presume to be common cognitive processes) that takes inputs (and internal feedback loops) and transforms the state of "the mind" somehow. Computers process information and in the same sense brains process information, but obviously we lack a lot of insight in the middle layers of abstraction: we know [some of] what the individual cells do and we know about some particular structures they comprise, and how some larger areas in the brain are correlated with certain tasks, etc. – but I don't think we can adequately explain how the brain creates the subjective experience of "I'm thinking of the colour blue", let alone "I'm doing this chain of thinking with inner monologue and imagining hypothetical situations and recalling memories and contrasting them to the hypothetical situations" (just as an example)...
Given those limitations, I can't see a way to get much more concrete about what "processing" might mean, at least without a lot of hand-waving. Of course, if anyone has a definition with some actual substance, I too would be interested in seeing it.
I could say a lot about some of that -- e.g., enumerating the things that are probably occurring (that are inferentially occurring) from a purely psychological / cognitive perspective during "processing" -- but if there's really no agreed upon sense of what people are talking about when they talk about it w/ a somatic lens, then I'm even more confused, since they're often talking about it w/ great virulence and certainty.
Although, upon further reflection, I suppose this is the last thing in the world I should be surprised about.
In my experience, almost all modern dancers and most ballet dancers partake of some amount of "woo" as used here (yoga, meditation, Alexander, Feldenkrais—usually focusing more on the somatic education than the transcendence). Among my acquaintances, there's not an obvious correlation with mental health: you get well-adjusted dancers doing a little or a lot, along with anorexics who don't and high-strung people examining their chakras all day.
This is a population of people exceptionally attentive to their bodies, to the point of spending ten hours a day obsessively testing whether they can hold their leg behind them at exactly such and such an angle while balancing on the other and swinging their torso from exactly position A to position B, etc. Some do well on academic tests and others don't, but the real community value is "physical intelligence"—being able to understand and imitate complex movements after seeing them once, predicting how a movement will feel and how the physics will work without actually doing it, being able to trust your body to find a safe and elegant way to land when you find yourself in a strange midair position. And among this community, it's just taken for granted that it's worthwhile and healthy to dedicate time to explicitly reflecting on how energy and emotion flow through your body.
My take is that different people's cognition is "embodied" to different extents: some people do all their thinking in an armchair and think their body is a tedious irrelevance, other people's executive cortices interface more extensively with their motor cortices and they prefer to do their thinking through motion. Accordingly, "woo" is simply the embodied-cognition side of mentalization or introspection: some people reflect on their intellectualized minds by thinking about their cognitive biases and intellectual competencies, others reflect on their embodied minds by paying attention to how energy moves through their daily sun salutation. Psychologists are familiar with problems associated with insufficient or excessive metacognition about one's intellectual cognition (BPD and neurosis respectively), and similar to Scott's "U-shaped curve" there are parallel unhealthy conditions in which people engage in either insufficient or obsessive metacognition about their physical cognition.
In the Michael Teaching, and also in Gurdjieff's Fourth Way teaching, there are three main centers: intellectual, emotional, and moving/physical. (Technically there is also instinctive, and 3 higher centers mirroring those 3, but beyond the scope here).
Everyone has a preferred center, and a secondary center, and they tend to view and access the world thru those lens.
In short, Think or Feel or Do, pick two, and that's your typical perspective/operation.
Body awareness is one center. Woo comes in many flavors, but most of the Woos listed are body/moving centered woo, often then using that platform to do emotional center work. Works well for those folks who pick those centers, but poorly for non Moving centered people. Talk therapeutics might work better for someone Intellectual centered to reach their Emotional center, as an example. (Or counter to this, picking the center you use least might help balance and free up stuck patterns... So getting you out of your head and into your body, for example)
In other words, Woo has many flavors, and there is Woo to explain why there are many flavors.
If I watch TV all day and eat a gallon of ice cream, I feel meh. If I bus, plane, train, and then bus again, I feel meh. When I do breath meditation, I feel very un-meh. Scott seems to think of body awareness practices as trying to remove DSM-5 disorders. At least for me, that's not what body awareness is about at all!
Possibility 5: Woo works on some people because the placebo effect is very powerful in psychological conditions, and some people have a worldview in which it would obviously work.
Possibility 6: Woo doesn’t work on some people because the nocebo effect is very powerful in psychological conditions, and some people have a worldview in which it obviously wouldn’t work.
I like to use the Moties' approach to quick analysis, so here's a first stab. On the one hand, I love the generosity, the willingness to grant the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much doubt to grant the benefit of. On the gripping hand, the vagueness of Woo Language traps anyone who jumps in carelessly. I conclude that it would take even more effort to break down and address the specific claims that go under the Woo heading.
That doesn't resolve my curiosity, though, there is still some mystery in my head about this post. I set a five minute alarm and sit back in my chair. It takes only seconds to think the thought that this post isn't about Woo, it's about exploring ways to organize belief and disbelief so that these natural enemies can get along. The alarm went off, I haven't thought of anything better, and I notice my curiosity feels suitably destroyed.
I seem to remember that in the distant naive past rationalists used to hope to disentangle actually working parts of mystical traditions from obviously worthless "woo" nonsense that they were enveloped in. Is it fair to say that, judging by this post, those hopes have been thoroughly dashed? It certainly looks like nobody ever gets far into untangling, they either dive into that stuff headlong, "woo" and all, or dismiss it altogether.
Probably people just changed the topic, because both sides got tired of trying to convince the other and failing. A similar thing happened previously with using drugs.
There are people in the rationalist community who believe that taking drugs or meditating have changed their lives profoundly, and there are also people who remain skeptical about it.
(I happen to be in the skeptical crowd on both issues.)
My n=1 case study: I have Crohn's disease and have been prescribed anti-depressants multiple times. Several years ago, my Crohn's symptoms and depression became crippling and I was hospitalized repeatedly. I was referred to a surgeon to have part of my intestine removed. My depression was pretty bad. I had previously dabbled in Woo, but never with any serious commitment. From this rock bottom state, I embraced Woo (meditation, tai chi, studying Eastern philosophy) and also made a significant career and location change. I managed to avoid surgery, I have not taken any prescription medication of any kind in the past seven years, my Crohn's symptoms have been very minimal during this time, and I'm feeling pretty good. While the career and location change undoubtedly helped as well, I am convinced that Woo has contributed substantially to my greatly improved physical and mental health.
I think I lean towards possibility 2 based on my experience. I suppose one could interpret my story as support for possibility 4 and Scott's assertion that "the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most." But I think this is an oversimplification. I certainly went all-in on Woo when I was in my sickest and most traumatized stage of my life. This is not unusual. But I find longstanding members of the various Woo communities I've engaged with to be the sanest, most emotionally and mentally stable, and most compassionate people I know. After all, the hero's journey requires descent into the underworld before emergence as a hero.
in my experience, meditation provides a very particular kind of stress, and the process of adaptation to that stress increases my capabilities in certain ways. by stress here i mean mentally challenging my mental inertia. certainly it's specific to the person, but i'd be surprised if controlling your environment in such a way as to provide particular stresses that you feel are helpful and that help you function or feel alive, whatever that is to you - i'd be surprised if that isn't something you do; and i'd be surprised that if your life changed to stop giving you that, that you'd remain vital and happy for very long.
Tentative theory: I've gotten a lot of good out of some kinds of woo, while starting out as being pretty numb.
On the other hand, even though I was numb, it seemed obvious to me that there was *something* in the mind/body/emotions connection.
Maybe woo of whatever kind works better for people who think some part of the premise is obviously true.
I gather Myers-Briggs doesn't get a lot of respect these days, but I think there's something to the Sensory/Intuitive distinction. Sensory people think that what they perceive is fundamental truth and iNtuitive people think that there's something more real within/beneath/behind/above what they perceive.
I think that's a false dichotomy, though. Personally I am quite aware of the limitations of perception (many of which are well-documented) and, as a result, some of the things I experience could be either real or not real – there's just no way of knowing. In practice I find that it doesn't really matter all that much. In quotable terms: perception is perception, everything else is just semantics.
It seems to me that “woo” is incredibly poorly defined and/or steel-manned here. An analysis that lumps together processes as different as Wim Hof and Internal Family Sustems (and as wildly different in their methodologies and goals) without defining the similarities is facially useless. To me, it seems like an old man shouting at the clouds.
Perhaps you're overgeneralizing when you say "emotions". Perhaps a certain set of emotions are stored as tensions in the body, and others aren't. It's definitely true that every "woo" practitioner I've encountered has overpromissed. but some of them seem to believe their promises. There are a lot of possible hypotheses that cover that, but a combination of marketing and believing what they hear themselves saying often seems to fit. So that's a "body oriented" feedback loop that they don't seem to be noticing.
FWIW, storing emotions in the body has Reichian echoes to me, and I think that he both had some valid insights, and also tended to believe what he heard himself saying. (Better evidence would be better, but since so much was officially suppressed it's not available.)
To me it SEEMS as if many of my emotions echo somewhere in my body (just where varies), but many of them don't seem to have that echo. Now the question is "Is this echo the long term memory of the emotion?". It could just be an related effect. Consider the itch of an insect bite. Is the itch the memory of that bite? A lot depends on the precise definition used. I've got a weak knee that I injured. Is that weakness the memory of that injury? Certainly traumatic events can cause injuries and associated strong emotions. Because of the nature of memory, one might expect them to reinforce each other.
I think the basic mistake is mind-body dualism. They are a unitary whole. You can't split them apart. The idea that you can do so is an illusion. You can't feel WITH you finger, it requires the finger, the neural connection, AND the processing of that sensation. A break anywhere along that chain causes malfunction. I expect that emotions act similarly. Memories have to be stored somewhere, but there's nothing that says all memories have to be stored in the same place. And sensations reinforce memories. Break the chain and the reinforcement disappears. But if you want to change things, a better choice is often to instead establish a wider link of alternative meanings for the emotion or tension. Perhaps this is what some forms of "woo" do for some kinds of emotion.
I definitely have low body-awareness, and that *does* come with problems. As an example, over the past 10 years I've been diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety disorders, and depression. I've lost three jobs. I recently went to a doctor who listened to my symptoms and immediately said "you have sleep apnea and you're tired. Do you feel tired?" "No," I answered, "but my wife mentioned I snore a lot." A sleep study showed that I was waking myself 60 times an hour from inability to breathe. A week into using a CPAP almost all of those "disorders" have resolved.
Better body awareness definitely would have identified the problem. And I can imagine that better body awareness coming from traditionally "woo" practices like meditation or body work. I was about to say it would not have "solved" the problem but actually a more active lifestyle leading to weight loss would in fact make me sleep better. Still, what fixed the problem wasn't body work, it was a doctor, and a medical device.
I'm not a big fan of various "woo" ideas, but I do think that American doctors and lifestyles de-emphasize body feedback in a way that's likely causing us to miss diagnostic data and treatment options. That might partially account for the worse health outcomes in the U.S.
I don't know if it counts as woo or not, but when I'm driving and the sleepiness descends on me, and I return to alertness by inducing some flow in the lesser chi circulation.
You are roping in stuff that is very new-age (cranial-sacral, etc.) with stuff that is totally substantial and physical (Alexander technique). Alexander technique is basically what you see LeBron James doing before games, where he isolates aspects of his movement and balance, to practice getting the parts of his body to move in sync in various ways. You might as well say that learning to ice skate doesn't "work". I mean, you might not be a more enlightened person once you learn to ice skate, but you'll sure be able to ice skate.
Re. "Buddhism teaches that life is suffering, and some Buddhist practitioners say that at sufficiently advanced levels of meditation, they realize they were suffering in hard-to-notice ways all their life, which they can then correct.":
If all life is suffering, and the objective of Buddhism is to free oneself from that suffering, then people who are dissociated from bodily experience (like the traumatized who can't tell when they're being massaged) are the most-enlightened of people, and becoming like them should be the objective of Buddhism.
Huh, I'm a little surprised to see Alexander Technique both 1) listed as woo and 2) something you got 0 results from. (Unless you didn't actually try it and just thought of it as part of a 'bodywork' category, which makes sense to me.)
[I think it will often be the case that someone has already got the basics of what AT is trying to teach, and so both they and the teacher should go "yeah, you're fine"; situations where the AT teacher is like "yikes" and does an adjustment and then the person goes "eh this is the same" seem super surprising to me / likely to require immense dissociation.]
I wonder if in the history of woo, it has ever happened that you go to a woo practitioner, have them check you out, and it turns out that in fact you're fine and don't need any kind of treatment.
If it does happen, that's probably a sign that even if they're not factually correct they're at least serious-minded.
That misunderstands the nature of at least some of the activities mentioned. If you go to a gym coach, they won't turn you away, likewise when learning one of these other skills.
Just one data point, but as a rationalist/very much "head" centered person, somatic work and IFS have been enormously helpful to me.
For example, I fully buy the idea that all thoughts with emotional valence have a corresponding sensation in one's body (may not be true for everyone!) and learning to notice and interact with that sensation is a useful skill. As I've gotten more skilled at noticing, often I'll see that bodily sensations arise first and then thoughts come after, and by catching the bodily sensations before the arising of the corresponding thoughts I can often halt the process and let it dissipate, instead of becoming a story that my mind is stuck in.
I don’t understand the confusion. I don’t know anyone who is baffled if I say something like:
“I can’t eat before a big talk because I’m so anxious.”
That is, most people are familiar with nausea, a bodily sensation, coming from an emotion. If I am angry, I have the desire to reflexively ball my fists, if I am happy, I reflexively smile. Why? This is not the result of top down control, again there is some low level signal in the body driving this (for me, it feels like a tension that is relieved in the reflex, but it is very very subtle, unlike anxious nausea).
We have words like heartache to describe serious grief. Do people think this is metaphoric? I have felt it as real tension and anguish almost bordering physical pain, and in the chest and left arm. I can’t be the only one, right?
This doesn’t need to be a woo claim. Emotions having a realization in the body seems like something many people are familiar with. A healthy woman I know had a breakup and she said it felt like she was having a heart attack. Is she secretly traumatized? Disordered?
+1, anxiety-induced nausea was a big problem for me in the past. Even though I knew it was anxiety-induced, I didn't know how to break the loop until much later.
Wooers shouldn't say "rationalist" when they mean "empiricist". Woo is such a good case study for clarifying the difference between the two, that I hate to see it ruined by using them exactly backwards.
"Rationalist" does NOT mean one who thinks scientifically and wants tangible evidence. That's "empiricist", which is the opposite of "rationalist". A rationalist is one who believes we can prove things about reality in the same way we prove theories in geometry, and have the same absolute certainty in our conclusions. Rationalists believe that scientific experiments are useless because the senses are deceiving, and the only source of knowledge is our own intuition, plus logical deduction.
Theology is rational; science is empirical. Scientists need to understand this, because the religious and post-modernist attacks on science, which have done so much harm in the past 60 years, all work by assuming that science is rational, which theologians and post-modernists justify by pointing out that scientists (who don't know any better) keep /saying/ science is rational.
Woo clarifies the difference because what distinguishes "woo" from medicine is that woo relies entirely on private phenomenology.
Back in the 18th century, Kant gobsmacked rationalists by convincing them that the empiricists were right in saying we can never reach absolute truth, nor penetrate to the essences of things (the "noumena" or "ding an sich"), because our minds grasp only phenomena (qualia, feelings, sensations). The rationalists spent the next 140 or so years trying to find ways around Kant. One of these ways is phenomenology, which, as near as I can tell, says that phenomena /are/ noumena, or that we should pretend they are. That is, human reality is built entirely from phenomena, so you can forget about the noumena, which aren't part of our reality, and reconstruct the rationalist geometricization of your reality by taking your own personal perceptions as the rock-bottom axioms and facts of your logic. Everyone has their own personal truths and their own personal reality, all just as valid as anyone else's.
Psychology became a science late because it's phenomenological: it wants to talk about feelings, which aren't directly observable by experimenters. We can, however, operationalize feelings, which means quantifying them by agreeing on a list of observable behaviors which we think correlate with those feelings. So you get a checklist of behaviors that correlate with depression, and measure how depressed someone is by counting how many times they do something on that list. You have empiricized the phenomenological.
But that's possible only because feelings are largely universal. We are pretty confident that when I say "I'm sad", I mean something pretty much the same as you do when you say it. Woo practices instead revolve around phenomenological descriptions with inscrutable meanings, like "empty your mind" or "feel your chakra". They haven't been operationalized, so we have no way of knowing whether you empty your mind the same way I do, or feel your chakra like I do. Until they can be, they're entirely rational, and not at all empirical.
Hm. Not sure if this post is being deliberately strawman-ish. Couple of thoughts:
"Woo" needs a much tighter definition. Yoga, tai chi, IFS , and chakra meditation do not seem like a coherent set. Based on an informal sample of dating profiles, I would estimate that roughly 100% of women living in a typical American city are into yoga. And that seems fine. It's a set of stretching and strength exercises. I don't practice yoga, but when I have done it in the past, I felt good afterwards, as I would expect after doing some mildly intense exercise for an hour. I've never done tai chi, but I would expect something similar. IFS is a therapeutic modality with some clinical research behind it. Taken literally, its premises seem pretty goofy to me, but taken as a guide to a structured form of introspection, it seems like it could be as useful as many other forms of therapy. Point being, this stuff seems like a far cry from crystal healing.
The idea that "woo" is good for everyone isn't as absurd as it's supposed to sound. Mild aerobic exercise like walking is good for (almost) everyone. Eating fresh vegetables is good for just about everyone. These practices aren't likely to transform your life, at least by themselves, and ditto for various forms of woo. But you don't need to posit that the woo-averse are broken human beings to accept that there might be some broad benefits to woo.
Finally, I think it's pretty much factually wrong to say that "really traumatized people" are the ones who are into woo. I find it pretty depressing how many seemingly functional people are into astrology. I know tons of happy, non-hippy dippy people who swear by the benefits of acupuncture. As mentioned, pretty much every woman I've ever met seems to harbor a secret desire to leave their career and become a yoga instructor. Woo is pretty much omnipresent, at least in the sloppy definition used here.
A silly example of "causation vs. treatment" that comes up in my own life is the observation that healthy people something like 7-8 hours per day, while unhealthy people sleep less or more. Sometimes you see articles saying that if you want to stay healthy, then, you shouldn't sleep more than 8 hours a day. To me there's an obvious possibility that sicklier people require more sleep!
This is an incredibly frustrating article because it’s based on a derogatory term that you don’t attempt to define very well.
I think that you’re almost exclusively talking about embodiment practices, but it’s hard to tell.
And I find the comments section to be doubly frustrating because people are attempting to judge and dismiss a whole range of disparate practices based on lumping them into a bucket based on a term that is intended to do just that.
In the process a lot of talking past each other is happening… maybe that’s just normal. I don’t tend to venture down here very often.
Woo is placebo so it sort of works for some things, especially if you believe in it, so it wouldn't work as well for Scott or I who are non-believers.
Doctors have been around for millennia but medicine started working in a modern sense only in the last 150 years. why did patients kept paying them if they provided no benefit?
The roots go even deeper with shamans and other people that we would call spiritual healers. It is believed by some historians that the Venus statues of prehistoric Europe had a healing function for giving birth. The oldest are about 40 000 years old.
People have been doing woo in basically in all cultures that we know off so it must provide some benefit and given the variety of practices the positive result is due to the healing ritual itself not a particular practice.
Not a woo responder and have made a good faith effort at some of it. If this is woo at all, I do find there’s something about the act of being totally focused on something you do with your body that helps you keep your mind healthy and happy. However, the most non-woo example I have of that is doing cuts on my mitre or table saw. When I do all day I feel like a lot of the sort of existential milieu “what does it all mean, really, when you think about it?” just evaporates. I hear racing cars is the same.
I think fundamentally we’re minds in conversations with our bodies which are in conversation with the reality around us and the more you get yourself in that feedback loop the better. That’s the thing we evolved to do. When I have to rip a sheet of plywood or something my mind and body are totally focused on making sure I keep the blade on the chalk line.
I have a friend who's a big woo fan, but also super rationalist and doesn't *actually* believe in anything woo (but he suspends disbelief). He's special in that he:
1. Is entirely unjudgemental. He's not 'triggered' by irrationality or nonsense, he finds it quite funny and interesting.
2. Is aesthetically really into all the incense, faux Indian music, imagery, chanting etc.
3. Has the balls to go to these events and say with full confidence: "No, I don't believe any of it, but I just love the feeling and the aesthetics." And people are cool with that. Weirdly, some of the woo people actually don't believe that he doesn't believe in it.
He's a really mentally healthy guy, gets some pretty deep experiences, as well as loads of superficial aesthetic enjoyment. When I've attended events with him, I 100% feel like the defective one for having intrusive thoughts such as: "this is bullshit, how can anyone believe that!" and failing to absorb the positive spiritual vibes.
An acquaintance of mine is part of an odd "cultural-only" Christian "church" where they *explicitly* don't believe in God or Christ but do the rites and everything anyway because they believe it's good for you socially and psychologically.
(Of course, the only odd thing about this is that it's explicit - plenty of churchgoers and even priests don't particularly believe either, but they have to shut up about it.)
I have a lot of opinions on this, having let a bunch of nominally-"woo" practices into my life in the past couple of years. I should say that experience has been that there is nothing magical about it, irrational people layer that on top to make what they're doing feel important, but, that the embodied emotions *feel* like we imagine magic feeling.
My model is pretty different and IMO more plausible than the ones you write about here, I think there are some unjustified assumptions in yours.
First my objections:
To (1)—I don't think the claim is that woo is "great", but moreso that it feels extremely good. However, it is likely that pursuing it comes at the cost of losing access, at least temporarily, to the full rational capability of the mind, basically because your awareness is elsewhere. I can't seem to play chess right now, but if I go play a ton of chess it will probably come back.
To (2), that woo is good for different people, everyone's OK—"This seems like the opposite complaint as the woo people" presumes that "right" is either "processing emotions in the mind", or vice versa. Not so. The better model is: that "right" is "the mind receives emotions clearly from the body and processes them".
This can fail either if the mind can't process them, or it can't receive them. If you aren't receiving emotions clearly from the body (because of dissociation, tension, blockage by trauma etc), they arrive instead as vague hopeless confusing impressions. Bodywork practices make these signals *clearer*—which in the short-term makes them WORSE, and more intense.
It sounds like the earlier psychotherapists, in this model, were doing something a little woo-like, trying to connect to suppressed emotions that were there but were confusing, but they didn't describe it in terms of the body, so it doesn't really pattern-match to the same thing.
You slip in "People who process [in the mind]... might benefit from ... cognitive therapy": CBT, in this model, teaches the other part—responsibly processing the emotions you receive. It will be very hard if you are not receiving clear signals. But CBT seems (vague impression) to be most immediately effective for people who have clear and strongly-felt emotions but no idea how to responsibly think through them—thinking about feelings, for them, is an immediate win. (CBT-style processing doesn't work for me at all when my feelings are blocked in my body.)
"woo practitioners considering their treatment a success when they shift people back towards more bodily processing"—in my experience, not having access to emotions in the body is deeply confusing, disconnected, and painful (if there is pain there.) For the dissociated, woo is clarifying. For the already-embodied, woo is *deeply pleasurable* and feels *meaningful*, significant—feels religious.
On theory (3), treats a specific defect: "[normal people] process emotions in their minds, where emotions belong." vs "shunting to the body... this is a non-normative and defective state". See above, this is not the model, rather, "normal"—healthy—people process in the minds but with full access to the emotion from the body, as opposed to little/no access.
"A correctly-running body part usually feels like nothing"—not so, at least for muscles—a correctly running muscle glows with energy and vitality, is a joy to get to use and wants to be used all the time, like a child running around, for no reason but the joy of it. This is accessible to adults through bodywork. And the lungs, correctly used, feel like breathing divine mana.
The "U-shaped curve"—sounds basically right. Very healthy people—fit, good posture, visibly healthy, glowing—don't seem to "need" woo, although it is very enjoyable for them. They have ready access to their emotions. Kids have ready access but are immature and their emotions are too large and harmful. If you mature without closing that access to the emotions—to the "bodymind"—your emotions remain large and significant but can be wielded responsibly.
If you do not have good access to the body, probably because it's holding a ton of pain, or you spend all day at a computer—then emotions are confusing and vague and everything seems to hurt. The immediate "problem" that your body wants to fix is not "I'm not fit", it's "I can't feel my body", so it's drawn to things that immediately let you feel your body—bodywork, weed.
On theory 4:
* "whooshes of energy will happen in an exciting pattern" —no, they're deeply pleasurable feelings.
* re sex scandals—the optimal amount of thinking is nonzero. Adults who are *fully* in their body are potentially—I expect, if this is even possible—animalistic and dangerous, with the responsibility of a child, in a body that the world sees as an adult.
Re "messed-up, traumatized people"... "Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors?" Here is a more specific theory:
* The traumatized mind is wounded and wants to heal. It will naturally try to convalesce—to sink into depression, or to seek ritual practices and the presence of healers, or things that point to healing, like insight into the source of the pain—receiving this insight can be healing itself, e.g. the Sarno Amazon review anecdote. Convalescing behaviors, and bodily practices that expose emotion, are trying to fix the problem—but the body does not necessarily know the best way to be fixed. (I have a chronic hip problem and my body mostly wants to lay around and draw my attention to the pain and try to untangle the clump in my IT band, not *see a PT*.)
* The self demands to be seen, to be differentiated, have an identity, feel belonging, to feel connected, to feel embodied in space with other bodies—"wants" in that it is painful not to. If your confidence is high, your self happily inhabits your body, and feels connected and present with other bodies. If it's not, your "self" hides, peeks out—acts of self-expression assert its desire to be seen anyway. You could call them "coping" but they're not *trying* to fix the problem, they're trying to *exist anyway*. They are not morally bad or good or working or not working. But they might not have been how you expressed yourself if you were perfectly healthy.
* Addictive behavior, seeking dopamine hits, is fully just "coping", sort of. It says: I don't feel like I have the safety to address to my emotions now, to heal—there are too many responsibilities. I can't have any long-term goals, I don't know what I want, because the emotion of deep resonance that ratifies decisions is one that is felt in the body ("gut feeling"), and I'm cut off from that, or because I cannot work through all the feelings I have, they're too overwhelming, I don't have any strongly-held beliefs to orient with, so the only option is to distract myself. Instead I'm going to go in circles and *wait*, hoping fate will intervene, or somebody will see that I'm suffering and engage with it and help me heal.
On days when I'm feeling highly connected to my body I can seem to see in other people what they are paying attention to—the sort of shape of their "proprioceptive body", which appears kind of subtly superimposed over their actual body. Kind of how if you watch somebody walking from far away, you can kind of get a vague sense of what kind of person they are from their gait, or read confidence off posture, or read a personality off of facial expressions.
(There's a tweet out there that says "I hate the tiktok-therapist face", with a bunch of examples—all pulling their faces into certain shapes to "appear trustworthy" but not actually *being* trustworthy, instead needing to be seen as wise.) Pain in particular is very visible.
The rationalist seems to have all their attention on a huge invisible cathedral of knowledge in front of and above their head. They look up at it a lot to find things. It feels like, talking to intensely-rational people, that they are extremely far away from me, I can't even see them. But they don't seem to be in pain.
There's another tweet (I feel insufferable..) that has been getting a lot of attention the last few days, https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1662995686819004417 "The majority of human beings cannot fully comprehend a statement that has a conditional as a key part of its meaning.". Most of the replies say: yeah because this is weird. Using a strict logical conditional like programming is an unnatural thing to do, because that's not how human communication works. IMO, in fact, it is *painful* to be that logical talking to a person, because you are refusing to "mirror", refusing to connect.
"But overall it’s left me feeling grateful that whatever “skills” predispose one to bodywork seem to have passed me by..."—it does seem to be trauma, and low self-esteem. The confident rationalist (perhaps because he has lots of interesting people to talk to and a highly successful blog) has no reason to try to rebuild! Confidence—particularly as ratified by "being a respected member of a community you respect"—seems to validate anything, and the lack of it leaves one wanting to search for identity elsewhere. I never really rooted in the STEM world, so I have wandered off, and found that to truly resonate with *anything* I need to cultivate the emotional body where resonance would be felt.
Also, fyi, chakras are just something you can feel if you connect to the body. It seems to be the case that different emotions are localized to different parts of the spine. The feeling of love radiating from your heart and flowing through your whole body is the best thing I've ever felt, basically like meditation-induced heroin. But the point of it is not the pleasure—indeed, I haven't once felt a desire to access it for pleasure. The point is the *clarity*. That emotion is always there, telling you who you love and what you enjoy and alerting you when you are being selfish. But feeling it clearly gives is like seeing the matrix of your own nature—you get to *know* rather than haphazardly guess, what will fulfill you.
Couple more things because if I'm going to dump my worldview here I might as well dump a lot of it.
> irrational people layer [magical language] on [woo] to make what they're doing feel important
A belief system to which all of this is a corollary is that, foundationally, emotions are real, and anything that rejects this or suppresses emotions is harmful. Pain goes unhealed, and healing is good.
But, different emotions contradict each other, so the mind gets involved to responsibly sort them out and reconcile them to reality by understanding the consequences of actions (if I get angry will it help? will I just hurt myself?) The pathologically-woo person is under-indexing on rational thought, but still wants to explain things, so they reach for magical causes. Unfortunately they probably end up hurting themselves, because most people won't listen to their magical explanations, and because trying to justify emotions on a basis of magic is actually a denial of the foundational truth, that the emotions are real in themself.
And, this is all pretty important for treating mental illness. A lot of people seem to have a ton of fear that lives in their body all the time, but they can't feel it. It comes out at times of stress as a panic disorder, but it was actually always there. Body-connection will give them access to the ambient fear, which will *tell them what they need to be paying attention to*. A therapy that just tries to address the panic in a vacuum is missing this entirely and will probably progress very slowly, grasping onto fleeting glimpses of the underlying emotion, vs one that first targets the body directly to make the full feeling accessible.
>Buddhism teaches that life is suffering, and some Buddhist practitioners say that at sufficiently advanced levels of meditation, they realize they were suffering in hard-to-notice ways all their life, which they can then correct. This is a pretty crazy claim, but I take it seriously enough not to find “I feel fine so there’s no room for improvement” a complete knockdown argument against this.
I grew up in Utah and did a lot of camping, skiing, etc. Basically sometimes you will be very very cold and I learned that it basically does not matter. There is a huge space between feeling cold and getting hypothermia. Living in Boston, I would bike through the winter, snow or shine. I always planned for ten minutes of pain at the beginning before warming up, but found it easy to ignore. Just don't think about it!
It wasn't until my mid-twenties when I was high and walking outside that I realized that I was in fact cold all the time wearing my sports coats that were too thin unless I was moving. This is an example of a connection lowering quality of life. Once I took the feeling more seriously I was less likely to go play sports if it was cold outside.
"Bodywork" is a bad term to apply here because it gets used, at least in my experience, to describe a range of things from Reiki (pure woo) to massage (some forms are clearly clinically useful but there's also plenty of woo in the field) to PNF stretching (not woo).
The regions most impacted are the ones around memory and executive control, and it seems likely it has a protective impact. However, the set of folks actually doing focused meditation that consistently I'd say is a teensy tiny minuscule fraction of the woo folks.
(Then again, the overlap between woo-folks and the kind of anti-chemical people who still do cocaine seems uncommonly high to me, so I'm curious when you say that the folks into bodywork seem screwed up, how many are doing it rigorously vs just talking loudly about it a lot? I'm in a lot of hippie circles and folks tend to talk about the benefits of various practices but then not actually stick with them in practice)
I’m leaning towards option (3), though I’d phrase in a less essentializing way. That is, I’d interpret “defect” to be more of a contextual problem in one’s life situation than a fundamental flaw in one’s psychology. There are times in my life where the discipline or ritual of things like Wim Hof or spiritual yoga feel like they have made a big difference. Though, tbh, these times correlate with poorer mental health for me. When life is swell, my empiricist side will start to tell me that these things are a waste of time.
There's a lot of woo I like and trust, like auras, but it took me a long time to figure out the difference between that and the woo that drove me up a wall.
The difference (aside from things like preferring Chinese methods over Indian methods) is that I don't tolerate the New Thought style of intention creating reality. I mean, it's hard to even get people to agree on putting putting a dinner party, so why would I believe people's subconsciousness got together to make 9/11 happen?
Another commenter mentioned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose model is very useful here. He would say that seeing this as direct brain-body interactions or the brain gating sensations from the body is not the whole picture.
Rationalists know well that the brain is in large part a machine to make maps or representations or "models" of the world around itself, including spatial relationships, forces, other animals and people, etc.
Damasio argues that the brain spends a great deal of effort making "maps" of the body (specifically in areas like the periaqueductal gray and insular cortex). This map should be constantly updating; the brain is constantly simulating the body, in addition to receiving actual input from the body proper. One advantage is that this is much faster and more efficient than waiting for your body to send signals; it's a bit like a cache.
Different people's body-maps may have very different resolutions, and this leads directly to the signal:noise problems that Scott alludes to.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "a correctly functioning body part feels like nothing". To me, there are 2 parts to this kind of self-analysis.
1. Focusing in on a small part of experience (the body, a part of the body, sensations)
2. Understanding your own attention mechanism, turning it on itself.
Ideally, following this path leads to self-validation, loving yourself without the need for external rewards. But it can go off the rails. The people who get a lot out of the process treat it as an exercise, and part of a balanced life. People who clutch onto it and need it to provide meaning in their life can really screw themselves up. It's dangerous to tamper with your own attention/motivation loop.
I think you miss some complexity by categorizing so many possibilities as "psychosomatic." The term diminishes the common phenomenon of stubborn physical diseases emerging from thought patterns; generally healthy people tend to assume that if one's chronic stress (for example) led to mitochondrial energy dysfunction, all should be quickly repaired once the stress is dealt with properly. Modern medicine simply doesn't yet understand why sometimes a disease is irreversible even if it was triggered by mental processes (which are NEVER the sole etiology, as genetics and experience complete the unfortunate cocktail).
As for woo (which is short for woo woo), t'ai chi, for example, teaches practitioners to move their bodies through space in a state of balance. This is not primarily a "spiritual" education. It is a recognition that balance is impossible without "flow." Flow occurs in relationship to the everchanging OUTSIDE world (think of a musician or an athlete), so it is outside the purview of rational thought -- and it is certainly much more than just a whoosh of pleasant feelings. It is something your body can actually learn.
If you're relatively healthy, you can get by (with obvious limitations) relying primarily on cerebral consciousness, but imagine being weak and sick, so that all your interactions with the outside world take ten times the effort as someone who can put on a pair of socks mindlessly relying on muscles alone. Muscular movement is deprecated in t'ai chi because the more efficient way to move a body in motion is with balanced momentum, which requires a particular focusing of awareness. The result doesn't have to be a "cure" to constitute an effective disease management strategy marrying mind and body.
1. "I feel worse today than I did yesterday, and I know why. "
The reason is that this morning, I got hit by a bus.
I don't need science to explain this. You could say that, at some point in human history, or at some point as I was becoming sentient, someone did some "science" to connect the experience of feeling bad and the experience of being hit by a bus, but fundamentally, these kinds of immediately obvious connections between gross phenomena aren't the kind of things we need science to explain, though we might need science to fix our post-bus broken leg.
2. "I feel worse today than I did yesterday, and I don't know why."
The reason is that I was bitten by a mosquito and I contracted malaria. I went to the hospital, and they used science to diagnose me and give my the correct treatment.
Without science, there is absolutely no fucking way I could have made the connection between that tiny, to-me-insignificant experience of getting bitten by a mosquito, and feeling bad. The way science did this, roughly, was to compare millions of people who were feeling bad in a particular way (malaria symptoms) and experiences they had in common, (mosquito bites) and the solution that worked (mefloquine.) On my own, I would've been absolutely unable to separate the signal (mosquito bite) from the noise (everything else that happened to me that day), never mind try every possible solution on earth until I found one that worked. But over the course of years, and combing through millions of individual human experiences, science did, and that's why science is GREAT.
3. "I feel worse than yesterday, and I don't know why."
I went to the hospital, and they ran a bunch of tests, and at the end they were like, "We don't know why either, sorry, but you could try this anti-depressant" so I left and I took the anti-depressant for a while but it didn't make any difference so I stopped. And so then, it was just me and the millions of experiences that make up my days - [eating a fried egg] [eating a salad] [sleeping 10 hours] [playing video games] [getting bitten by a mosquito] [going to yoga] [talking to my friend Zelda]. And slowly, over time, I started noticing some rough correlations between things I did and feeling better and other things and feeling worse, so I started tacking towards those things that resulted in good feelings [yoga] [salads] [Zelda] and away from others. I didn't know why yoga and salads, worked; they just did, and I felt a little better, but not much.
And one day after [yoga], while I was talking to [Zelda] over my [salad], I was telling [Zelda] about the particular way I felt bad, and correlations I'd noticed, and she was like, I have a lot of the same symptoms as you, and you know what helped for me? [Bottled Woo]. So I thought, why not, and I ordered at $30 bottle of it on the internet and I drank it, and it didn't help.
But when I told [Zelda] that, she said, No, [Bottled Woo] only helps if you [fast] and you [meditate] and you stand in a [posture] and [pray] while you drink it, and I tried it [meditation] + [posture} + [prayer] + [Bottled Woo] and I felt a little better, better than I did with just [yoga] and [salads] and [Zelda] but not THAT much better. And I told Zelda that, and she said, oh, that's weird, it usually helps me a ton, why don't you come over and do it with me, and I went to her house and we did the things and I felt AMAZING, better than I ever had, and my problems didn't come back; in fact, I felt even better than I had before all these problems started, and I was really happy because I found a solution that worked.
And then I ran into a scientist I met at the hospital and he was like, how are you feeling, and I said, AMAZING, and he said, Oh great, what did you do? and it was pretty complicated to give him the whole answer so I said [Bottled Woo] and he was like, no, that's pseudoscientific nonsense there's absolutely no way that worked.
And I'm like, but it did, though. And he's like, no, you're wrong [Bottled Woo] has been scientifically proven to do nothing in double-blind lab tests. And I'm like BUT I'M BETTER LOOK AT ME and he shows me all the controlled studies that show that [Bottled Woo] is absolutely useless, and I said, "Oh yeah, I thought that too at first, but you have to [meditate] and [fast] and stand in [posture] and [pray], it's a whole thing."
And he was like THOSE ARE CONFOUNDING FACTORS YOU ARE NOT DOING SCIENCE RIGHT and I was like, I'm not trying to do science I'm just trying to feel better, which I do, so checkmate, buster. He said, okay, well, try doing all the things you're doing but stop drinking {Bottled Woo] and see what happens. And I was like, why would I mess with perfection, I'm better, so changing anything seems risky. But I felt bad for the scientist, so I did...and on some days without [Bottled Woo] I felt the same, and on some days I felt a little worse, and maybe it was all just noise but I really, really didn't want to mess up whatever had caused me to feel amazing, so I went back to drinking it and it definitely didn't hurt.
And then I ran into the scientist again and I tried to duck behind the corner so he wouldn't see me, but he grabbed me by the collar and was like "ARE YOU STILL DRINKING BOTTLED WOO?!" and I was like yeah, and he was like, look, if you're feeling better, that's an amazing miracle, I'm not even mad at you for being bad at science, come be a part of my experiment, maybe it's [Bottled Woo] in combination with some other thing, and maybe we can figure it out and help some people. So I went to the lab and helped the scientist put together the experiment, and separated out as many confounding factors as we could -- [Bottled Woo] [Posture] [Meditation] [Fasting] [Salads] [Yoga] and obviously 99% of the way they were able to replicate my experience in the lab was extremely mediocre, for example, the only salad they could afford to give people was a cruddy one from the cafeteria and the yoga teacher they picked was kind of a ding-dong as opposed to mine who is the best, but the scientist did the best he could.
And I'm a woman, and I'm overweight, and I have a college education, so the subjects they picked for the study were also overweight, college educated women, because that's what the scientist thought that was most relevant about me, as opposed to the fact that I grew up in Pittsburgh, and broke my leg when I was seven, and live on the thirteenth floor of an apartment building, and am Jewish, and was bullied as a child, but I guess they had to start somewhere; and they tried to pick people who felt bad in roughly the same way as I did, which in some ways was obvious but in others they weren't, for example, they let in one woman whose husband had just died, and another lady who came to the experiment straight off of back-to-back shifts at McDonald's, and it seemed to me that those ladies maybe had different problems than I did but I'm not a scientist and even I didn't know what my problem was, exactly, so I just let it go.
Anyway, they ran the experiment, and four ladies got a lot better but the other 96 didn't, and I pointed to the four ladies who'd gotten better, and I was like, "See! It works!" and the scientist was like, wow, you are really bad at science, so I quit the experiment and me and those four ladies went over to Zelda's house and did the whole thing her way, and our lives got so, so much better, like amazingly better than they had ever been before, and when people saw us and wanted to know what we'd done, we told them, and some of us tried it, and it didn't work for them, so they left, and others tried it, and it did work for them, and they stayed.
And meanwhile the scientist kept toiling away in his lab and I kept living my life, and one day he called me and he said, "Listen, I've been thinking, what if the actual magic ingredient is your relationship with Zelda; I've been trying to come up with studies that isolate "Friendship" or "Connection," or "Faith in a Guru" as a confounding factor, but it's not working; I'm not sure what it's missing." And I was like, "Yeah, it's true, the particular constellation of qualities that make Zelda, Zelda are utterly unique anywhere on earth; there is only one of her, so really would be difficult to replicate the experience of knowing her in a lab." And he said, "Well, then, what good is that to anyone?" and I was like, "Ummmm...I'm not sure how to answer that question" and he said, "Here's an idea; what if we run an experiment of one, and you cut Zelda out of your life, and we see if you feel better or worse, it's not the best design but maybe it will do." So I hung up on him and we never spoke again.
And then, many years later, I died, and Zelda died, and so did the scientist, and Zelda's daughter continued this thing called THE ZELDA MOVEMENT that got some traction for a while then petered out, and then one hundred years later, after a massive amount of SCIENCE, a scientist working in the original scientist's lab discovered that Zelda's house was located over a mineral deposit that had some healing effect on the extreme subtle and rare blood disorder that hadn't even been discovered yet, but which genetic testing of their descendants revealed that 40% of the people in her original cult had had! So that's crazy. Score one for science. A funny thing is, though, I didn't have that disorder! To this day, the reason I got better remains unknown. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe Zelda really was unique.
Science doesn't work on the level of the individual. If you are feeling bad, you should go to a hospital, because that's where they keep most of the non-obvious solutions to common problems. If you're still feeling bad after that, in between ["science says this will kill you"] and ["Science says this will absolutely, 100% heal you] is the vast majority of human experience. A perfectly reasonable thing to do, at that point, is look around for people who are roughly like you, and are having roughly the same problem as you are, and do what they're doing. If it helps, keeping doing it. If it doesn't, stop.
If you ask those people why the thing they're doing works, and the answer they give you is garbled nonsense, don't worry about it. Most people don't know why anything they do works, because most people aren't scientists, and there are lots of things scientists do (like prescribe anti-depressants!) without knowing how they work, either. When it comes to feeling better, knowing why is overrated. A placebo effect is meaningfully indistinguishable from a 'real' drug, if the only person you're trying to heal is you.
Now, if somebody comes along and says, I *definitely* have an answer to this problem, science is lying and trying to hide it from you and I can give it to you along with some secret knowledge for the low-low price of $1,000" they're probably a charlatan and you shouldn't pay them. We need science to know with any certainty why anything works, and science can rule out bad explanations for why things work better than it can do almost anything else. But we *don't* need to know why things work to use them. If you're feeling bad, and yet you limit everything you're willing to try in your life to things that science has already found an explanation for, then the person who is being irrational is you.
I feel similarly about believing in deities. I tried for many years but couldn't suspend my disbelief enough. I have envied the religious for that ability, and I do think I'm missing out on one way that people find meaning in and cope with life, but I don't think that makes me defective. It's a normal human variation that doesn't preclude me from being well and fulfilled.
Dan Harris had nervous breakdowns while performing. It took serious work with meditation for him to figure out that he had a drinking problem.
I'd mistakenly attributed this to Sam Harris, a completely different person.
This is a shorter version of my comment. In my efforts to edit it, I somehow deleted the comment and the replies to it.
I was able to recover the replies from email notifications.
Stephen Klunk: "Are you thinking of Dan Harris? I have never heard any of this about Sam Harris, and I’ve been following him for a long time."
Yes, thank you very much. I've been wrong about that for a while.
Deiseach, replying to my being surprised Dan Harris had so much trouble figuring out he had a drinking problem: "In my limited experience, when people drink too much but are functional/not yet at the stage of alcoholism, they will rationalise it all away. "I'm a social drinker, therefore I don't have a problem/I have a drink or two after work to unwind, that's not excessive/I've never been blackout drunk/Sure, I like to have some fun and get a buzz on, what's wrong with that?" and so on. The person we can lie to best is our self. And I mean me in that as well. Other people can see there is a problem, but we deny it until slapped in the face with it. Maybe what meditation did for him was strip away all the "I only/I'm not/I don't" layers of excuses and made him see the raw reality of what he was doing."
I've tried to post this several times and it hasn't posted. I'll delete the extras if they show up.
You can have a name like mine which is rare enough that a lot of people have trouble spelling or remembering it, or you can have a name like Harris and get confused with other people.
Can we define "woo" here? "Bodywork" - so, like, yoga? Stretches? Exercise and flexibility is generally good for people, both mentally and physically.
When I hear "woo" I generally think of astrology, crystals, auras, vaginal eggs that you pay $500 to Gwyneth Paltrow for the privilege, etc... What exactly are we referring to here? Can Scott give some examples?
Yuck. I find all of these framings (1-4) tendentious, beginning with the choice to call this "woo."
I would encourage folks to dig into the work of David Spiegel [1] at Stanford Medical School on hypnosis. One of the tools he works with is the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, which measures just what it says on the tin. The bottom line: there is natural variation around these things, and there's nothing normative about it. It's not that one level of susceptibility is "normal" and another "defective" or anything like that.
Likewise, the fact that some people take to various bodywork practices more than others strikes me as no more strange or in need of special explanation than that the fact that some people take to long-distance running more than others. There might have been an interesting piece to write on this topic, but the normative talk is really getting in the way.
WOO is a successful social/political structure akin to the Medieval Church. The practitioners have a decent living, and the patients have a treatment that usually keeps them from becoming seriously anti social.
Why question its utility? Neurosis is a companion of Alienation which is an integral aspect of Modernity.
Modernity itself was questioned in the 19th century, resulting in the roots of WOO.
To be sure, the Developing World doesn't seem to have much time for it: too busy building High Speed Rail and elevating billions of people out of subsitence living.
The specific Western form of hippie-adjacent woo is probably rarer in the developing world, but believing in all kinds of different nonsense is rampant and very likely _far_ exceeds what we see in the West.
Regarding Possibility 1, and in particular the writings of Bessel van der Kolk, this relates to the message I get from the story of Princess and the Pea: Being highly sensitive to discomfort caused by a real "thing", no matter how subtle, is actually good. I suspect it's been observed for a long time, and certainly matches my personal anecdotal experience, that people who don't seem to be aware that their body is functioning suboptimally or their environment is suboptimal have worse lives. On the surface it would appear to be a disadvantage to be so easily irritated by feelings in your body, but it might pay off if those feelings are genuinely indicative of a health issue or something that can be fixed. For example, if someone's breathing is suboptimal (maybe they have dust mite allergies and sleep in a bed of them) or their joints are stressed by being obese, but they can easily put up with it because they're barely aware of it.
I suspect a large proportion of woo proponents are highly sensitive in this way, but either their sensitivities are misfiring (i.e. they feel bodily feelings that are decoupled from genuine problems, and therefore other solutions don't work any better) or they simply misattribute the causes of these sensitivities. But I do think it's possible some proportion have accurate sensitivities for which there just aren't any good scientific solutions to, and some woo techniques actually do help here.
I have lots of tattoos, dye my hair, sometimes do drugs for fun, but am mentally/physically quite healthy and don’t practice woo. No trauma here. I’m curious if there’s actually a correlation show between trauma and tattoo/hair color? I can believe drug use for sure but probably not occasional recreational use.
My explanation is a simple "woo is often the only thing bringing some of these people out of their house to join in recreational activity with other people and build community out of shared belief/practice," of course that's going to be healthy and make people feel better and more well. If you don't feel like it works, it's probably for the same reason a non-sports fan won't get a lot out of going to a baseball game.
2. Social norms invariably pathologize some normalcies and normalize other pathologies
3. Every treatment helps some people with certain conditions (even if just placebo)
4. Many treatments can help most people in the right context
5. In the wrong context, every treatment will be ineffective.
6. In the most wrong context, every treatment can be harmful
7. The generous approach is to fit the treatment to the person, not vice versa.
8. That is surprisingly difficult to do, because the emotional investment necessary to believe "this treatment can help people" creates a sunk cost that is difficult to ignore
9. This effect is worse if "people like me" benefit from the treatment, because then identity is added to the sunk costs
Tai chi (aka taijquan) is an interesting case because the vast majority of western teachers of it are just purveying woo along with light calisthenics, but if you're lucky enough to study with Chinese experts they are much more down to earth about it. My teacher says westerners are stupid for separating mind from body in the first place, before throwing me across the room.
A fifth possibility occurs to me (kinda like number 3 above, but not quite): Mentally and emotionally healthy people process emotions largely in their bodies, while traumatized-and-unrecovered people tend to repress them and block them out. But healthy people (including, I assume, Scott) don't get into woo because they don't need any kind of external aid or practice to get back in touch with their bodily emotional sense. It's already their default. In fact it's so natural to a healthy person that they don't even consciously think about it, and so paradoxically may not realize that that's what they're doing. It's only people who have an unhealthy disconnect from their bodily emotional sense who can notice this problem, and then find woo helpful as a treatment.
My perspective on this is as someone with some degree of childhood PTSD I've been working through, particularly in the last few years. I was never at a point where I couldn't tell what part of my body was being massaged. But as I've learned to pay more attention to my bodily sensations, I've definitely noticed that there's a strong correlation between negative mental states / thought patterns, and strong bodily emotional sensations; and that the more I bring my attention to the latter, the more both are alleviated. I haven't really gotten into any form of woo to accomplish this though; I practised breath-following meditation for some time but didn't find it very helpful. What's been most helpful has just been getting into the habit of *remembering to check* for bodily sensations.
While yoga might be 'woo' in the US, it's fairly normal in India, and I don't think that there are larger percentages of people with mental illnesses that practice it than the general population (I may be wrong...?). Still those people often report great benefit. So I'm not sure the last hypothesis holds.
Lol that's a good one. While this may seem nitpicky to those not from India, I'd be careful about confusing Tantra (a religion) with Yoga (more of a meditative practice).
Evidence for somatic obliviousness: I felt nothing special after my first Alexander Technique lesson and figured I had wasted money on the lesson. Then later that day I had lunch with a friend, and before I said anything about the lesson she told me that my shoulders looked completely different and asked what had happened. So I went for a second lesson with a different teacher, and felt something so unlike anything else I'd experienced that I went on to train as an AT teacher though I never made a career of it.
Like many other commenters here, I don't think AT fits in the same category as some of these other practices. What AT addresses is the interface between high level intention and low level motor control. Obviously you aren't consciously controlling individual bundles of muscle fiber when you move, there must be some higher level way in which desire is converted to movement, and it stands to reason that this is trainable. AT tries to teach you an effective language for your consciousness to work with your reflexes.
I would encourage you to try again with a different teacher, ideally one who isn't dabbling in mysticism or psychotherapy at the same time. Maybe find someone who trained in England instead of California.
"AT tries to teach you an effective language for your consciousness to work with your reflexes"
This is absolutely part of what Tai Chi does too: using visualisations to create biofeedback loops that enable you to retrain the way your body moves. These concepts are widely accepted in modern sports science and are not really "woo" at all in the predominant sense of the term. (No one's talking about emotions when we do this!)
There is a Taiji saying that I think captures this well by analogy to a general directing an army. Roughly "the mind is the commander, the qi is the flag, and the waist is the banner". Unfortunately "qi" means a lot of different things in Chinese philosophy, and in martial arts it often gets identified as some sort of physical energy instead of a subjective internal construct. In this regard, Alexander Technique benefits from having a more modern origin.
The other difference is that AT is taught using very simple everyday movements, one on one with hands on feedback. A skilled Alexander teacher can evoke an experience in a half hour where a Taiji student is likely to flail around for years imitating external forms and never learn anything about walking and talking.
"Unfortunately "qi" means a lot of different things in Chinese philosophy, and in martial arts it often gets identified as some sort of physical energy instead of a subjective internal construct"
Yes, this is a huge problem. Your average western woo Tai Chi or Kung Fu instructor will talk about qi as though it's the Force, but (ime) it's more like a useful umbrella concept to describe and train the ways (sometimes very surprising ways!) that physical forces can move through the body. (And good instruction absolutely includes hands-on feedback, as well as partner work.)
> The other difference is that AT is taught using very simple everyday movements, one on one with hands on feedback.
I think this is a big reason why children of martial arts instructors tend to be very good themselves. Put aside genetics and Secret Techniques; they simply have access to a level of instruction that isn't ,and cannot be, generally available.
Confuse at this definition of "woo": I thought it meant *definitely* supernatural stuff, implying supernatural beliefs of some kind, and that things like tarot reading would fall within the "woo" umbrella.
I realise you define your usage of the word, so I'm not saying you're unclear, it's just weird and jarring to me, like if you'd decided to up and use the word "magic" to talk about the yoga-tai-chi-meditation cluster. Is this common?
I don't think it has to be supernatural to count as woo. Everything that comes out of Gwyneth Paltrow's mouth is woo, but only some of it requires the supernatural.
I also think a lot of the US 'hippie movement' turned a lot of practices into things they were not. For example, if you go to a new age yoga studio promising to 'relieve the stress of intergenerational trauma' (something I saw the other day) and then find that it doesn't do what was promised, you shouldn't be too surprised.
I think the government ought to subsidize cigarettes for schizophrenics. It sounds like a joke, but they have hard enough lives. I genuinely think that it's the right thing to do.
I used to be insensitive to body-focused attention, and identify with the "can't imagine any relevant information there" tweet.
A recent meditation retreat I went on was more body focused than the type of meditation I usually do (retreat included lots of body scans and walking meditation, where you pay attention to the feeling of your feet on the ground etc). At first I was annoyed because that felt like a waste of time, but after 3 days of intensive practice I got onboard. I found moving my awareness down into my body (if that makes sense) super stabilizing -- after all, the head is a pretty chaotic place to be, with your attention caught up in discursive thinking and shifting emotions. The body is much more stable... Again though, it took some practice to really believe this, but is empirically testable (although maybe I confounded myself just by testing, my big gripe with self-experimentation).
> Maybe these are just two different ways of processing things
I think they are in fact two different things entirely. One is about learning to notice something, and the other is about developing a “vocabulary “ to report on what they notice.
The processing might be very physical (dance, sport, fighting, singing, sex etc)[all the above sound good to me], or very verbal (Jane Austin, Herman Melville, Charles Bukowski ( couldn’t resist seeing those three in the same paragraph…))
And it could be a Zen Master processing all their emotions in real time while remaining perfectly still. No matter how you process, though, first you need to notice.
In the bigger picture, I think a hell of a lot of people grow up feeling uneasy, in a broad sense of that word; anxious, uncertain, confused by what the big people are doing. The obvious strategy to deal with this if you don’t have, a lot of priors is disassociation. The eventual grown-up is still uneasy, but it’s sort of vague and not really related to anything. Cosmic hum…kind of killing the buzz, but how would you know? You were trained not to notice.
Slightly gross but on-topic parenting anecdote: shortly after bringing my eldest home from the hospital, I went to change her and the moment the diaper was removed she projectile shat across the bathroom; I dodged almost in time. After that, I took to aiming her at the open toilet while removing the soiled diaper, which was quite effective.
Follow up research turned up some solid literature around this. Newborns are disinclined to soil themselves but are trained not to notice over the first month or two of life; noticing has to be trained back in during conventional potty training. FWIW, although they still required assistance and were far from perfect, both my kids were functionally done with diapers around 13 months because they *weren't* trained not to notice.
Human beings have to develop a relationship with their physical selves; the curse of The Fall if you will. We must cover our nakedness.
In practical terms (and this is my parenting story) it plays out like this:
My son (age 4~) is on a bicycle in Central Park and he miscalculates a turn or something, and he crashes and falls to the ground and starts wailing (you know the drill). I am on the ground holding him and trying to console him. He keeps screaming
“Why Papa!? Why did that happen?”
I have no fucking idea, and neither does he, there is just pain and shock and frustration and a deep sense of betrayal. It sucks.. There’s no way of reasoning out of this; it’s a squall on the sea- the weather changed. Out of nowhere a very well-meaning woman appears next to us (it’s Central Park after all) and offers us a cookie. To distract him.
This is my point…Distraction, dissociation, the replacement of of one need with another (cookies in this case).
I’m coming generally from the rationalist perspective.
I’m not sure if it makes sense to create the responder and non-responder distinction.
I think the core thing is how much you pay attention to the moment-to-moment operation of your body.
The body has responses to all sorts of stimuli in the environment. These can be low-level/physically close to the body in space and time (sympathetic nervous system spike from a loud sound in the environment) or high-level (sympathetic nervous system spike from thoughts about being able to pay bills at the end of the month and what happens if you can’t).
In both situations there is a response in the body. These bodily responses can be observed by the mind.
This fact can be useful when there are high-level negative thoughts (worry about the financial future) that don’t line up with reality (there’s enough money in the checking account). In that situation, the awareness of the feeling of the sympathetic nervous system being active can be enough to get out of thinking about worrying about the imagined situation and instead evaluate reality.
I think this is the skill that they’re referring to. Using bodily experience as a source of information about your mental state, then being able to use that information to correct mental course, if necessary.
My guess is that rationalists do an above average amount of the practices labeled "woo" here ("yoga, “bodywork”, tai chi, Alexander Technique, chakra meditation, Wim Hof, Internal Family Systems, somatic experiencing, some trauma therapies, etc.").
That is, the percentage of Western rationalists who would say that they've benefited from at least one of the things on this list is larger than the base rate in their countries.
There’s a Possibility 11 (or whatever number we’re at) which some commenters have pointed at but I’ll describe a little more. If one can be somewhat dissociated from one’s body, as van der Kolk describes, I want to take this a step further and say certain faculties or responses can become frozen to the point of being glaciated and that this is not always “bad.” There may be, um, psychological mutos in that ice and maybe the subconscious just is not interested in waking them yet. There might be some quantity of woo - in whatever units, woonits, sorry - that would have to be directed into that dissociation or blockage. It might take hours/days/months/years and then what you’d get would be months or years of flashbacks and assorted agonies while your system processed whatever Godzillas were in the ice. After you got it all cleaned up you’d find yourself feeling freer perhaps, and responding to woo. But generally people get dragged into those because they feel they simply must heal x in the present, and then the archaeological expedition reveals itself and the time frame for relief is - well, it takes time.
So it might be that someone is not “defective” or a “nonresponder” per se but rather diverting or dodging those energies, not letting go too much to prevent a mass thaw. Based on the little I know of Scott’s backstory I would say the odds of this configuration are nonzero. I did Alexander technique years ago to deal with some carpal tunnel syndrome issues and it helped a lot - and I would say feeling absolutely nothing different after a session or several would be atypical. I also use lots of other woo and appreciate it - and I would say after my own “thaw” I responded to it much more. But the thaw itself was painful and time-consuming. If someone is high functioning and well-adjusted, there isn’t that urgency, so they can take time and find a modality and course of treatment that might provide them something they actually want and then pay top dollar for a full course with a reputable practitioner and see what happens. When someone is in crisis there’s much more of the casting about in desperation for something to take the edge off. Body modification, hair modification, it can be a way to mark transformation or grieve loss. Telling a story of the possibility of change that involves beauty or self-empowerment. Not everyone wants that or would find it in hair or tattoos. But some do.
Anyway long story. People inevitably become interested in their frozen spots - some always choose to leave them alone, others eventually investigate - the investigation is up to the individual. Contemporary society does allow us to freeze and stay frozen in ways past civilizations couldn’t accommodate (I think). “Waking the Tiger” is interesting in patches and addresses these ideas.
>Contemporary society does allow us to freeze and stay frozen in ways past civilizations couldn’t accommodate (I think).
My impression of the past is that people used to be more actively encouraged to repress parts of themselves, lest they became unwilling to serve in the war/leave their husband/refused to work in the mines/whatever thing was personally horrific but allowed civilization to function.
Perhaps the civilization of, say, India was different, I don't really know anything about it. Or perhaps it was different for certain subsets of the population, anyway.
Am I misunderstanding what you're talking about with "freeze" here?
You’re right, I oversimplified. I think in some societies in the past at some times, yes, people were actively encouraged to repress parts of themselves and I think that still goes on. In Peter Levine’s book “Waking the Tiger” he observes that animals, which are in life-or-death situations regularly, don’t carry trauma the way many humans do - some animals will literally “shake it off” by shaking and moving when they survive a situation, and then they keep on with their lives, not developing trauma symptoms. It’s been a while since I read the actual book but IIRC that observation was a significant moment in the development of somatic experiencing therapy. Which I guess when done well leads people to release traumas, then leading to a decrease in symptoms. “My Grandmother’s Hands” by Resmaa Menakem is pretty much the only other somatic experiencing methodology book I’ve read, and he describes the way small-seeming practices such as humming and rocking can be culturally traditional elements of what we might call “coping skills” to reduce trauma stress load for individuals. IIRC he also describes some mourning and grief traditions as more conducive to getting all the stress out and leaving people with fewer symptoms afterwards. I think different cultures valued different balances of this - doing one’s duty to the family might involve a lot of repression, while still utilizing daily and ritual somatic stress-management behaviors to a much greater degree than contemporary suburban America typically would. I think regular intensive exercise makes it hard to maintain certain types of repression (this is a digression, but one reason I think US culture encourages weight gain is people don’t learn how to let go of minimal stress and it builds up, creating a wall they hit every time they try to exercise). Some people seem to use exercise to strengthen the repression though. But I think in general we don’t do basic somatic maintenance and so we can get quite a buildup of trauma. Especially in early years things can get baked in or frozen in to use the other metaphor, and it can be quite disruptive to the system to let go of those old frozen traumas or at least it entails significant reorganization. Someone intelligent and strong-minded might develop a very rigorous type of self-protection. Some of it individual, some of it culturally encouraged repression. I think there is a lot of flexibility here, I don’t have this all ironed out. What I did want to communicate to Scott & readers was that being desensitized or even seemingly resistant to woo might be sort of a temporary state, one that could be created for reasons and be serving a psychologically protective function. Not that he was going to sign up for some month-long meditation retreat and end up in psychosis or something. I think he has better instincts. But to point to the “borderline skills” as not necessarily bad either. Some would say that it’s a sign of serious repression in the culture if the only people reaching for what would be healthier somatic coping skills are people with severe trauma. I don’t want to say the repression is bad - it serves a purpose - there is a sort of implicit hierarchy of whose experiences are better and I don’t want to cast shade in whatever stage anyone is in. I tried to get rid of repression much too fast and did damage, so I don’t recommend that. But I think the repression can occur on different levels and in different ways. Willingness to give oneself over to an experience is an element of it. Anyway this response is already way too long but thank you for your question.
I was going to make some point in support of IFS as pretty useful (and non-woo if you take it metaphorically rather than literally), and then I remembered that I have a significant mental illness and thus I'm not providing any counterevidence...
Asexuals often get similar responses. I think it's partly a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy -- they experience things a certain way and can't properly understand what it's like (or that it's possible) to have a very different experience.
This was kind of jarring to read linguistically, because at least in my personal idiolect, "woo" is entirely pejorative – "woo is great" would be akin to saying "quackery is great" or "snake oil is great".
I can make myself cry thinking how one day my daughter will be old and die and forget all our adventures together. Or stare at the sea until shivers go down my spine. Mostly I don't toy with the emotional subsystem thus. Has a masturbatory quality to it.
One related observation that's impressed me from both the posts and the comments section here is that there is a _lot_ of variation in baseline bodily sensation across the population. From the discussions on CO2 sensing (from "Ondine's Curse" to panic attacks) to those on obesity to those on libido levels, there seems to be a large dynamic range in basic bodily drives.
Insofar as "woo" at least starts with concentrating on bodily sensations, this tends to support hypotheses that one should expect significantly different reactions to "woo" from people with different baseline sensitivities to particular bodily sensations.
-- I think part of the explanation for woo's reported success may be a selection effect. People who are capable of maintaining a regular practice are going to be more mentally healthy than people who can't. People who are capable of light non-damaging physical activity (yoga, taiji) are going to be healthier than people who aren't. Further, if these practices are designed to ease people into them and encourage participation, the act of participating may actually increase participants' mental and physical health. And even with that aside, if a person is trying one woo after another but is in a bad enough condition that they can't keep up with any of them, and then for unrelated reasons their condition improves, the next woo they try will stick, and for them it will be correlated with improvement. Plus, other people have mentioned the beneficial effects of being in groups, working toward a shared goal, and making incremental progress.
-- Here's another hypothesis for some of the body-work type stuff. There's a lot of factors involved, and a lot of mechanisms, and we don't understand and haven't isolated many of them. Until the point that we do, we have to rely on intuitive, non-rational understanding to work with them. (Compare a chef who "just knows" what spices to add, to a computer program that can analyze flavor compounds and calculate how combinations match against the standard human palate.) There may be a body of knowledge built up using various metaphors that have over time been productive. Accessing the patterns at higher levels requires understanding the building blocks at lower levels. And none of this stuff is like Lost Knowledge from the Gods in a fantasy story; it's simply a lot of best practices built up over time a la "The Secret of Our Success". A further complication is that we are not disembodied intellects, or even a pure intellect in a clean implementation of a neural network: our meat brains are hooked into our bodies in all sorts of weird ways. Biofeedback aside, in certain domains, we (most of us) have hard-coded instincts and biases that are difficult to overcome or even notice. At times like that, being able to operate at the level of a metaphor can allow results that are (for most people) more difficult to accomplish through pure rationality. (Treating people as numbers makes it easier to do things that talking with them, face to face, would make harder. And, perhaps, treating all living things including yourself as incarnation of the same "world spirit" might produce a type of ethical treatment of animals that is difficult to reach and sustain by purely rational methods. Maybe. I dunno. That's just a thought.)
-- Some of this stuff seems close to sympathetic magic. That is, there's a bigger problem, perhaps psychological in nature, and also a smaller problem, perhaps physical tension due to inefficient use of the mechanisms of the body. If a correspondence is built up over time, then part of the treatment for the bigger problem could involve resolving the smaller problem. Probably not at once; it would seem best to match the lengths of treatment and create correspondences and stuff like that. And breakthroughs in the smaller problem could be re-purposed to unblock seemingly-intractable aspects of the larger problem. Alternatively, this would be a great way to scam people into thinking that you'd fixed their big problems.
-- A personal anecdote: in my EMDR treatment for PTSD, I'm often asked after a few minutes of EMDR to notice where in my body I'm feeling tension. I respond with where or not, I'm reminded to hold attention on that, and then we go for another few minutes. I can see how someone might interpret this as woo, but to me it's that I simply react to stress with certain types of physical compensation. Not like fully curling up into a fetal position, but minor things like hunching, fidgeting, and so forth. (There's a strong correlation between those physical sensations and working on something important, but only a moderate correlation the other way.) So if I'm noticing sensations like this, we can use them to track how well I'm processing, as long as I don't fall into the trap of persuading myself that the sensations are whatever I might want them to be. I try to keep the causality flowing one way.
> Schizophrenics smoke much more often than other people; is this because nicotine causes schizophrenia, or because it controls the symptoms schizophrenia (studies suggest the latter). What about marijuana? (here the studies are unclear, a lot of people think it might contribute).
My personal experience with pot and PTSD is that there's a linear scale going from PTSDing to normal to stoned. Call it from -1 to 1, and a standard 10mg indica THC edible moves me 0.5 to the right. If I'm heavily PTSDing (-0.75), I'll get somewhat better (-0.25). If I'm moderately PTSDing (-0.5), I'll go to normal (0). If I'm lightly PTSDing (-0.25), I'll get slightly stoned (0.25). If I'm normal (0), I'll get moderately stoned (0.5). Multiple doses appear to be additive, but I've never gone over 2 doses (I don't actually **like** being stoned). One could conceptualize the scale as visceral agreement with the statement, "It's all cool, dude, just relax and let go." If I were not suffering from PTSD, I would not have discovered this about myself.
Does it generalize to other people or other conditions? I don't know. Does it help long-term in dealing with the condition? I don't think so; it seems like temporary relief. Does the drug itself have long-term effects? I don't know. Would someone who spent a lot of time stoned forget how to deal with their condition when not stoned? I rather suspect the answer is "yes": why the FUCK would you want to keep these FUCKING coping mechanisms in your head if you didn't absolutely FUCKING have to? Pardon my FUCKING French.
"Woo" is usually a mixture of placebos, poorly regulated folk medicine, and practices that are normally part of medicine, such as things like stretching, talk therapy, or meditation. Placebos work for different people to varying degrees so long as it is a condition placebos can touch. And good health practices remain that even if you dress it up in dubious theories about what is going on. So woo absolutely can "work" if you keep your expectations focused on what is actually going on. But people adopting the surrounding mythology is pernicious insofar as it 1) encourages them to try actively harmful treatments 2) causes people to choose it in lieu of more effective options or 3) causes people to form poor habits of mind that end up resulting in them adopting (other) harmful beliefs. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, all three are all over so-called woo communities and people with a good background in rational skepticism rightly should look at that with a mixture of concern and contempt.
I think woo is fake systematicity, and this is separate from the question of which things have an underlying practice that has an effect for some people. Fake systematicity has lots of bad side effects related to misrepresenting what's actually going on in any given practice community and the biases and emotional problems of the people drawn to that community.
I am an engineer, very healthy physically and mentally, and score about 9.5 out of 10 as a rationalist. Been following and aligned that way for a decade or more.
I have also practiced Chen style Taiji for over 20 years (over 10,000 hours of practice and instruction). For the first 5 years it was just a complicated exercise - good for the body but comparable to Pilates. Then one day I experienced feelings that were not correlated with Western Medicine and my world view changed. The Taiji teachers would say I experienced “chi”.
I practice Taiji very rationally. If I practice “correctly” then I experience chi and observers will state that my Taiji is objectively better. The chi experience is repeatable and seems to be teachable.
I do not know what chi is and do not care. I simply accept that my sensations are not entirely correlated with the predictions of western medicine. That’s OK, the sensations are useful and repeatable and teachable. I don’t need more than that.
I would be glad to answer questions about this. I think it is valuable for the Rationalist community to accept the possibility that there are “real” experiences that are not explained by current Western models.
Individuals vary a lot. Describing this as normal vs. defective is the opposite of helpful.
Many variations may be due to hemisphere dominance. Left-brained people may have little interest in their bodies, while right-brained people may find their bodies rich with information. These differences can be a combination of genetic and learned. Learned responses may include trauma responses, but not only that. Simply imitating parents' emotional styles can cause large differences. Both hemispheres have value. See The Master and His Emissary. (The Master is the right hemisphere, so if anyone is defective, it's overly left-brained people, according to McGilchrist). The rational brain is easily fooled, while a "gut feeling" is hard to fake or make up as a rationalization.
Responses to different woo practices vary a lot among people, and practices like meditation can take a long time to get good at. No benefit from one practice says nothing about practices you haven't tried yet.
Only the mind separates the organism into body and mind. The body makes no such distinction.
I would say I enjoy doing some woo practices (I meditate regularly, stretch (yoga) almost every morning, I love cold dips at Scandinavian spas or after a gruesome physical effort.
I do this stuff because I enjoy them. Simple as that.
I also enjoy a ñarge variety of sports, I enjoy watching TV and films, and I love reading. To me, these woo activities are hobbies that keep me entertained and busy and make me feel good. And I understand that others don't enjoy them as much!
That's fine. I share the preferences you named. Our host seems to have written mainly about a distinct aspect of woo as I understood him. Less agency, more having something done or taught to you.
Forgive me if someone else made this point and I didn't see it among the comments, but I think there's another aspect to woo that is not being considered here: most kinds of woo involve a intimate, trusting relationship with someone who very likely comes across as caring about you. That in itself can be beneficial to those with emotional or psychological trauma or instability, much like a relationship with a good therapist. To wit: we offer Reiki to nurses as part of staff care at the hospital where I work. Reiki is obviously woo, and I have never heard a remotely plausible explanation for it, but I agreed to try it once, and it was really quite pleasant. I felt that the Reiki guy cared about me, I trusted him, that relaxed me, I was less stressed and more focussed the rest of the day, and so on. Would it have been the same if he'd just given me a hug, or I'd played with the therapy dog for a bit?
Important point. Encounters with sufficiently trustworthy people (or animals) that show genuine interest in you and try to do you good promote your health. I may repeat myself here, the best evidence-backed indication for classical massage treatment is depression, with effects in the range of psychotherapy and antidepressant medication.
Can anyone give me an explanation of what “woo” is? I never heard of it until this article, and Scott’s brief description seems to encompass an awful lot. I mean, I do yoga, and it certainly helped - fixed my back right up. It’s boring as hell but it worked!
There's no exact definition because it is a catch-all term meant to refer to a whole grab-bag of treatments and practices frequently associated with new-age spirituality with an almost total overlap with what is meant by complimentary/alternative/integrative medicine. It's a shortened version of the "woo-woo" pejorative that is more generally aimed at pseudoscience, superstition, and mysticism, but is heavily connotated with a particular subset that one might call "crunchy."
One the one end you have things that likely have a positive effect for plausible theoretical reasons like yoga. In the middle you have things that are nothing more than a placebo, but probably aren't actively harmful apart from the fact that they affect how people reason with evidence and their health choices like homeopathy or acupuncture. Then on the other end you have things that are straight up harmful like chelation therapy to treat autism.
But rarely done because it would condition others in the same direction. Instead, the teacher will ask questions “how do you feel?” to encourage the student to be aware of their body. A group of people might all agree that “we feel chi when we do XYZ” but would generally not go into any more detail.
(FYI, if you respond via email, your response just goes to the root level. So the person you're responding to won't necessarily see this comment. I happened to catch this because I was eagerly awaiting your response; I've done a fair bit of martial arts myself, including a few years of Chen Taiji.)
As a variation of 2, maybe woo could have a placebo/nocebo effect (which in this context is pretty much equivalent to it having a real effect), but the specific kinds of woo work only for specific kinds of people, because of their expectations? Those who are open to the idea of spirituality are able to benefit from it, while those who are skeptical about it as a category and more open to traditional medicine would be better off with other forms of treatment. For example, they might get better effects from new, supposedly scientifically-based practices, supplements and medicine with studies proving their efficacy. Even if the studies fail to replicate in a few years, or further studies reveal that the treatment has insignificant effects, the treatment still works for them, as the context at the time allowed for them to be open to the suggestion that it would work.
Conversely, a treatment that is scientifically-proven to be effective, but sounds woo, might be made ineffective if the patient is unable to do their part because they believe it won't work. Adapting the treatment to sound less woo and more scientific would remove the nocebo effect that stops an effective treatment from working.
On the topic of emotions and body sensations, there was one thing that I personally found really useful, as I might be one of these people who repress their body sensations. So, at one point my therapist recommended I try to experience my emotions with my body rather than with my mind. I found it a rather weird concept, but after some period of trying managed to get it working. And it helped a lot! The way I see it works is that when I try to consciously experience my emotions as body sensations (pain, tightness, difficulty to breathe, whatever), it might be unpleasant. But it always passes, and most of the times quickly. But when I try to deal with emotions in my head - it often creates an obsessive feedback loop when I keep circling around the particular problem, reliving it a hundred times and basically re-creating the emotion raw again and again and again. No such feedback loop in body - it hurts, then it goes away, sort of like when I hit my knee on something and an hour later it is just back to the way it was, no pain.
One thing I'd like to point out about woo is that it's often (not always, but often) better than nothing. I had relatives who genuinely believed in woo. If I had a headache as a kid, they'd run their hands over my body to channel breath magic or something like that. It was placebo, so it worked.
My question: would kiddie aspirin have been an improvement? Should I have been given ibuprofen instead? Consider the risk of liver / stomach toxicity of these drugs - should you still administer them to young children, or should you try magic tricks that don't run that risk first?
Woo works well for transient, minor pains (for most otherwise healthy people is the bulk of most pains). Woo does not work for serious ailments, and if there is a treatment, it's obviously better to pursue that treatment. But in the absence of available treatment .... Is it better than nothing?
I'm solidly on Team Possibility 2. I had depression where the symptoms were *so* somaticized that it took over 5 years to realize my problem was mental health related and not a sleep disorder. I'm also someone who easily falls into meditative states and experiences the kinds of things described in the stages of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, including things that happened, in the "correct" order, quite a few years before I read the book or started any kind of structured meditative practice. I prefer unguided meditation. My wife is exactly the opposite: trained as a therapist, processes emotions mentally and verbally, prefers guided meditations and gets lots of benefits from them but not the more woo-y experiences.
I would question the whole framing, actually. All four possibilities are likely actual. Scott wrote about how meds are both overprescribed and underprescribed at the same time,sometimes to the same people. It is similar to this "woo" thing.
First, we are all at least somewhat dissociated from our bodily sensations at all times, otherwise we would be constantly distracted, itching, scratching and ow-ing. Sometimes we are dissociated so much, we don't feel rather pain in the rush of the moment, not until later. We are often also hyper-sensitized to our bodily sensations, say, feeling more pain in a specific area when we are scared of it. Again, Scott covered this a number of times. One very common example is a person yelling "I am not angry!!!" when pointed out that they are. It is not a "U-shaped curve", more like a bunch of random points.
Second, some people experience a lot more of this than others. A child who was regularly beaten and/or raped growing up learns to both not feel pain to survive the experience, and later experience body-memory pain when triggered. The sensation perception is completely warped in them. Sometimes it is "useful" (I know a person who can choose not to feel mild burns), but most of the time it is not a great thing (a person who has a severe health anxiety and simply thinking about potential heart issues can trigger heart ache, heart palpitations, and all the symptoms of a panic attack that mimic a heart attack). Stigmata is another classic example.
Third, this can often be normalized, at least temporarily, by mindfulness meditation, (self)trance, and all the other "body work" "woo". There are people who are both receptive to this and accepting of it. There are other people who hate the sensation of feeling their body and refuse anything that could "raise awareness" or it. Yet others would love to normalize their bodily perceptions but are not good at it.
Finally, like with psych meds, the trick is to match the treatment to the person, or else one does more harm than good, creating long-term negative side effects without having any primary benefit.
> The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos, dye their hair, do drugs, break off contact with their families, cut themselves, and massively over-psychologize everything they do. Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors? Which are both at once, vicious cycles that convert present suffering into future suffering, and so need to be compassionately discouraged? A lot hinges on the answer!
Well, some are vicious cycles, and some are virtuous cycles and some are ad hoc coping strategies, and sometimes all three at once, depending on the day of the week.
I know lots of people who do not have severe problems who are into woo, and feel very helped by some or several varieties of it. It seems to me that their belief in it has a different quality than their belief in science-based treatments, which most also take seriously. They have a special bond with their woopractitioners and with other people they know who are believers in this particular woo. One clear sign of it is that if you say, "but that can't possibly work," they are hurt in a special way -- almost as though you had laughed at their religion, or scoffed at a photo of a loved one that's important to them. It's much different from how they'd respond if you said, "I don't think cholesterol-lowering drugs have any effect." To that they'd say, "What?! Where did you read that? Mine sure works on my cholesterol."
Also, I think people who respond to woo are more suggestible -- better hypnotic subjects.
I'm sure there's also a group of people who are suffering greatly from some illness that conventional medicine cannot treat, and who turn to woo as a last resort. Ross Douthat wrote about doing that.
> Also, I think people who respond to woo are more suggestible -- better hypnotic subjects.
That could explain some things. (Although, the problem is, Scott already made a few hypotheses in the article, and each of them "could explain some things".)
Maybe each form of "woo" provides some mild benefits -- meditation improves your focus, yoga makes you exercise, Wim Hof method makes you less afraid of cold -- but more practice provides diminishing returns... Except for the people who are "hypnotized" into believing that it makes their lives miraculously better. And those definitely do feel better, it's just their explanations (that they feel better because they have perfect control over their minds or bodies, can remember their previous lives, and get energy from the universe) that are bullshit. They merely feel better because they convinced themselves to feel better whenever they do X. (In other words, they made X their hobby.)
This study examined the role of hypnotic responsiveness in the practice of a dhami-jhankri, a traditional Nepali healer. The hypnotic capacity of 248 male patients was measured in an allopathic (Western) clinic, an Ayurvedic (ancient Hindu healing art) clinic, and a dhami-jhankri's practice. Hypnotizability was assessed using the Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP). The Induction scores of the HIP were significantly higher among the dhami-jhankri's patients than among either the Ayurvedic or allopathic patients. Furthermore, patients who returned to the dhami-jhankri were more highly hypnotizable than first-time dhami-jhankri patients. In addition, treatment satisfaction as reported by dhami-jhankri patients was positively correlated with HIP scores. The authors conclude that hypnotic phenomena as measured in the West might be an important component of the dhami-jhankri's treatment in the East.
Here's one more -- but after this I promise, no more!
Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields
Author links open overlay panel
Pehr Granqvist a, Mats Fredrikson a, Patrik Unge a, Andrea Hagenfeldt a, Sven Valind b, Dan Larhammar c, Marcus Larsson d
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with weak (micro Tesla) complex waveform fields have been claimed to evoke the sensed presence of a sentient being in up to 80% in the general population. These findings have had a questionable neurophysiological foundation as the fields are approximately six orders of magnitude weaker than ordinary TMS fields. Also, no independent replication has been reported. To replicate and extend previous findings, we performed a double-blind experiment (N = 89), with a sham-field control group. Personality characteristics indicating suggestibility (absorption, signs of abnormal temporal lobe activity, and a “new age”-life-style orientation) were used as predictors. Sensed presence, mystical, and other somatosensory experiences previously reported from the magnetic field stimulation were outcome measures. We found no evidence for any effects of the magnetic fields, neither in the entire group, nor in individuals high in suggestibility. Because the personality characteristics significantly predicted outcomes, suggestibility may account for previously reported effects. Our results strongly question the earlier claims of experiential effects of weak magnetic fields.
My answer to this column is going to be heavily coloured by my experience as a member of Gen X (born in 1970). I had an entirely analogue childhood, which largely involved around running around parks, climbing trees and swimming in rivers. I didn't own a computer until after I graduated university. Since the mid-1990s, my work has almost entirely been based on a computer After an analogue childhood and youth, this has always felt a little jarring to me. The way I've made it work is by looking for hobbies that emphasize physical movement and physicality to provide some balance.
It's interesting that your list includes a lot of options that are based on physicality, including yoga, tai chi, Alexander technique, Wim Hof, etc. The "woo" is often based on the way people talk about these activities (particularly the alleged benefits) and not so much on the activities themselves, which could be included in a much larger category that includes everything from powerlifting to salsa dancing to marathon running to playing tennis and going for a nice walk in the countryside.
I suspect that the drive to include some analogue physicality in our increasingly digital lives is the real story here. Many of our ancestors would probably be more surprised to see us doing abstract work while sitting still in offices and staring at screens than they would be to see some people stretching enthusiastically, getting up early to move gracefully in traditional ways, trying to work on their posture, swimming in cold water and so on.
A more superficial issue is why one activity resonates with one person but not somebody else. Yoga, tai chi, Alexander technique, Wim Hof are non-competitive; involve regular practice; are light on equipment; and often come attached with whole worldviews. That is fine. Some will like these aspects more than others. On the other hand, someone else will enjoy cycle races, with one long training session at the weekend and lots of shopping trips for gear, while any sense of transcendence goes unspoken. That is also fine. But the drive to do something physical is largely the same.
Ok. I think I have a vague understanding of whats going on here. Scott has touched on Conectome Specific Harmonic Wave Theory. If you check out rhw qualia insititue and testing models of valence theory, you will hear a lot about "neural annealing"
To greatly simplfiy, the idea is sort of that instead of a single brain wave, the brain has multiple connectomes with their own waves. The degree to which these harmonize or are in discord affect something like "mood." Neural annealing happens when people are stuck in "entropy sinks"- feedback patterns that keep the connectomes misalinged in a posiitve feedback loop.
A lot of "spiritual experiences", despite the specifci religious content, seem to happen in similar ways. Data or experiences that the entropy sink cant handle can force an adjustment, which can, under the right conditions, restore the harmonics and thus increase valence. This is something like the idea of Chod in Tibetan buddhism where people would partake in orgies or meditate in a charna field. Note the orgy thing probably wouldnt work for a westerner. The idea was to have an experience so shocking to the senses that a person's normal ego boundaries couldnt contain it and would force a sort of reordering or the percpetion of reality.
Probably, differnt specific traditions describe the process in specifi ways that then become self fulfilling prophecies. For example, there are "many" buddhism that insist theres is the true path and others are getting it wrong. What might happen there is they have their own means and interpretation of the steps of this process, and as Buddhists will point out, initial entry level expereinces are NOT the end goal. So if these different processes lead to people harmoning their connectomes, if unchecked that would feel incredibly significant and convince them their process was the true one.
So what the woo people might be saying is that our models, communties, and ways of understanding things lead to having these types of experiences more easily then a rationalist perspective. This could be true without any of the specific claims being true as the word sare substitutes for vague culturally shared an reinforced intuitons. I have noticed that in the "rationalist world" people tend to beleive they are more aware oif their own cognitive processes then they actually are. This COULD be a block for many, as if one believes they are more ware of their own cognition in rationalist terms, and are in terms of certain models,. they would be less open to poking around at the things that that they form parts of their cognition they are not consciously aware of, which is sort of necessary for a neural anneling process- a degree of honesty with oneself where the subconscious or "shadow self" is explicitly recognized and merged with the conscous ego identity.
Sorry Scott, but to me, it's hardly possible to have a meaningful discussion about these issues if one uses categories like "woo", which lump together very different techniques rooted in different contexts. I see your point, but using a more nuanced language would be helpful here.
BTW, lumping all these things under a blob-like label "woo" feels to me like the intellectual counterpart of treating bodily sensations like an undifferentiated blob.
Also, labeling as "woo" things as different as Somatic Experiencing, yoga and "chakra meditation" (not to mention "crystals and witchcraft", which appear in the comments) seems actually harmful. It's like treating libertarianism, oldschool conservatism, nationalist populism and downright Nazism all as "right wing" - correct from some point of view, but all in all hardly useful for making cogent arguments.
Yeah not all woo practices are in the same category, some actually have good evidence backing them up and are frequently used in business, acting , psychological practices etc. precisely because they work.
I’m a little bit skeptical of people who say they have tried meditating / yoga / breathwork / affirmations / etc. seriously (with proper instruction) and regularly (ideally daily) for a longer period of time and experienced absolutely no benefits.
If you had someone tell you they tried antidepressants / diet change / new exercise routine and they didn’t work but they had only taken them for a month you’d tell them that they need a way longer timeframe to experience benefits, and surely all these three things are effective without a doubt.
Irrelevant to your point: most antidepressants can pretty safely be said to show their benefit or the lack of it in 4-6 weeks, but not necessarily sooner than that.
Just for general information, when you say you tried all these woo things in good faith, what does that exactly mean? Daily over a period of a month/year? Guided instruction? Would be nice to hear a detailed report on your experiences
Also, there's a world of difference between trying something "out of intellectual curiosity" (or to establish an intellectual point) and going all in (because you feel a raw, pressing need). I imagine Scott's motivation was the former (I could be wrong on this), which might contribute to lack of perceived results.
When I was younger, I went through many years of severe depression culminating in a suicide attempt.
The psychologist who saved me was able to identify that I was suppressing my emotions and rationalising them to avoid feeling them profoundly. It was only through a process of feeling emotions - literally, bodily sensations - in the psychologist’s office that I became able to process how angry I was at my father (very stereotypical.)
During and since that period I have done a fair bit of Vipassana meditation (or “body-scan” as it is called in Western tradition) and that has helped to keep me grounded.
As a result of my experience, I have roughly the same reaction to someone hypothesising “maybe body-work is all woo” as I would to “maybe hair doesn’t exist.” It comes out of my head! I can see it on many people I meet! Perhaps being bald is not a pathological state, to extend the analogy, BUT (to extend it even further) if eg it is a result of chemotherapy it might be a sign of deeper problems within.
So I suppose I come down somewhere between possibility 1 and possibility 2 on Scott’s list above. I don’t think you should necessarily seek out body work if you’re not inclined to it, but feeling your real feelings, without resistance, without interference from thought or rationalisation, is the gateway to unwinding a ton of mental pathology.
To wax more philosophically, there is a sense in which your feelings are the only true thing. All interpretation can be misguided, this might all be a simulation or a hallucination, there might not be a “you” at all (Buddhist philosophers teach that there is not) but there is certainly a perception. That is immediate and cannot be denied.
Scott, your comment in the first paragraph about how you have tried body work and not gotten results begs the further question (which you don’t have to answer if you don’t feel comfortable.) What results exactly were you trying to achieve?
My hypothesis is that the difference between those drawn to woo and those not is how much congruence there is between the way you've learnt you "should" feel and how you actually feel. I believe the term in psychoanalysis is "splitting".
From the snippets I read of this blog's author he doesn't seem wracked with anxiety, doesn't seem to question himself constantly. He writes blog posts quickly, not a lot of second guessing. So I'm extrapolating to say, for him there is no split. How he feels, where ever he feels it, is just that. Thoughts, feelings, body, mind: congruent. Not saying happy necessarily, just congruent.
But then there are those in various communities who have splits of various kinds: people who have experienced trauma that isolates them from others, people who are neurodivergent and have been told constantly that the do things wrong, people who feel the need to mask, people who for whatever reason have a feeling deep down that something is just fundamentally wrong with them. And for them, maybe their brain feelings and body feeling don't match up. Or maybe even it's just their thoughts and their feelings that don't match up. There's some incongruence that leads to confusion and distress, and leads people to be interested in woo because woo attempts to address this incongruence.
This doesn't match my experience of woo, which was mostly in Quaker circles. I lived and worked at a Quaker center for a year. The central practice, after the breakfast of whole-wheat bread and fair-trade coffee, is the 350-year-old woo practice of sitting quietly and waiting to see if God will speak to you (meeting for worship). People were into listening to your inner light and looong discussion sessions. Most of the staff seemed like pretty stable people.
Of the dozen people in the youth program there, I don't see an obvious connection between who was most into woo and how they were doing personally. The one who went on to become a shiatsu practitioner seemed fine. The one with a lot of trauma from childhood cancer went on to get more into neopaganism. The one who was most obviously struggling mental-health-wise was not particularly into woo.
I meditated for 7 years before I had any body issues. So its kind of hard for me to grasp that I picked these practices up as a coping mechanism. They were already in tact.
I think this article gets to the crux of the paradox of awareness. You don't know you unaware, until you are. What many people think is a normal mind, is actually not normal. It's kind of just how this all works.
I don't particularly like your examples. Having been around a lot of woo over the course of my life. Woo, I would categorize this things that solely or at least primarily function through physical or biological mechanisms that have been categorically disproven to exist, so some combination of placebo effect, cultural pressure, wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of the fundamental science mixed in with outright fraud is the animating principle. People do have positive responses to these, and I think the idea that non-responders might be defective in some way is possible, or just neurodivergent better at some things than others.
What I would call woo are things like Deepak chopra's Quantum longevity, Homeopathy which has been done to death, energy healing, Crystal healing, psychic surgery which is pretty much just fraud but can still have Placebo effects, certain forms of detox, High colonics, Etc.
Things that I wouldn't call woo are things that map on to meditation or stretching or exercise such as Tai Chi and yoga, and I wouldn't call internal family systems woo either, because that's just a multi-agent psychology. It may not actually work because there has not been enough scientific validation yet but it's not based on an unscientific model. Multi-agent psychology is arguably the dominant neurophysiological model of how the brain, mind and cognition works.
Are these practices hard medical science? No not at all. There's still a lot of work to be done that may show that they have less value than their proponents think they do. Is there a lot of woo attached to them, yeah I think that's a reasonable accusation though I don't think there's any form of medicine or motivational theory that doesn't wind up with superstitious and exaggerated claims connected to them.
I don't disagree with what I think is the intended conclusion here, but I do want to flag this:
> But somehow depressed borderlines with five past suicide attempts never need to “learn the prerequisite skills”. It always comes naturally to them!
This is approximately what I'd expect. If you're mostly psychologically/physically healthy, you can move through life without really understand how your internals work and by just trusting your mind and body in a fairly straightforward way. If you're a depressed borderline with multiple suicide attempts, odds are you're used to treating your body and mind with a level of distrust and error-correction that most people don't have to deal with at all. So yes, obviously, the people that have had to sink or swim on their self-awareness will have more deliberate and finely-tuned self-awareness than people whose general level of health never brings them into situations where they'd need that.
In the many and long-term interactions that I've had in my life with them, I have not found Borderline folks to be particularly self-aware. If anything, it's generally been the utter opposite. (I'm not saying this to be a jerk, but merely because it's true to my experience.)
I mean, the ones I meet are typically not self-aware in the "models self in social situations and does the globally appropriate things" but _are_ self-aware in the "my general functioning is at a low point today, so I won't commit to doing stressful/involved/intellectually demanding work now" and the "I can precisely and deliberately move my body in space, and know its relative and absolute limits to a remarkable degree" sense. The latter two to a much higher level than neurotypical people I meet. What I'm trying to say is that it seems to make sense that you'd have these levels of self-awareness if you didn't have the capability to effectively ignore those limits on a day-to-day basis but were still able to act in the world (I'm assuming there are lots of borderline folks who I never meet because their functioning is low enough that I just never encounter them in real life).
Ah, I think you were using "self-aware" in a much different sense than I was. If you meant, primarily, bodily awareness, I don't feel like I can really judge how bodily aware the ones I've known have been, but you could well be right. I was using "self-aware" more in terms of having an accurate mental model of themselves as an agent, their inner workings, their behavior, and their interactions in the world, and on that count, I have found them to have relatively quite low awareness (or, more precisely, inaccurate awareness).
One’s sense of wonder is another’s experience of the mundane. If meditation practice makes you experience your body and mind in a somewhat new way, one is enthralled, while another just files the experience away as any other new experience. So I’m going for door number 2.
I lived in Boulder for 11 years and tried all kinds of woo stuff — mediation, herbs, hynotization, sweat lodges, reiki etc. etc.
I always felt like it had zero effect.
Then I did a long series of weekend workshops with a particularly talented couple of teachers, during which they put a great deal of pressure on me to essentially get over myself.
One Saturday evening I just opened up. I cried and I felt vulnerable for the first time, and all that woo stuff suddenly made sense. It was like suddenly developing a "sense" of emotion after never having had it. Imagine that all your life you've heard people talking about how food tastes, but it didn't really taste like much to you. You learn to fake having a sense of taste, and you can sort of distinguish food but it mostly tastes quite similar. Then one day BOOM you get the full taste experience and it's completely overwhelming.
It was far and a way the most beautiful and important experience of my life.
It was terrifying, and during the next few hours I gradually shut down again, back to my impenetrable self. I never again felt that way.
But it was clear to me at the time that I live in a particular sort of hardened state that keeps woo from working on me.
I don't think all people are like me, though it sounds like you might be. Maybe very few people are like this.
Afterwards, I did some research into trauma, post traumatic stress disorder etc., but the state of the art at that time seemed primitive and I didn't pursue it.
I studied Buddhism for a long time, and I remember hearing that sometimes a teacher has to help a student build up an ego before helping to tear it down. That resonated with me — I think I shut down so completely, so early in life, that I didn't develop a "normal" psychology, with normal emotional reactions.
There have been a couple of times when I've had a faint shadow of that experience, and it was when I was in stressful and chaotic situations that I couldn't control. I think the shell I developed served as a way to control my emotional exposure to the world from a very early age. It's become so deeply ingrained that I can't see it or choose to stop.
I'm a woo non-responder, and like Scott I have given a few things quite a serious try. I don't think it's a sign of defectiveness not to respond to woo, but in my case I think the lack of responsiveness to woo is part of a larger trait that I do view as a defect: I'm a non-responder to ceremonies where people come together to grieve or celebrate: weddings, funerals, parades, concerts. In my case I think it's something about difficulty connecting with the group vibe. At funerals, especially, you'd think that wouldn't be hard. Most of the other people are feeling sad in much the same way I am, and I know it. I simply am not comforted by their presence, and I can't kind of roll with what's offered -- some music, some talks, some of them mostly about grief, others lighter in tone, memories of fun times and great jokes with the deceased. I'd like to get on that train and ride it but I can't. My experience is that I am sitting alone in a public place, forced so powerfully to think about the dead person that I can't keep from sobbing, yearning to be alone so I can cry in privacy and peace. Dunno why I'm like that.
Anyhow, the woo stuff seems to me to have a groupiness to it -- people feel a bond with the practiioner and with the other people who also feel a benefit from the treatment. It's almost like a little religion. Compare the way people talk about visitis their dentist or their physical therapist to the way they talk about energy healing sessions.
Lucid dreaming is an interesting case study. It's something that would be considered woo, except that there's solid evidence it's a real phenomenon. It clearly comes naturally for some, while others struggle to experience it even with persistent effort. Getting zero results is not unusual. Anectodally, lucid dreaming non-responders do not seem defective as a group.
A possibly related example is the constrast between people who have visionary experiences with psychedelics versus people who don't experience visual effects at all on these substances.
My guess is that unusual bodily experiences are similar: people are wired differently.
"All of these people also “do bodywork”. Is this a coping strategy? A risk factor? An innocent diversion? I don’t know. But overall it’s left me feeling grateful that whatever “skills” predispose one to bodywork seem to have passed me by"
I do some 'bodywork' in the context of meditative practice (mostly samadhi-related body scanning and working with the sensations and related subjective phenomena). Causality is beyond me, but I can say very confidently that doing lots of meditation and some related stuff has coincided with a steady, big improvement in mental well-being and general sense of easiness compared to before. On top of that, the coinciding sense of easiness and happiness eerily resemble the experiences during my meditative - I'm sorry, woo practices.
I also don't hold many if any (woo-related) weird beliefs, and I remain quite skeptical of, say, epistemic or philosophical frameworks related to meditative practices. I have no issues doing meditative or otherwise woo work, however, if I can see I benefit from doing it. Whether or not I have good explanations for why that is.
Now, as for the quoted part - that is, the explanation that I'm just a sick, traumatized druggie: I'm pretty smart, I have a ton of friends, I'm happily married, my sex life is amazing, my income is in the top <5% in my country, I'm productive, I exercise a lot (another thing, by the way, which has tremendously helped me psychologically over the years), I don't have substance dependence issues, and psychologically I'd estimate that over the last few years - coinciding with woo - my anxiety levels have dropped to perhaps 5-10% of what they used to be, while my ability to generally enjoy what I'm doing has slightly increased (maybe 10%).
Impossible to control for confounders and likely (surely) all of the aforementioned also positively affect my sense of well-being. However, I'm just posting this here to point out that sneery rhetorical insinuations along the lines of "woo people are stereotypically very unhappy and sick, wow I'm so glad I'm not into woo" don't fit into my experience, and that of a lot of other people as well. I'm of course sorry if some woo people have said mean things to you.
Regarding your remark about "The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos [...]" It seems like you are only considering
BPD-type messed up people. What about dark-tetrad type messed up people who might look very conservative and appear to lead normal respectable lives
but then go home to systematically torture their family (e.g. Josef Fritzl)? My observation is that these type of messed up people are not particularly into woo and I would regard them as more messed up then the tattooed druggie self-mutilators.
My point being that if 'woo' correlates with a specific defect from your description it sounds like BPD. However there are people who score way higher
on my hierarchy of messed-upness and don't seem to be attracted to to any kind of therapy.
Another 'why did Scott include x in his woo list' remarks - this time on IFS. Does Dick Schwarz make any spiritual claims? As far as I know he does not, although I can see how the system can easily be integrated with spiritual beliefs especially the concept of 'Self'. As a non esoteric believer I found the IFS model of 'parts' to be very useful. I think of it as at the very least a useful metaphor for my emotional world and talking to my 'parts' has actually brought a lot of insights that I don't get from things like CBT. I also appreciate that for a lot of people this would feel odd and uncomfortable, in the same way that ordinary acting or role play can feel odd and uncomfortable to a lot of people, which suggests possibility 2.
It could be a few options simultaneously. For example, consider a spiritual practice that promises to give you supernatural powers, but in reality only makes you relax.
* some people can't loosen up and they may find the exercise deeply unpleasant, while everyone else finds it pleasant (albeit with different opinions on how useful it is);
* some people are in a stressful situation and can benefit greatly from taking a regular time to relax, other people are already relaxed enough and it's a waste of time for them;
* some people are more suggestible and they may genuinely believe they are getting supernatural powers, other people may perceive actual positive effects of relaxation (and either report them correctly, or interpret them in the perspective of the supernatural claims).
For example, a person could report: "I've been doing the magical exercises for three months, and although I cannot shoot lasers from my eyes yet, I can already magically cure minor health problems, and make people react more positively to me. Magic definitely works!"
An outside observer might describe the same situation as: "The person was under a lot of stress recently, the tension of muscles started causing them some pain, and their unpleasant behavior made their family and colleagues react negatively to them. After three months of regular relaxation, the muscle tension and the unpleasant behavior are gone, their family and colleagues react positively to the change."
So, on one hand, this kind of woo provides actual benefits in real life, beyond what we would typically call a placebo effect. On the other hand, the official explanation is wrong. A skeptic may argue that the positive effects are all imaginary, which would be clearly wrong (but may sound convincing to other skeptics). If you correctly realize that it is all the effect of relaxation... but you won't relax (e.g. because "let's relax, it can loosen muscle tension" is way less motivating than "let's get magical powers")... then you won't get the benefits.
I came across this study about peoples reports about experiencing what you guys call whooshes of energy:
“Like a Vibration Cascading through the Body”: Energy-Like Somatic Experiences Reported by Western Buddhist Meditators
Abstract
There are numerous historical and textual references to energy-like somatic experiences (ELSEs) from religious traditions, and even a few psychological studies that have documented related phenomena. However, ELSEs remain an understudied effect of meditation in contemporary research. Based upon narratives from a large qualitative sample of Buddhist meditators in the West reporting meditation-related challenges, this paper offers a unique glimpse into how ELSEs play out in the lives of contemporary meditation practitioners and meditation experts. Departing from studies presuming a “kundalini awakening” framework, this paper presents a broader scope for understanding ELSEs by describing the metaphors practitioners used when speaking about them; the trajectories and impacts of ELSEs, including the factors that were reported as influencing their nature or trajectory; the various ways in which they were interpreted and appraised by practitioners, teachers, and specialists, such as doctors and therapists; and how practitioners responded to them or managed them with particular remedies. Deciding how to interpret and manage ELSEs entailed recruiting frameworks from within and/or beyond the meditator’s specific Buddhist lineage.
I feel like you're missing a pretty apparent (to me) option here...
Option 3, but the reverse. This is at least where I've found the greatest benefit from these practices.
Revised, this would be: "Some people are good and normal. They feel emotions in their bodies, and process them in their mind, together as a unified process. Other people can’t do this, intellectualize their emotions entirely, dissociate, and with no 'outlet valve' for these emotions, end up ruminating all the type, constantly tying their mind into knots every time something goes wrong in their life. This is a non-normative and defective state. Maybe they got this way because they were traumatized as children."
The point is that for some of us, as hyper-rational people, our brains are our worst enemies for emotional processing. Any practice that helps us get out of our mind and into the bodies more can help relieve tension. If something makes you upset but you end up thinking about it all the time, doom and glooming, and don't actually *cry*, this may be you, especially as a man trained to swallow most physical display of emotion. Encouraging the physical manifestation of an emotion to take place, like crying, is actually a healthy thing, to a limited extent. And I'd bet you tons and tons of 'mentally healthy' people cant remember the last time they displayed emotion like this.
Is WHM Wim Hoff? Because when i search on pubmed nothing comes up: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Wim+Hoff Is there a different term to be used?
Huberman is really good at taking small scale or animal studies or potential mechanisms, linking them together and extrapolating from there. Rarely does he have powerful studies in humans to back up the claims. I found much of his podcasts interesting, but the lack of powerful studies was/is disappointing.
Thank you, i'll check this out and the papers in the other link.
Since MBTI is garbage, you're unlikely to get anywhere with skeptics by invoking it.
“My MBTI type is ‘the type of person who did some looking into it years ago and knows that the MBTI is neither particularly scientific nor particularly consistently applied’. Or, as it’s also called, INTJ.”
Yep!
If you haven't seen it before, you might be interested in this post:
https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html
This bit is the part I find most interesting about the Myers-Briggs vs the professionals: "If you take continuous measurements (like every Myers-Briggs test ever gives you) [for each of the four Myers-Briggs axes] they correlate strongly with four of the five big five measurements."
Myers-Briggs can be thought of as hitting four the five axes of the OCEAN model -- except that it is widely used by amateurs rather than professionals.
Yes, there is more nuance than this, but this isn't a bad high level summary.
It seems like there's a lot of unrealized potential for OCEAN popularizers to create some kind of tribes or clusters with catchy idealistic nicknames, which is a big draw for MB. I'm not exactly sure what the positive nickname for a disagreeable, neurotic, unconscientious, low openness introvert should be, but there should be one, and 16 seems like a good number of combinations to have.
Don't know if they're "positive", but Similar Minds uses "limbic" and "calm" for both ends of the neuroticism trait. Couldn't you just add that to the MBTI so all 5 OCEAN traits are represented?
Then your "disagreeable, neurotic, unconscientious, low openness introvert" would just be a limbic ISTP, or a limbic Virtuoso (the nickname I found for ISTP online.)
The site 16 Personalities (an MB-based site) essentially does exactly that. They have an added axis of "turbulent" / "assertive", which is basically neuroticism by a less stigmatized name.
I've dabbled a bit in trying to identify recognizable "types" in the OCEAN model. My idle musings so far (using OCEAN - FIDS as abbreviations (FIDS: Firm, Laid-back, Introverted, Disagreeable, Stable)):
> FCxxx -family: "Do it by the book" types.
FCxDx - Drill-sergeant
FCxAx - Good worker
FCxAN - "Good-girl syndrome"
>
> FLxxx -family: Slacker types (?)
>
> OLxxx -family: Dreamers. Artist types.
OLExx - Stage musician
OLIxx - Writer/Painter/Composer
OLxxN - Tortured artist
OLxAS - Hippie
OLxAN - Astrologer
>
> OCxxx -family: Inventor types
OCExx - Gründer
OCIDx - Eccentric recluse
>
> xxEAx -family: Social types
xxEAN - Gossiper
FxEAx - Small-talker
OxEAS - Conversationalist
>
> xxEDx -family: Arguers
xxEDN - Argument-instigator
xxEDS - Civil debater
>
> xxIDx -family: Nerds
FxIDx - Playing the same game since 2005
OCIDx - Designs custom fantasy setting
OLIDx - Daydreams about custom fantasy setting
>
> FxIxx -family: Geeks
FxIAx - Dedicated team sport player
>
> FxxAx -family: Normies
FLEAx - Frat boy
>
xCEAS - Easy-mode life
xLIDN - Hard-mode life
As an analogy, imagine that someone invents a "genius-moron test", which is kinda like the IQ test, except that it sorts all people into one of two buckets: "morons" (everyone with IQ below 100) and "geniuses" (everyone with IQ above 100). Also, it adds a noise of plus or minus 10 IQ points to everyone, which means that most people (those around IQ 100) will score as a "moron" one week, and as a "genius" the next week.
Would you also agree with a high-level summary that if you dismiss the "genius-moron test", you also have to dismiss the IQ tests?
I think this kind of misses the point. Part of the argument Dynomight is making is that MBTI is preferable in some ways specifically because it *doesn't* attach undesirable/stigmatized names to each axis. A genius/moron test would be doing the opposite.
By the way, I saw an IQ test that politically correctly called high IQ "thinking abstractly" and low IQ "thinking concretely". ;)
My objection was against the "most people are in the middle, and they are put in a different category every month" aspect of MBTI.
There was an actual study of personality types made with proper regression, and in the end they could only identify four significant clusters, and one of them they just called "normal".
People just don't fall into 16 distinct personality types.
Great post! I'll be using the test linked in it from now on. A 2 minute test with better output? I'm amazed it's not more widely known.
There's this thing that happens where A is imperfect and worse than B for the purposes of scientific study, so a funnel-plot-appropriate number of studies say A is worse than B for a given purpose, then one day a journalist notices this and claims that A has been DEBUNKED (when it may still give pretty good results) and is PSEUDO- or UNSCIENTIFIC (which is probably true but also misleading: new-age herbalists are unscientific, but if they feed you wintergreen oil you're still getting salicyclic acid in your bloodstream, and if you do yoga with them you're still getting exercise).
For reductio ad absurdum, consider Newtonian physics and whether it was debunked.
I thought you were going to answer to this objection ^_^
https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1658998399436218369
Isn't that a fully general dismissal? "Woo helps things in your life" "Well I tried it and it didn't help" "Haha silly child obviously it helped you and you just didn't realize it"
Well, it is a tough thing to gauge! If we're disentangling the physical from the spiritual effects of yoga, for instance, I think everyone would accept that you do have to put in the work and the practice to be able to be as bendy and flexible as a master. Doing a few sessions then giving up because you can't wrap your ankles around your ears would be rightly met with "you didn't stick with it".
The spiritual effects? As Westerners practice it? I have no idea. I mean, there are studies about how things like fasting etc. induce the spiritual results claimed for them because of physical effects that scientists were able to measure, but does that mean we go "everything mystical has a physical explanation" and if we do, then it really *does* mean that "you're not in touch with your body" is the true explanation for "Why didn't I get the touted benefits?" since there is a replicable programme to produce those.
Isn't that what Sam Harris is trying to do with his Buddhist meditation for sceptics? Strip away the mysticism, get the core physical practices that produce the shiny happy feelings?
What are the touted benefits, though ? If the woo is supposed to make you feel better/happier/etc., then it's not really all that mystical. Lots of things can make you feel better, like a conversation with a friend, meditation, a funny movie, prayer, a tub of ice cream, whatever. You could interview woo practitioners and see if their woo makes them feel better, then pick the woo that is most likely to work on you as well. It's not super interesting.
But if the claim is that the woo makes you shoot lasers out of your eyes, the time to start spending time and effort on practicing it is when you see an experienced woo-user shoot laser beams out of his eyes. Until then, it's not really worth your time.
Dan Harris had nervous breakdowns while performing. It took serious work with meditation for him to figure out that he had a drinking problem.
I'd mistakenly attributed this to Sam Harris, a completely different person.
This is a shorter version of my comment. In my efforts to edit it, I somehow deleted the comment and the replies to it.
I was able to recover the replies from email notifications.
Stephen Klunk: "Are you thinking of Dan Harris? I have never heard any of this about Sam Harris, and I’ve been following him for a long time."
Yes, thank you very much. I've been wrong about that for a while.
Deiseach, replying to my being surprised Dan Harris had so much trouble figuring out he had a drinking problem: "In my limited experience, when people drink too much but are functional/not yet at the stage of alcoholism, they will rationalise it all away. "I'm a social drinker, therefore I don't have a problem/I have a drink or two after work to unwind, that's not excessive/I've never been blackout drunk/Sure, I like to have some fun and get a buzz on, what's wrong with that?" and so on. The person we can lie to best is our self. And I mean me in that as well. Other people can see there is a problem, but we deny it until slapped in the face with it. Maybe what meditation did for him was strip away all the "I only/I'm not/I don't" layers of excuses and made him see the raw reality of what he was doing."
In my limited experience, when people drink too much but are functional/not yet at the stage of alcoholism, they will rationalise it all away.
"I'm a social drinker, therefore I don't have a problem/I have a drink or two after work to unwind, that's not excessive/I've never been blackout drunk/Sure, I like to have some fun and get a buzz on, what's wrong with that?" and so on.
The person we can lie to best is our self. And I mean me in that as well. Other people can see there is a problem, but we deny it until slapped in the face with it. Maybe what meditation did for him was strip away all the "I only/I'm not/I don't" layers of excuses and made him see the raw reality of what he was doing.
Are you thinking of Dan Harris? I have never heard any of this about Sam Harris, and I’ve been following him for a long time.
You're absolutely right. I'm editing my comment to indicate the error.
It seems obvious to me that the right attitude to have about this stuff is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" and to always look for the simpler non-woo explanation. Such as: damaged people desperately want to believe that something magical exists so that it can save them.
The problem with this approach is that our current measurement techniques are incapable of reporting subjective changes. People's self-report is all we've got. Dismissing people's self-reported gains sounds like gaslighting to me. Sorry if my experience doesn't match any theory you believe in, but that doesn't give you the right to dismiss the evidence I have inside me that is compelling to me.
I think people are conflating a woo-fan's personal experience with the fan's beliefs about the causes of that experience. Subjective experience is an inalienable right of the subject to describe and judge the worth of. Outside observers have no access to subjective data (by definition), so denying another person's experience absolutely is gaslighting and/or delusional on the part of the observer.
The causes of the subjective experience are objective facts that everyone has a right to weigh in on, using evidence. But this includes the subject too, and people can bring different kinds of evidence. I believe the placebo effect exists, and that tapping into it (rather than treating it as an obstacle to be overcome) is an underexplored and underappreciated route of causality. In this way, you might judge a woo-fan's beliefs about causality as delusional because you're looking at the wrong kinds of mechanisms, and ignoring placebo as a mechanism.
>that doesn't give you the right to dismiss the evidence I have inside me that is compelling to me
The right to dismiss your mystical experience as self-important self-delusion is inalienable. It need not be "given", and can not be taken away.
You must be fun to be in relationship with.
Other person: I feel happy/sad/bored
You: No you don't. I have an inalienable right to decide how you feel, and my theory says you're angry right now.
Evidence about subjective states is necessarily subjective. How the person feels is how they feel. That's the brute fact. It's not possible for me to be self-deluded about how I feel. I may be mistaken about why I feel the way I do, but if my mistaken belief about the benefits of some practice are contributing to my feelings based on the placebo effect, am I really mistaken?
.But there *are* measurement techniques. Self-report works. You have a treatment group, who get a particular "woo" approach, and a placebo group who get a different treatment. You try to make it as much like the woo approach as possible, except that you leave out the part that is considered the active ingredient. So if the "woo" treatment involves a quiet, low-light setting, with music; and the practitioner chants certain things while touching certain spots on the subject's body, the placebo group gets exactly the same thing, except that the placebo practitioner touches the wrong spots on the subject's body -- the spots that are not thought to be a bit helpful. Then afterwards you have have subjects report on their experience -- maybe right afterwards, a week later & a month later. It would be good to also have them answer a few standarized questions to help with comparing their experiences-- just simple things like "how do you feel now compared to before the treatment -- much worse, slightly worse, the same, slightly better, or much better?"
That's a feature, not a bug. Rational skepticism isn't gaslighting. It is much more likely that your subjective experience of woo is the result of mental illness/self-deception than the result of some heretofore unproven aspect of physical reality.
I have exactly as much right to dismiss your claims as you do to assert them. We both get to think whatever we want.
"everything mystical has a physical explanation" Of course, what else would you expect? I think the thing here is to better define what you mean by "mystical"
Having grown up in an entertainment industry-adjacent part of the San Fernando Valley, I can recall the early 1970s when yoga was fashionable among my classmates' moms. Its now back in fashion in this century, and that seems perfectly reasonable.
Personally, I've somehow managed to slide through life without almost zero back pain, but for the many people who have endured spinal discomfort, yoga seems about as promising as anything else, such as chiropracty.
We need to put a call out for people to check whatever parallel universes they have access to. Then we can get some data on how much woo practice their Scotts have been doing, and how well their Scotts' lives are going.
Betteridge’s law of headlines says no
I'm sure standard yoga is fine for mobility if for whatever reason you need more of that, and more intense kinds might even add some cardio. Beyond that, it's magic, and the thing about magic is that it doesn't work in the real world where most of us live.
The different kinds of yoga work about to the same extent as they overlap with secular gymnastics.
That's a big assertion. I would have thought yoga was better for calming, flexibility and concentration, gymnastics better at strength and dynamic movement, but with greater risk of injury.
Honestly mobility is overrated and can leave you at higher risk for certain kinds of injuries. People treat it like an unalloyed good and it is absolutely not.
Yes.
So getting away from "woo", I don't see how it is non physicalist to note that many people from different cultures and traditions find through various practices similar neural states that are difficult to convey to those who don't experience them. I wrotre a post above putting a very basic phsyicalist description of what I think the people are trying to get at here, and it doesn't require accepting any of the duious claims about objective reality that are usually the baggae of such.
I have yet to meet a person over 30 who wouldn't benefit if they did yoga for twenty minutes, three times a week.
It's just stretching - as you say, normal yoga.
I'm unsure why there's so much skepticism to stretching in these comments and I'm always thrown off when yoga is stuck in the quagmire of bullshit like the other things in this posts title.
It could obviously also mean yoga means something completely different to people who aren't me.
I get the impression that stretching is kinda overrated. And what would I really gain from more flexibility, apart from being able to do more advanced yoga? I have what I need - what’s any more actually good for?
People that sit a lot and don't do any other physical exercise tend to get tight muscles. This can lead to posture problems like forward neck or rounded shoulders. These don't look nice, can lead to pain and other injuries.
There are some specific cases where more flexibility will help you like climbing or some funky sex positions.
Every few years I look over the research on stretching. I do this because a friend told me there are no benefits for athletics. For decades I’d stretch before sports cause it’s what you do. As a coach, I always had my teams stretch. Intuitively it makes sense.
The research I found (ignoring all the on line testimonials or lists of coaches who do this, etc) showed little to no benefits. Actually, they showed poorer performance for the first 15 minutes or so. I haven’t looked at the research again in several years; it takes time.
So, right now I don’t believe there are benefits. Every time I say this I feel like a nut. I see pics in my mind of NFL players stretching before a game and figure “it must work or they wouldn’t be doing it”. But it wouldn’t be the first time people believe something has benefits, but it doesn’t.
All that said, if someone had links to good research … I’d be ok being wrong.
Oh and I’ve only seen studies on athletics. I suppose it maybe be different for general well being, but I’d be skeptical.
Woo is obviously a result of quantum ancestor simulations retrocausally testing these hypotheses for woo. If you don't try woo or claim it didn't work, of course you won't have experienced anything from it. But the people who plausibly claim it worked will naturally be simulated in the future according to tests that assign real quale states in correspondence to woo practices, and these retrocausally interact with the "original" timeline. It's like a pared down version of a Greg Egan novel.
And while I don't actually believe this I am going to keep saying it indefinitely until someone steelmans it with a lot of math and then refutes it with even more math.
Quantum mechanics!
So basically "the secret" for galaxy brain nerds
Ideally we'd find some way to engage in trade with future AIs such that they simulate more woo.
Quale farming. Once AI has isolated the physical or mathematical correlates of quale, biological brain architectures are probably redundant for all purposes but assembling more reference data about quale. So bio entities and simulated bio entities will still be useful for generating novel quale and quale distributions and testing novel hypotheses. Then AI just takes those and instantiates them in more efficient or specialized architectures for whatever its purposes are (one possible example would be making cartoon characters conscious in a simulation with cartoon physics)
This could explain the Matrix, as an attempt to generate quale from human brains on an industrial scale.
> I am going to keep saying it indefinitely until someone steelmans it with a lot of math and then refutes it with even more math.
Who does math these days anyway? If you keep saying it, GPT-5 will learn it as a fact, and if someone asks it to design an ancestral simulation, it will include it among its rules.
GPT will someday become the sum of all human knowledge, including the parts that are wrong.
To varying degrees, the things you mention are forms of physical exercise as well as "spiritual" practises. Are you saying here you've tried a regular yoga practise and it's done nothing for you physically in terms of strength, mobility, balance, calm? Or just that the parts of it less related to physical well-being didn't connect with you?
Agreed, some yoga exercises have been quite clearly helpful for some of my upper back problems, in a way that seems mechanistic. (Pain in this area; stretch a muscle in that area with this pose; feel better immediately.) It seems odd to lump it in with the other things listed.
Moreover it's not really hard to imagine someone trying running, calisthenics, swimming a couple of times and feeling like they didn't get anything from them. What can we really conclude from that?
Genetic variation, for one thing. Some people find it easier to gain strength than others.
Trying something a couple of times and not getting anything out of it is better explained by the fact that you only tried it a couple of times rather than by "genetic variation." No one will gain significant muscle from only lifting weights a couple of times.
Excuse me, I wasn't reading carefully.
The effect is most dramatic initially. If you don't gain strength in your first couple lifting sessions there may be a problem
I was both surprised and impressed with how quickly you can move from "terrible" to "no longer outright terrible" with weights. Even if you're lazy like I am, there's definitely low-hanging fruit here.
"Everything worth doing is worth doing poorly", after all.
Note that the parent comment said "gain significant muscle", while this comment says "gain strength". Those are different. In the first few lifting sessions, you'll typically gain a substantial amount of strength by using your muscle more effectively, while gaining almost no muscle
I made myself try lifting weights, felt bad after doing so each time, and spent like a year before quitting. I tried cycling and liked it the first time.
If you don't get anything out of the first few times, "try something else" is a much better strategy than "try it more", because there are so many other things to try, and massive variation in what's good for people.
Both are valid strategies, and there's no great way to tell which one is better. For examples, I did cross country in junior high school and high school, and for the first 3-4 years my attitude ranged from hatred to indifference. I kept doing it, and eventually running became one of my favorite activities, including some pretty transcendent episodes of runner's high.
I don't mean to claim that everyone should run (or lift), just that there are plenty of instances where sticking with something for a seemingly irrational amount of time leads to a switch flipping in a way you wouldn't expect.
so the expectation with lifting weights is you would feel initially "bad" because the goal is to break down muscle to build it back up.
What often happens with people who have not tried before is they overdo it wind up with sore tendons or overly degraded muscles. This is actually a good example of where you have to get over the initial hump to see the benefits.
I think Scott focuses here entirely on the mental side, mostly all of the claims that woo completely changed how people feel about themselves, or that there is some kind of special greatness about woo that goes beyond just being in shape. That's why it's woo instead of "physical exercise"
Yes, and I get that but also think it's key to understanding why people are helped by these practises: there is no way to entirely separate physical and mental well-being. At least some of these pursuits can for sure make you fitter, calmer, better at knowing when your posture has gone awry, etc etc. Some people then have a very woo vocabulary for talking about the benefits, which may or may not involve some delusion. But if you decide to ignore the concrete physical benefits it's no surprise the psychological ones will seem obscure.
People are helped because people are highly suggestible, people desperately crave attention, and to feel like someone cares for them, and people hate when there is no answer.
My hand hurts all the time.
“Grow up you are 42 and you body is braking down”, is a lot less appealing than “for $50 I will spend 30 minutes softly speaking to and touching you and smooth your energy fields”.
It’s total nonsense and fixes nothing, but it makes a certain kind of idiot (a kind of idiot like half of people are) feel better.
Decay from aging should be treated as something to cure, not something to mock or put up with. If your hand hurts all the time, there's probably some stretches or strengthening exercises or massage techniques that will greatly improve the situation!
Or you are just old and your body is wearing out. It happens if you use it hard, it’s not a fucking invincible golden temple.
It’s also not something you can “cure”. Your body will fall apart, hurt more, and eventually fail entirely and die.
There have been rather a lot of diseases over the years that went from inevitable death to curable conditions. Who does it benefit to be defeatist? We can't entirely cure aging *yet*, but we should do what we can to ameliorate it and we should endeavour to improve our abilities for the future.
Also, on the specific thing of a sore hand - muscular and fascial issues are very much treatable and 42 is not the kind of 'old' where it's normal for your body to be falling to pieces. If you've injured it with manual labour over the years, healing it might require taking a break from that labour for a while, but you absolutely should not be ok with living in constant pain
More specificically I think, it seems that in this case, you feel getting benefit from caring contact is a sign of weakness, and to you youd rather endure pain, which absolutely is a case where your beliefs and attitude would make you get less benefit from someone who perceived that in a different way.
This 30-minute energy field smoother sounds like a rip off, but there probably IS stuff you can do to help your hand. If your preference is for exercise/physio/massage advice given in a non-soft voice and that is more 'sporty' and pulse heightening, rather than guidance given in a relaxing way, that's available too.
I just don't think it is worth it.
Think of it this way. I can probably shake 30 minutes of message out of my wife a couple times a week if I really wanted to. Would that make me feel better? Yes. Would I like that? Yes.
Do I do that, no. Because I would rather use up those "relationship credits" on having more sex. It is much more valuable to me.
Ditto all this "heal your pain with woo" stuff. I like when going to sleep relaxing sounds and soft voices, ASMR type shit (though I never have "tingles" whatever the fuck those are). I find it soothing to listen to some soft spoken British man drone on about the history of computers, or rocks, or ancient Egypt or whatever. Do I spend all my day doing that? No. There is more to life than pain avoidance/pleasure seeking.
I am in a couple book clubs, coach multiple youth sports, participate in adult sports, run a business, have a good marriage. I also love videogames. My schedule is pretty booked. Yes I could start taking some time out of that to have slightly less day to day pain (maybe), but its just not that big a deal, your body manages. You groan a bit when getting up, or rub your hand a bit after 30 minutes of typing. It is not some crisis (and when it is a crisis you can go to a real doctor!)
Someone speaking softly to you, and touching you in a caring way probably actually IS therapeutic. I think modern humans in western society tend to underestimate how much or basic genetic makeup hasnt changed since our hunter gatherer days. You perceive desiring such as weak, yet you'd prefer to experience some degree of discomfort.
I understand that is an "unfair" summarization of what you're saying, but it is a case that somewhat makes the point being made above. If your attitude is that someone speaking to you pleasantly and touching you nicely- that getting benefit from that is a sign of weakness where you feel its better to just endure pain- well, literally, a person speaking to you and touching you is going to be less beneificial for you because of yoour attitude towards it. So narrowly youve kind of examplified the point being made here
I am not saying people who want a massage shouldn't go get a massage. That would be silly. I am saying someone who hear same say "{my neck hurts sometimes", and responds "people should never hurt, you should get massages every day so you feel no pain" are IMO placing way way too much emphasis on pain avoidance versus other goods.
And woo like for instance an aunt by marriage who makes a good living doing charka healing for pets (makes even more $ than regular vets), well her clients are just silly and the people who use them delusional morons, whose brains are so malfunctioning who knows if they (or their pets) real feel better or not.
Absolutely the placebo effect is a big deal, and personal care and attention are sometimes all someone needs. Even better is getting to a place where you can solve your problems without even needing that, and get on with more productive activities.
OTOH, if you go through life as a hardened rational materialist you may be continually suggesting yourself out of observing things that a person with a more empiricist tilt of mind would find interesting and possibly even remarkable.
I can only speak to my own experience, but here's my Woo story. About 15 years ago, I threw out my back. The Workman's Comp doc put me on Cyclobenzaprine and sent me to a physical therapist. The drugs didn't do much except make me too groggy to think. And the physical therapist seemed to think that making the pain worse was somehow beneficial to my recovery. I went to a chiropractor, and she wasn't able to help my condition either. But the massage therapist who shared her office space, took me aside as I was leaving, and said, "Let me see if I can help you." I figured I had nothing to lose. So, I made an appointment with her.
It ranks up there as one of the weirdest damn experiences I've ever had. I lay prone face-down on her table, but she never touched me except for occasionally placing her left hand on my heel. Instead, she made passes with her hands above my spine and above my legs. After every pass, she'd need to belch (it almost sounded like she was about to vomit) and she'd flick her hand as if she was trying to shake something sticky off her fingers. After a few passes, I began to feel a warm tingling in my spine. Even though she wasn't touching me, I felt like she was pushing something around inside me (it was like a deep tissue massage without being touched). And she kept belching. And the smell of her belches became pretty stinky—like she was belching up something rotten. It took her about half an hour to do her thing, and when I got up off her table, and my back pain was completely gone, and I had full mobility back.
Now, it may be that I was suggestible, and it may be that she hypnotized me. But if she was able to alleviate my pain by a ritual, that would suggest that my pain must have been psychosomatic, too. Psychosomatic or not, I was hurting BAD. And after that session, I wasn't hurting any longer. I asked her about what she did to me, and she said that her mom back in the Philippines was the village curandera, and she had learned that from her mom. I'll admit I was already open to the Woo because of my heavy use of psychedelics in college. But her curendera-style cure worked better than the Flexeril, PT, or chiro. Go figure.
Agree. The benchmark shouldn't be "this is better than doing nothing", because that's such an incredibly low bar - at the barest _minimum_, you need to support the claim that it's better than going for a run or even a brisk walk, something that's readily and freely available.
It's not hard to make this case in non-woo terms though, you'd say yoga/tai chi/Alexander put the body through greater range of mobility and train more for muscle control and bodily awareness. (If you want cardio and the feeling of speed, a run is better -- incidentally there is a tonne of writing by runners about its spiritual benefits so I cannot see the distinction in terms of woo here.)
If the claim for yoga is merely "this is light to moderate exercise and enhances mobility", then I don't think a lot of people would have any objections. This isn't woo.
Given how I've heard Californian skeptics struggle with finding *any* non-Woo yoga (and in one case having to set up their own), my impression is that this is not the typical limited claims.
Hmm, might be a California thing. I would say for vinyasa yoga I've experienced the opposite, most classes are pretty much just fitness, albeit with lots of vocab involved like "Feel energy running up the front body and down the back body", which is just cueing different subtle movements as far as I'm aware.
Kinda beside the point, but it bugs me how people assume yoga is only "light to moderate" exercise. Sure, it can be, but it can also be strenuous exercise. As with weightlifting or running or biking or swimming or anything—some people will put in intense effort, some people will not.
It is a certain tell of someone who hasn't done much yoga.
ok. yes, youre not going to to be able to shoot fire and levitate- which admittedly is kinf of disappointing- but maybe you could be more specific in expectations versus reality here as you see it.
"...incidentally there is a tonne of writing by runners about its spiritual benefits so I cannot see the distinction in terms of woo here."
I can elaborate on this (and hopefully not hijack your point ...).
There seems to be this experience called "runner's high." It is, supposedly, great! And it is triggered by running hard-ish for some period of time -- 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. Not marathon length running though, one hour is supposed to be plenty of time for the effect to kick in.
Even better, your heart doesn't really know if you are running or on an elliptical machine or climbing a few hundred flights of stairs so, in spite of the name, you don't strictly need to be *running* to experience it. You just need to be pushing cardio hard.
I, unfortunately, do not seem to experience it. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't because I'm "not working hard enough." If you trust the Mayo clinic, I can sustain close to 85% of my estimated peak heart rate for about an hour and *still* no get a runner's high (and I have no intention of pushing beyond this as breaking something internal seems like a bad idea).
And I'm not unique. It seems that lots of people do not get a runner's high.
Still, lots of people DO seem to get a runner's high and I'm unwilling to conclude that they are all wrong.
I don't see how this is different from woo.
I too am jealous of those who get runners' highs. I have had them from time to time when all is well and I am feeling fast but, mostly, I'm too hung up on twinges from old injuries to feel very euphoric whilst running.
When I was doing the "Couch to 5K" program, there's a week near the end where instead of alternating walk/jog for a few minutes, you load up the workout and it just says "run for 20 minutes". At the end of that week, I had a runners' high and felt so good I just kept on jogging down the trail for another few minutes, but I think I was just really excited to have done it. Same thing a few weeks later when I finished the program. And basically never again since then, even when I had cool milestones like first street race or a new PR.
Occasionally, coming around the end of mile 2 if I'm doing 3 miles, I get something like the feeling of a stimulant in my chest, the bit of anticipation and excitement, but nothing like the runners' high as described.
I'm pretty sure there is some combination of things that allows certain people to experience runners' highs, but hearing this suggested as a possible myth makes me want to look into other cultures' experiences with it.
Because the difference between someone who feels runner's high and someone who doesn't is likely a literal chemical one! This is the whole point of neuroscience as a discipline!
There was a bit late last year about how gut microbiome differences are probably a big driver of this, but whether or not it's the microbiome, the point is that it's—at least in theory—measurable. https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/the-spice-melange-exercise-capsaicin
I get what you're saying, but going for a walk is one of the best interventions there is, in a variety of ways. Maybe the bar should be 0.5 walks.
ironically, if such people cultivated belief to where they had a high rate of placebo effect, their belief not being seperate from their body, essentially what they have done is learned the skill of improving health through mind state.
As I wrote above, what the poster was probably trying to express isnt something they have the language for. The fact people cant do a job of describiing things doesnt necessariy make them invalid.
Independent of the effectiveness of any specific woo remedy, they could be trying to say that their mind state and shared cultural beliefs make neural annealing easier then the bayesian rationalist mindstate, and that might be true.
I’m a little surprised by the original claim. I would have thought that rationalists are *more* into yoga than average people. It seems like precisely the sort of thing that evidence-based medicine with its frequentist statistics has trouble identifying anything good about, but that rationalists are happy to identify value in.
Sometimes I'm annoyed by your willingness to take nonsense seriously, but mostly (like here) I admire your style. It's refreshing to see your reasoned openness to alternate facts.
You don't know if something is nonsense or not until you've taken it seriously.
With some things, I don't need to "take them seriously" to know there's a very high probability that they are nonsense. Given my finite life span, I'd prefer to reserve my "taking things seriously" energy for those things that are less likely to be nonsense.
As the saying goes: "Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out."
> Some evidence for this: again, just the observation that the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most.
I think this is because the more perilous/treatment-resistant one’s condition becomes, the epistemic threshold for what one considers a viable treatment path plummets as desperation skyrockets, and the type of woo they become a attracted to is often a reflection of their biases/worldview. Stereotypical middle aged women flock to crystals, chakras, and bodywork, nerdy young men flock to obscure research chemicals, podcast host supplements, and wim hof, etc.
Once mainstream knowledge has failed to help (or they distrust it/reject it), they turn to their respective “cultic mileus” to find “the answers.” Because of a mix of placebo/delusion/regression to the mean, those cultic mileus will never be short of people gushing positive anecdotes and how they were once just as lost and hopeless as them, until they found the super secret hidden knowledge that saved them.
The writer Leonid Kaganov summed it up as “When humans are in a situation where they have no real powers, they start believing in unreal ones.” From prayer to witchcraft to cult leaders to woo.
People _with_ power are far from immune either, though.
I would wager that they are much *more* immune.
Possibly, but what _really_ helps is scientific literacy (just as with religion).
Suppose one is scientifically literate, but mainstream medicine has nothing to offer for your serious chronic condition - "maybe in 5 - 10 years we'll have figured something out". What are you meant to do? Of course you try alternate approaches, even if they're individually very unlikely to work; and of course you vet them to avoid the ones with a significant risk of making things worse, but most of the time the worst case is wasted time and money, and even a small chance of a meaningful health improvement is worth a lot.
Actually, I don't - I would likely be happy with taking part of an experimental treatment, but I simply wouldn't even _try_ the magical stuff.
My wager/explanation is "people we think of as having a lot of power, don't really have it".
A CEO, for example, is a classic example of a powerful person, but to the extent I see a CEO's job as a constant high-stress hell of insufficiently happy shareholders, cagey directors, skeptical customers, hungry competitors, and the SEC breathing down one's neck, it doesn't surprise me at all when I see one of them turning to a priest, a self-help guru, a Nigerian prince with an email account, a virgin on top of a volcanic vent, etc.
It appears to me that by considering the "woo" practices you are missing out on half of the spectrum. Let's call "hoo" all practices pertaining to body health: going to the gym, various cleansing diets, etc etc. These are often accompanied by woo ideology.
Agree. Woo is _much_ wider than this.
You view "going to the gym" as comparable to "cleansing diets" in terms of level of nonsense?
The gym is just a place. What matters is the exercises you do. Thus going to the gym only correlates with physical fitness and there is no causative relationship. ;)
There has been a whole slew of studies like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34867275/ that show no measurable effect, so a certain degree of skepticism seem warranted
I'm not sure I fully understand the definition of "woo" here. Yoga, for example, can be a good physical exercise, strengthening muscles and improving flexibility and balance. I guess it's only "woo" if you hope to get some non physical benefit?
But that can't be right, because all physical exercise has non physical benefit. If you keep physically active, that's better for your mental health, isn't it? There must be some more specific thing than that that qualifies it as "woo".
I believe we're talking about the spiritual/meditative side of yoga here. I don't think anyone disputes the fact that yoga can be a good flexibility/core strength/balance workout, or that mild-to-moderate physical activity can have mental health benefits. The 'woo' claims are about extra benefits you can allegedly get from approaching yoga as a meditative/spiritual practice, above and beyond the generally-accepted benefits you can get from doing the same physical movements as a secular workout.
With a lot of these practices the placebo is the point. Just joining a group of people and engaging in rituals has a positive effect on many people (going to concerts or sharing a special meal). Add some "spiritual" stuff, and come away from the session believing you did something useful that will help you, and you have a powerful cocktail.
Agreed. One could say the woo non-responders are "defective" in the sense that they have managed to innoculate themseleves against this particular form of placebo.
Joining a cult can be helpful, probably due to the placebo effect.
The spiritual side of yoga does not have anything to do with asana practice. In fact, classically, "asana" means only sitting in a meditation posture. Did he get initiated into a lineage and practiced mantra, kriya or laya for a few months? That would be trying out yoga.
The gymnastics session you can book in Western countries is not "yoga" and not something that would produce spiritual effects. It is a very big Western confusion that doing bodily contortions would have these benefits.
> The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos, dye their hair, do drugs, break off contact with their families, cut themselves, and massively over-psychologize everything they do. Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors? Which are both at once, vicious cycles that convert present suffering into future suffering, and so need to be compassionately discouraged? A lot hinges on the answer!
When I factor-analyzed a bunch of variables, one of the factors I found was an ideological/political factor that seemed to pattern-match to this. (Though I didn't have these exact questions. I think Emil Kirkegaard factor-analyzed some OkCupid data and found a similar political factor?) Here's my interpretation of what's going on:
A lot of these things are memes, and probably most of the memes (like dying one's hair) are basically-harmless. But why are there such ideological correlations in memes?
I think the biggest part comes down to differences in which people you trust. When you encounter some abstract distant idea, such as "drugs are harmful/harmless", it is hard to get direct observations on whether it is true. But if you trust Serious Authorities, then they will sternly inform you that e.g. drugs are harmful, whereas if you trust certain other groups, they may argue about some other things.
The notion that the underlying cause is trust helps me make sense of why traumas might have such a big influence on them (especially because I am pretty skeptical of the validity of "traumas as damage" theories). If someone has a conflict with an authority figure where the authority figure was bullshitting a lot and got away with it, then that is logically going to reduce their trust in authorities. It's justified by Bayesianism!
If this analysis holds, then it raises other questions for how to think of this question:
* How much of what authorities say and do is bullshit? (Quite a lot, presumably; think "law of no evidence", replication crisis and other poor scientific methodology, erc.)
* Which groups are the authorities trying to suppress with their bullshit? And are their proposed alternate memes superior to those created by the authorities, or do we need a third solution which improves on both the authorities' memes and the rebels' memes?
>When I factor-analyzed a bunch of variables, one of the factors I found was an ideological/political factor that seemed to pattern-match to this. (Though I didn't have these exact questions. I think Emil Kirkegaard factor-analyzed some OkCupid data and found a similar political factor?) Here's my interpretation of what's going on:
I did, but never published that. Should get that done. What I did for those curious: I took the OKCupid dataset (https://openpsych.net/paper/46/), then filtered down to the first 100 or 200 questions with the most data that were ordinal in data type (some are nominal and harder to analyze). Then I analyzed these with exploratory item response factor analysis to get at the structure. I analyzed it for an increasing number of factors to see what would fall out of the data first, and see if they would be consistent when extracting more factors (like in this paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691400347X). The results, as I recall them, is that the first factor is a kind of political conservatism-religious factor. The second factor is an intellectualizing factor that loads on all items related to being a thinker, including intelligence (likes books, reads stuff, interested in science etc.). I don't recall the other factors.
Good questions, I'll have to meditate on that a bit :-P
This post reminded me of a book I read a long time ago, "The Feeling Of What Happens" by Antonio Damasio, which made the case that there is a feedback loop from the brain to the various organs back to the brain, which the brain uses to made emotional assessments - basically, the brain asks the guts "what do you think of this?", and if the guts say "urgh", the brain tries to avoid it. One piece of evidence was that patients with locked-in syndrome (whose feedback loop is thoroughly interrupted) appear to be remarkably equanimous about their horrible situation - they can't suffer as much, because it takes signals from the body to really suffer.
I don't know if the feedback loop theory is sound, or what it would mean for "body work" - that's out of my area of expertise, but maybe someone else can connect the dots.
That said, it bothers me a bit that the word "woo" is applied to stuff like yoga - there seems to be a slippery slope leading from breathing exercises to weird esoteric theories about the cosmos, but in and of itself, yoga exercises are great for developing and maintaining flexibility, balance and coordination, and I would hate to see them painted with the wrong brush.
I agree with your final paragraph; Scott's list of examples at the top were 4x exercise regimes with mysticism on top and 4x purely mental things. Even if the mysticism component is utter bullshit, the physical health benefits of Yoga or Tai Chi are going to be felt - the control group for those is probably a gymnastics class or something like Brazilian Ju Jitsu, which I also expect to be dramatically better than being a couch potato
It's probably hard to separate the physical and mental component for any type of workout, seeing how exercise is considered one of the best treatments for depression. Also, I can attest that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu involves dealing with a lot of emotions (fear, exhaustion, frustration, anger, among others) and learning to harness or at least manage them.
Actually compared to most animals our physical capabilities are pretty pathetic. Watch any squirrel going about its business and you'll see better balance, wilder braver moves, move grace and agility than in the Olympic gymnastics.
Sure, workout the mind too. That's distinct from mysticism
5. It's all made up to take money from people and doesn't work except as placebo, and when it doesn't work the cheap way out is to say you didn't try hard enough.
Why on Earth would Scott, a trained medical professional who can presumably tell that the likelihood of various forms of woo working is somewhere between minuscule and physically impossible, try so much woo, btw? Surely it can be ruled out in advance that we have "chakras" or that every disease can be cured through foot pressure points? You don't need to _try_ it to discount it.
Sometimes placebo works even when you know it's placebo. Cost/benefit of trying some of these things seems reasonable even if you only ever think any positive effects will come from placebo.
For some people (Scott?), there's nothing else to try, so it's reasonable to spend small amounts of time exploring the improbable.
Woo as Pascal Robbery, indeed.
There are a bunch of things in medicine where the underlying theory is probably bunk but the treatment actually works very well. In fact, I might go as far as to say that it's more exceptional when this is *not* the case! Restricting to psychiatry makes this even more true.
So yeah, we probably don't have chakras, but the chakra people might be doing stuff that works regardless. Nature doesn't actually care if you know why your treatment works.
This simply isn't the case about woo treatments. If it were, it would show up in double-blinded studies.
(Acupuncture is interesting because it makes for unusually strong placebo while not having any other effects, and that's not nothing if nothing else works _either_.)
I mean yeah, but you have to check. You can't rule it out in advance.
It depends. Since we don't actually have chakras, a "chakra treatment" is as likely to work as doing something else more or less randomly, so it's unclear whether it deserves testing. When it comes to homeopathy (at least of the dilution variant) we don't even have to test, because it's _impossible_. Testing homeopathy (dilution type) is just a waste of time and money.
The things that deserve testing are ones that at least have a plausible mechanism. Testing herbs from traditional medicine might well make sense, for instance (note that I mean as a scientific study, not just trying it out yourself because that's very likely a bad idea), because even though most won't work, you could stumble upon something that does.
It's a fallacy to assume that a "chakra treatment" is as likely to work as doing something randomly. It's possible that some woo "treatments" got the right answer for the wrong reason sometime in the distant past, and that right answer derived from wrong reasoning was passed down through the ages because the people that tried it got real benefits from it. No?
"When it comes to homeopathy (at least of the dilution variant) we don't even have to test, because it's _impossible_."
Eh, I disagree for several reasons. First off, try this. Pour some oil into a glass. Fill the glass with water. Dump out the glass. Fill it with water again. There will still be some oil in the water. This isn't magic. Oil sticks to things and is hard to wash off with water. If this wasn't true we wouldn't need dish soap. It's really hard to dilute down to nothing using a single set of glassware. Homeopathic *theory* of the 'water has memory' variety is bunk. But the notion that some endocrine disruptors have paradoxical effects at very low doses has some support for it. Bisphenol A is one potential model for these non-monotonic dose response curves. Some homeopathic dilutions have experimentally been shown to be producing low but non-zero dilutions for the reasons described.
Upregulation coupled to downstream downregulation is 'a mechanism.' There are lots of scents that smell pleasant at very low doses and 'chemically' at higher doses. Indole is said to have a floral note at low doses and a fecal note at higher doses.
And when they've actually tried to test homeopathic remedies en masse, the results tend to be mixed rather than 'conclusively, this does not work.'
It only shows up in double-blind trials if you’ve got a well-operationalized metric, and it’s possible to do blindly. As we all know, there is no such thing as a double-blind trial of something like wearing masks or taking mdma, and no one has done studies managing to show that better teachers yield better education, which is hard to operationalize.
He also lives in the capital of woo, where every woo practitioner has attempted to congregate for longer than I have been alive.
In that atmosphere, thinking "well maybe I'll try some of this stuff out", or being nagged by friends into going for some woo sessions, is a reasonable thing.
It's also possible to shout loudly and repeatedly "none of this stuff works or has a chance of working" but then you end up with no friends and possibly no patients.
What do you mean by "work"? A lot of these practices produce very specific and unusual experiences -- e.g. "fun whooshes of energy" as Scott describes above. It's different from sugar pills or homeopathy where literally nothing happens.
Whether they're good for treating any medical problems I don't know. It seems likely that perceived benefits are just the result of the placebo effect -- but in many cases, it's a very active placebo.
That's the point. If you claim that yoga is good against depression, this doesn't seem the least bit unlikely - getting out of the house and doing _any_ exercise is likely a good thing if you can manage it. If you claim that it's better than other exercises at it, this seems a bit unlikely, but can't be absolutely ruled out in advance (it gets ruled out after studies instead). If you claim it cures metastatic cancer by adjusting "energy flows", then it seems severely unlikely and studying it seems like a waste of resources.
If you want to communicate your (valid) skepticism to woo people, I think acknowledging that their practices have real and unusual effects would be helpful. I mean here "effects" and not necessarily "benefits".
For example, it's common to hear something like "there's no evidence that meditation is really any better for stress than just sitting quietly for 20 minutes". This is probably true.
However to a meditator, it sounds very strange, because doing meditative practices is a strikingly different experience from relaxing with your eyes closed, and some of the weird stuff promised in the meditation books does actually happen. Same with many types of yoga as I understand it -- it's not at all the same as just stretching.
I very much like the result that watching nature TV is as good as meditation (because it's easier and you might learn something). There's no immediate reason not to believe that meditation is as good as any other form of relaxation, but that also seems like a very weak claim and not something you will be able to become a rich guru from.
Let's just hope that David Attenborough never uses his powers for evil...
> If you claim that it's better than other exercises at it, this seems a bit unlikely, but can't be absolutely ruled out in advance (it gets ruled out after studies instead).
That's exactly what Scott is exploring here. I think this is the answer to your question above.
Possibly his patients participate and believe in the "treatments". Scott may find it helpful in his practice to better understand the treatments so he can better communicate with his patients.
This could be a reasonable choice, especially if you only do it once or twice to see what it's about. Skeptic neurologist Steven Novella often says that it's a problem that real physicians don't know enough factual stuff about alternative medicine, because then they don't understand what they need to look out for among patients - it's definitely a good idea to ask what oddball herbal remedies a patient is taking, because that can cause some seriously weird medical interactions.
But then you wouldn't expect any strong-claim effects in the first place, and it seems Scott did?
Perhaps because of 'luck-based-medicine' https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/luck-based-medicine-my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical
It seems implausible that woo is a complete scam in the way you describe. Your model predicts that the only reason to be pro-woo is if you're selling woo, this does not seem to match the world I observe where lots of people are fond of woo the way others are fond of Marvel movies. They must be getting something out of it, even if it's only fun wooshing sensations.
Let's break this into three parts.
1. What the customers think and experience. Yes, in some trivial meaning, they must be getting something out of it, even if it's just the fear of what would happen if they stopped. But this doesn't really mean anything - humans are amazing at fooling themselves, and people seem fine with joining and staying in destructive cults or risking their health by paying for homeopathic treatments instead of going to real doctors when the tiniest bit of research shows that it doesn't work and cannot work. I'm sure they think they have reasons, but these reasons certainly don't have to be related to any efficacy. It doesn't _even_ have to be about anything that makes them feel good.
2. What the people running things think. Here, the span is likely both to be massive and to differ between different types of woo. 100% of psychic surgeons and physical mediums know they're frauds - it's impossible to perform it without deliberate fraud. But at the same time, I'm sure the _vast_ majority of yogis believe it themselves when they're selling energy flows and magical health effects - they were schooled in this, and unless you're a psychopath it's easier to sell something when you actually believe in it. And you feel better about yourself when you don't feel that you're defrauding people. We have good evidence that astrologers and fortune tellers often believe in their own nonsense.
3. The system. When I say the reason we get what we get around woo is that it can be monetized, it doesn't mean everyone involved is committing fraud. It just means that you can only sell what you can sell. Very few people will be able to make a living from telling people they should take walks now and then, and few businesses will take out ads foe that. The business end only works in the first place if you can get paid for it. Therefore all the businesses and all the advertisement will be about stuff where there's actually money to be made.
Note that most of these practices (yoga, tai chi) traditionally don't take money from people to practice them. It's only with commercialisation in the US that that's started.
How did you write something pointing to "get out of the car" while at the same time not being able to get use out of the woo? I feel like I want to be impressed by the phenomenon.
I have had an experience of finding woo non existent on the obvious premise of it not being there, then later finding it to be very existent on the obvious premise of it definitely being able to be felt and viscerally apparent. I don't think either position was wrong and the metaphysics lines up on "it was probably there but I wasn't noticing.
Woo can often be described as " subtle" and because of this it can be missed by people because it's literally the small stuff. Sometimes I've seen it portrayed as noise (when from a certain perspective, there is no noise [yes this is a rationality red flag statement], only information). And at other times I have seen subtle states be so obvious that it has taken me or my friends years to notice what's been right in front of our faces. It's hard to be concrete about subtle objects, they are not so easy to put words to. That's not to excuse lazy epistemics, but merely to give a reasonable warning that it's hard work here.
I tend to tell people, if you don't see(perceive) the "woo" then don't worry about it. Until you do. One day you may meet someone who seems nuts but is operarionalising their seeming ridiculous woo in some efficient way and is doing very well in the process. Then as you get interested in it, you may be able to see it and learn it. Until then, don't bother worrying about it.
As an exercise. If I told you that gravity is always down and not-gravity is always up. That seems obvious right? Well what if you want to try a body exercise of checking where the heavy and not-heavy are. Usually while sitting, the heavy is at the earth-facing side of the body and the not-heavy is at the not-earth side of the body. Sometimes the subtle stuff organises so that it disagrees with the location of the heavy and not-heavy sensation. Sometimes people feel the "weight of the world on their shoulders". If you spend some time (1hr), just noting where the heavy and not heavy details are in the body (maybe on an inch by inch scale) then spend a day noticing the heavy and not heavy. If ever you feel a weight-of-the-world sensation and you move the heavy through the body to the earth side (sometimes with a gently postural shift), often the emotional side of the experience will also shift. This is woo, and comes in fancier language but it works for all sorts of people.
It's possible to play with your epistemics. What if we just call it down because it feels heavy? What if the heavy one was up and the other one was down? What would that be like? Try imagine it and play with it. Maybe you can cure your depression by changing your relationship with heavy and light. This is woo.
>How did you write something pointing to "get out of the car" while at the same time not being able to get use out of the woo?
Because "get out of the car" was a story, and in the story Scott could have his hero just not bother to make good objections or have his spiritual entity just not let him make them.
The get out of the car story has the situation "the supernatural entity isn't a fake, but by pure coincidence, it looks exactly like a fake". The proper conclusion to this is not "we should never think things are fakes, for fear of this happening".
I don't get the reference. What story is this?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/
Scott uses the word "woo" in a non-standard way. It has a far wider meaning.
"Woo, also called woo-woo, is a pejorative term for pseudoscientific explanations that share certain common characteristics, often being too good to be true (aside from being unscientific). The term is common among skeptical writers. Woo is understood specifically as dressing itself in the trappings of science (but not the substance) while involving unscientific concepts, such as anecdotal evidence and sciencey-sounding words."
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo
"Woo" is probably being used because it originates in the tweet that Scott responded to.
But thanks for the relevant link!
Its very strange to me to see so many people (in the comments and the tweets), who presumably believe in "woo" stuff, use the term "woo" which in my mind (and as you point out) is used as mockery. Very strange.
Agree. I mean, the etymology of the word is the "woo... woo..." sound you make when you pretend that you're doing magic.
I have a friend who's into woo who describes it as "woo". I think part of it is friendly, gentle self-mockery to keep themself from taking it too seriously.
Also, this wouldn't be the first time where a word is used derogatorily by outsiders and affirmatively by insiders. There's lots of cases like that.
Well, woo is like the N word, the F word, the other F word, the L word, the Q word, and the C word. All cases where a word initially is extremely offensive, but then the targets took it, started using it themselves among themselves, and eventually for the in-crowd, it's no longer offensive.
I think it's pretty clear that woo is (or at least was) pejorative but not offensive?
From the discussion, it seems that at least some Woo-practitioners are trying to reclaim it, though.
the idea that this stuff will repair your emotional life or mental health is pretty unusual I think.
Millions of normal tai chi or yoga practitioners just want some vague feel-good health benefits + fitness. Alexander Technique has its base mainly among musicians and actors, who are looking for some combination of stage presence + avoiding overuse injuries. Even Wim Hof mainly promises vague improvements in "energy" + immune system + ability to be a tough guy in the cold.
My own experience with Alexander Technique is that I was promised a narrow scope of what it would do, totally unrelated to emotional processing, and it "worked" as advertised -- but as a head-oriented person I really did have a hard time perceiving my body at first and had to work through this a little as a prerequisite.
I think other woo is similar, and that these twitter posters are talking about something real, just exaggerating the benefits of bodywork and being very smug.
"Something-something-Energy" and "strengthen the immune system" are huge red flags for nonsense. You probably don't _want_ to strengthen your immune system even if that in fact worked (which is doesn't) - an overactive immune system is how you get autoimmune diseases.
Interesting. I have the opposite impression. In my mind all of these are associated with people/groups that make big claims about repairing emotional or mental health. Then the kind of narrow claims you encountered are the exception. (this is all probably just due to our past experiences and exposures).
And this can happen within the same discipline. It both stands to reason and is supported by research that Alexander Technique can help with some lower back pain by improving posture. The opposite in both regards is true for it treating asthma, which is _also_ routinely claimed.
I think this is a great point, actually. The only counterpoint I can think of is yoga does include meditation, which has been claimed by many to improve mental health (and I think it does). Scott has posted before about how meditation didn't seem to have any affect on him. However the 'bodywork' stuff wouldn't apply to this.
I've also found things like yoga to help with my mental health, but this seems totally normal (spending time focusing on slow movements stops anxious spirals and releases muscular tension).
My experience too. I do yoga mostly for the physical benefit, but it also makes me focus on the present and not let my mind skitter away in unproductive directions. It’s a really valuable mental and physical reset, although I don’t consider it mystical in any way.
I'm surprised at seeing Alexander Technique listed as woo. It's a very materialistic approach to improving kinesthesia by (from angle) making movement easier by freeing the neck leading to freeing the back and the rest of the body (this is approximate) or, from another angle, inhibiting parasitic tension associated with movements.
I was also surprised. As a musician, Alexander Technique (and especially the Taubman approach) was invaluable in finally solving the tension/wrist issues that had caused me to drop out of my college piano program and be unable to work consistently for several years.
I really was unable to tell/notice when I was "tense" in the kind of way that could lead to injury, and it retrained me to notice and correct what I needed to, in order to avoid overuse damage to my wrists. Telling someone "just relax" doesn't work when they have no idea or experience of what the appropriate kind of relaxation feels like, and what parts of body they need to relax while holding others in tenser balance as they perform musical motions. These taught me how to activate and feel the differences, and I use the techniques to this day, to adjust my posture and wrist/hand position at the piano.
I was really confused to see it listed here as an example of "woo," as I never heard it or my instructors promise or overpromise any kind of pseudoscience nonsense.
I bet people classify Feldenkrais method as woo, too.
Could you tell me about the Taubman approach?
I have found Feldenkrais interesting as some lessons (have only done Awareness Through Movement) have done nothing obvious for me whereas others have been game-changers. I'm lucky that I hit one or two of the latter early on in my experience. I am guessing that some aspects of my body functioned well already whereas others didn't.
The closest thing to woo I have found useful is a variant of Feldenkrais taught by Harriet Goslins at Esalen and other places, which she calls "cortical field reeducation" (kind of a hilarious name, like isn't that just learning??).
It involves various coordinated movements you do with different parts of your body, many of them subtle, for the purpose of reminding your body of its variety of motions and methods of coordinating movement. It's not super woo in practice, but it very much is so in her language and way of describing what's happening. Sometimes she even talks about visualization as part of what you're doing. The effects are not supposed to be spiritual, but there is an aspect of returning to knowledge you had an infancy, and integrating your body and mind better.
I did find it helpful, and I think it's subtly changed my life for the better permanently.
Sure!
It's very keyboard-specific, and iirc developed by Edna Golandsky and Dorothy Taubman. It focuses on things like hand alignment, arm balance, and wrist rotation.
There's some versions of it where you put your life on hold and retrain every motion from the ground up; I had a teacher (Terry Dybvig) who leaned toward a more integrated and flexible approach when possible, and I was able to keep working most of my gig jobs as I corrected my technique. She'd address the most glaring issue(s) she saw in a lesson, and give me some tools and exercises, and I'd apply it for the next couple days on the material I was learning, emailing her if I had questions. Then at the next lesson we'd check my progress, and add new tools to my toolbox, and so on.
Things we covered included:
* Maintaining natural alignment of the hand-- learn how to take it from how it falls at your side, and get that same shape/feeling on the keyboard, and maintain that consistently. (Most piano teachers do mention/prioritize this to some degree, so I was already familiar with this. My problem was in all the other body parts I was tensing too much, whenever I focused on maintaining the hand position. And not being sure which types of exceptions and adaptations of hand position (as piano playing does still require lots of movement and contortion) were OK vs potentially damaging)).
* Bench posture: Are the sitbones solid on the bench; where are your ears in relation to the sitbones? Do you need to add some pads to the bench so you're sitting at the right height to keep hand alignment? What are the shoulders doing? (It took me quite a while to be able to tell the difference between what relaxed shoulders vs tense shoulders actually felt like, as there's always going to be some tension/support needed while playing. Experimenting with different postures and combinations, and having an instructor tell me "YES, that position you're in and that feeling you're describing right now is what we're looking for" or "no, whatever you're doing right now isn't it; try something else" was extremely valuable to me).
* How much pressure do you need in order to strike a note? (This was the BIG and transformative thing I personally needed to learn). I did lots of exercises where you strike a note, then release as much pressure as possible while still keeping it ringing, and rotate/relax your arm while keeping the note held, to get used to the feeling of "only this much tension and pressure is is needed" and "these are the positions your hand can comfortably be in while exerting that pressure." Also lots of exercises where one presses down a note slowly without making sound, to get used to the feeling of the "catch" of the key, and how much pressure is needed to move past it. And lots of exercises dealing with finger striking and forearm striking combinations, to learn how to minimize unnecessary movement, and to learn the "just this much tension and pressure is needed to keep the hand shape and get the sound you want" feeling.
* Additional specific drills, for example for thumb crossing in arpeggios/scales to minimize wrist contortion. Also a lot of practice in "thinking ahead" and "moving ahead," making sure the hands are over the notes you want to play, in a good and supported position to strike the notes, before you strike the notes. I also had several tutoring sessions where we troubleshot specific passages that were making my hand hurt, and we tried to figure out where I was doing unnecessary twisting of the wrist or too-much-pressure motions.
* As I look back at some old lesson notes, probably the most "woo" thing was experimenting to see if there were any "trigger" words and phrases that could help me get into a ballpark-of-correct combination of tension and relaxation and body alignment. I took a pilates class once, where something silly like "pretend your core is being held down to the ground by the roots of a tree" could sync a lot of my muscles into the right alignment, a lot more quickly and easily than thinking about each individual body part. (Which then gave me an opportunity to analyze and double-check and compare what had shifted). At the piano, I found there were some combinations of tension/relaxation at the keyboard that were easy for me to trigger by thinking of my keystrokes as being "confident" and "communicative of beauty." I'm not sure if heuristic shortcuts like that work for everyone, but I was grateful to find there were a couple that worked for me.
Thank you very much.
there's an alternate and more general version of AT going around (e.g. https://expandingawareness.org/) that is focused on something causally upstream of posture itself—on awareness, intentionality-of-responses (sort of Taoist), elimination of anxiety, and naturalness of expression, and is implemented more as a meditation practice than a specific physical exercise. A bunch of anecdotes point to it being transformative for some people.
‘Woo’ encompasses a great many ideas and therapies. Taking all of them together to answer whether they are effective is not helpful and cannot be answered in one essay.
There is good research done to study some of these therapies. I recommend you look at these. Physicians routinely refer patients with lymphadema for lymphatic massage therapy. Tai Chi can reduce falls among the elderly. Acupuncture reduces back pain. You can find this research in PubMed.
Think of it like seeing a physician specialist. If you go to an obstetrician for arthritis it is unlikely they can offer an effective treatment. Not all ‘woo’ has been shown to be effective. Most effective modalities treat a limited number of conditions. And most of the effects of temporary.
Acupuncture:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33306198/
"We included 33 studies (37 articles) with 8270 participants. The majority of studies were carried out in Europe, Asia, North and South America... We found that acupuncture may not play a more clinically meaningful role than sham in relieving pain immediately after treatment or in improving quality of life in the short term, and acupuncture possibly did not improve back function compared to sham in the immediate term"
Tai Chi:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30703272/
"We included 108 RCTs with 23,407 participants living in the community in 25 countries...Exercise reduces the rate of falls by 23%...Tai Chi may reduce the rate of falls by 19%"
Manual lymphatic drainage:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32803533/
"The reviewed articles reported conflicting findings and were often limited by methodological issues...There is some evidence that MLD in early stages following breast cancer surgery may help prevent progression to clinical lymphedema. MLD may also provide additional benefits in volume reduction for mild lymphedema. However, in moderate to severe lymphedema, MLD may not provide additional benefit when combined with complex decongestive therapy."
Yes. We know it doesn't matter where you put the acupuncture needles, and we know it doesn't matter if you actually put in the needles or just fake it. Theoretically (and not necessarily unreasonably) it might still do things to how the subject experiences pain, but in that case, it certainly has nothing to do with putting in a needle and everything to to do with the distraction of the sensation.
That is, the entire theoretical apparatus of acupuncture is demonstrably nonsense. You can't put them in the meridians because meridians don't exist, and you don't actually have to put them in at all.
Right. There is some interesting research where they do basically they same acupuncture studies but with collagen injections or steroid injections for some kind of joint pain. The results are directionally the same - getting any shot/needle/procedure makes people report feeling better regardless if there was any actual "medicine" in the shot.
A pet theory of mine is that cutting works a bit like this too. Yes, it hurts, but it hurts in a manner you have control over and it distracts you from pain, possibly existential, beyond your control.
According to one study read about, acupuncture has the second-strongest placebo known, exceeded only by placebo surgery (which you can't study in a controlled manner for ethical reasons, but sometimes a surgeon has to cancel a procedure after having opened the patient up, and the placebo here is huge).
Seems like it ought to be possible to ethically study "placebo surgery" by simply informing the patients up-front about exactly what treatment they're actually personally getting, and only maybe misleading about the context of what's being studied. Something like:
"As part of this study, I'm going to apply anaesthesia, cut something open in the general vicinity of where you've reported chronic pain, poke around in there a little bit, disinfect thoroughly, then stitch the wound closed and move along to the next study participant. This has all the usual risks of surgery - here's a pamphlet on those - and basically none of the benefits. There's a chance your condition will improve anyway, for some reason not yet well understood by medical science, which is why I'd like to try it - control groups and so on. Other people are trying other treatments, including placebos. If you'd rather quit the study instead, I can't blame you, and you'll still get [participation incentive] either way."
Then, if it can be proven to predictably do more good than harm in some context that's otherwise difficult to treat, it becomes as legitimate as any other cutting-edge intervention (pun very much intended), so investigation of causal mechanisms and iterative refinement of the technical specifics can proceed from there.
You can find research to support a lot of things that aren't actually true. You have to consider the weight of the research.
Tai Chi is a series of exercises which require you to practice balancing yourself, I don't know why it would be included in your list of 'woo that might work'. Of course it does, it just doesn't have anything to do with body energy.
That being said, using the concept of chi/ki/qi as a visualization tool could be useful, but that's not really woo either, lots of athletes do stuff like that. I say this as a former practitioner of traditional Asian martial arts, some of which are completely immersed in woo.
I want to also offer a separation, "skeptical doubt" as separate from "willing skepticism". A lot of woo does get interrupted by doubtful skepticism. It can be fragile like that. Partly because it's a delicate perspective. If you walked into the meditation room, and started loudly asking "why do they do this" they may have trouble staying in the meditative perspectives. Woo can similarly be interrupted by all manner of healthy and unhealthy skepticism. However, usually a well developed woo system will have a pathway for supporting healthy skepticism and inviting it while validating it and a pathway for working with unhealthy skepticism and a place for that perspective to not interrupt the delicate "meditators".
I predict that woo non responders can be willing skeptic and find it more responsive than doubtful skeptical will be able to find. (maybe there's an openness trait here) it also depends on the need.
I have a concept I call "not suffering enough". People who suffer badly enough, start needing spiritual solutions and start asking for them. Then they start seeing them. Before they ask they often didn't see them. (warning: suffering is pointing to the subjective experience of suffering and not the nearby experience of things like "pain" or having a "bad time". You will need to notice the suffering and in a real and genuine way to get onto the stream entry path of awakening). I don't consider this spiritual problem of "it wasn't here" to be a problem for the people who don't perceive it, they aren't worse off for not seeing it, although it does seem (to me) like the people who do see spirituality as having a better time afterwards (although ymmv). Also as per the metaphor of awakening, sleeping isn't bad, being awake isn't "better" but I sure want to be awake if I have a choice. Unless I'm tired, in which case I want rest.
Sorry, are you saying that skepticism of the practice makes the practice not work? That doesn't seem to be a very good indication of the practice actually working. Am I not understanding you correctly?
Wait, why wouldn't that make sense? If the belief itself is having an effect, then disbelief wouldn't have the effect, right?
Like, take depression. If I'm depressed because I believe I'm a loser, then changing that belief can cure the depression. Even if nothing else in my life changes. So if beliefs can have profound negative effects, why couldn't they have profound positive ones?
I totally agree with the example you give. But take or energy healing or something similar. If I am required to believe in the practice for it to work, that doesn't lend much credence to the practice actually doing something (beyond the placebo). And that can be OK if the practitioner and the client both agree on this. On the flip side, I don't have to believe in chemotherapy for it to work.
Maybe the issue is just what each of us thinks of as examples of the practices talked about in this thread. If the claim is "meditation can help you changing the way you think" thats much different than "wear this triangle on your head to cure your cancer". And our discussion about each of those would be much different.
I always viewed meditation as being built on insights and cognition pattern changes. (I cured my own chronic depression & anxiety via meditative insights, fwiw.) I don't think it works in the same way as chemo. Your brain has to be an active participant.
You could be possibly be skeptical of woo and still have it work if your cognition patterns still change. But I imagine that would be really hard to do, because in order for your cognition patterns to change, you kind of have to allow them to change, which isn't something that a highly skeptical person is probably going to do.
One very simple mechanism might be that you need to be paying attention to the process for the process to work. If, instead, your head is filled with rational thought about anything, including why the process might not (or might) work, then to that degree you won't be paying attention, and thus the process won't work.
It's not the skepticism, it's the doubt. There's a pretty big conversation about "doubt on the spiritual path" that is talked about. "doubt" is one of the ten fetters.
Imagine that you are meditating and trying to quiet the mind so that you can have insightful knowing of what's going on in the mind. Then imagine that you have an interrupting sub-mind that says to you, "nothing is happening here, we should stop meditating" every time you get bored enough. Because it interrupts, it gets in the way of clear mental perception and progress. The meditator must learn to work with themselves in order to progress down the spiritual path such that they are not having the interruption. They must achieve the personal alignment of their mind to their meditation practice so that they don't continue to have these disruptions.
This is how doubt interrupts a meditation practice but it can similarly interrupt all kinds of woo type practices.
A good "patch" for trying woo is to agree to hold the doubts out of the meditation (or other practice) window and consider them afterwards rather than during the meditation. Another good patch is to only try practices that don't trigger the doubt so bad. And another patch is self compassion about the doubt.
A test for doubt: if a highly competent expert in your field said to you that you were wrong about everything and you didn't get it, would you doubt yourself?
Now imagine if a mathematician said that about your ability to add simple whole numbers. You can probably imagine that your reaction might be be to first be confused about what they are saying, then to be willing to check if they know something you don't, then fairly quickly to be willing to ignore their expertise if it disagrees with your basic math knowledge and they can't explain why. But you probably won't doubt your own math skills. Curiosity, compassion, openness and eventually laugh in their face. This is what it's like to not have doubts about your own mathematic ability in simple arithmetic.
You probably have unshakeable self belief in your basic mathematical ability.
I think that people use the word "skepticism" for different things, some of them the opposite of the other, ranging from "lack of belief" to "strong belief in the opposite direction".
People with the "strong belief in the opposite direction" will refuse to follow the instructions, because what's the point, they *already know* it is not going to work anyway.
Sometimes it makes sense; if someone tells me "if you meditate 2 hours a day for 30 years, you will be able to shoot lasers from your eyes", I would be like "hehe, no thanks".
But some "strong skeptics" will dismiss even statements like "if you lie down on a soft bed and listen for 10 minutes to a relaxing music, you will feel relaxed" as "haha, no way, this is stupid woo", just because a Hare Krishna guy happened to tell them so. And if you insist that they try it, they will be tense, and fidget, and ask every 10 seconds "this is so stupid, could we please stop already?" that they will really succeed to *not* be relaxed after those 10 minutes. Then they will write an article on RationalWiki about how relaxation is pseudoscientific and debunked.
> I have a concept I call "not suffering enough". People who suffer badly enough, start needing spiritual solutions and start asking for them. Then they start seeing them. Before they ask they often didn't see them.
I strongly agree with this.
> it doesn’t seem like woo “experts” have cured themselves and become unusually mentally healthy
That reminds me of a story about Evelyn Waugh, noted Catholic (and obstreperous asshole). He was behaving so badly one evening that his hostess said "How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic!"
Do various breathing techniques (holotropic breathwork, quantum light breath, some forms of pranayama - anything that focuses on deep breathing over >40 minutes) count as woo here? Because I found that these are very useful for getting to emotions and trauma for many people. There is a reason Stanislav Grof focused on these after LSD was illegalized
"quantum light breath"
I have no idea what this is, but I can tell right away that it's woo. It's in the name.
The name is probably just to have something that can be copyrighted. Essentially, all the breathing techniques do the same thing, there are just differences in details and naming (because copyright)
Personally speaking, I experience what is probably a nocebo effect from a lot of these techniques. When I was having anxiety issues I tried one of the most "effective" breath techniques (cyclic breathing) and found it made me feel significantly worse.
Breathing techniques are among the things that can potentially help but don't necessarily do so (like most things, actually). I never found the good old "just take deep/slows breaths to calm down" particularly helpful myself. I suspect it's based on the idea that slow breathing is associated with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system... but if whatever is keeping stress responses going has more influence, then obviously the breathing by itself is just a waste of time at best. At worst it adds additional stress because you're getting first hand evidence that this supposed surefire technique is anything but, and you might start trying harder to make it work and "trying hard" is hardly ever a good thing to do...
By the way, the comment you replied to was about a very different type of breathing – one designed to bring out things, rather than getting rid of them. I am not convinced that these types of breathing actually work for any other reason than that people are expecting them to work (and the general potential state-altering effects of doing something that's starkly different from what you do normally), but assuming that they do, maybe that's where you ended up...
No Possibility #5? The one that says "Woo doesn't work, but some people are more susceptible to placebo effects than others."
The specific woo techniques people know probably do a better-than-random job of eliciting whatever placebo effect makes woo popular. It would be kind of weird if they didn't, surely thousands of years of developing yoga has made for more enjoyable exercises than whatever random nonsense I could invent in five minutes. But this implies there's some kind of active ingredient that "real" woo has more of than my shoddy improv woo, and in some sense that means it can't be a placebo. Sure it's just giving people a fun woosh feeling, but you can describe most recreational drugs that way and they sure aren't placebos.
Oooh, I like this. And the follow-up question, "Can some procedures increase a person's susceptibility to placebo effects?"
I prefer an alternative name: expectancy effect. To me it describes much better what's going on: you get an effect purely because you expect it. It follows that if you manage to change your expectations, you manage the degree to which you'll encounter expectancy effects.
Of course, if you're a sceptic, you'll find it slightly hard to get yourself to expect an actual effect from "healing crystals", so if you want to utilize expectancy effects you'll be better off looking for things that don't outright conflict with your views. These would typically be rather more "non-woo" things – things that seem plausible but are inherently hard to test scientifically (e.g. because they are difficult to double-blind or even single-blind). Even then you likely wouldn't come into it with an outright expectation of an effect, though.
In the end, my answer is "yes, but": I do think it's possible, but it takes a lot of carefully balanced interaction with your current mindset, which is not at all easy for an outsider (one of those "more of an art than a science" and "inherently hard to test scientifically" things) and even harder doing it by yourself, especially if you've never done it before. I can try to explain a little more if you're interested... but I can tell you right away that there won't be any silver bullet.
I wouldn't be surprised if woo "works" via the mechanism of someone actively trying to do something to address a problem, regardless of what they're trying. If we go by the simple model that pain is the thing you feel when there is something wrong and we further assume wrong things can include emotions, trauma, and other non-mechanical things (ie, if we accept psychosomatic stuff), then actively spending time addressing pain could in principle be enough to reassure your pain engine that it can stop, since it was heard.
It wouldn't necessarily be a permanent solution if you fail to fix the underlying problem in the long-term, but it might work in the short-term. For example, sometimes I'm feeling physically hungry, with mildly unpleasant sensations in my stomach, and they go away when I deliberately make plans to eat in the near future. But the sensations will come back if I then fail to eat for a long enough period of time
Unsure if anyone else had this reaction, but my assumption is that a lot of rationalist types are unusually sensitive to physical sensations, and have lower than average tolerance for stuff like loud noises and physical contact. I don't think I'd characterise this as autism, except in the sense of everyone being somewhere on a spectrum. Hope I'm not claiming too much, but I personally get stressed by loud background noise and am very uncomfortable with being touched by other people, which I'd characterise as very inconvenient preferences to have.
Now, I'm not saying this is a healthy way to be aware of your body, I just feel like if you added the question into the next survey, the average reader of this blog would not come across being particularly detached from physical sensation. This at least seems like it contradicts some of the suggested reasons for us not being particularly responsive to "woo".
I wasn't conflating the two, I was just challenging the claim that people here are not very responsive to physical sensation. Obviously if you break it down more it will be more complex than yes/no.
+1, I'd love to see this question be asked but separated into several different sub-questions as I think "noticing physical sensations" breaks down into several categories, such as the difference between internal and external sensations (internal is things like muscle pain, external is something like the wind on your skin).
*I'm interested in this because I feel like rationalist types are really good at "noticing" but what is noticed may not be physical sensations.* For example, I'm very good at people-watching, but it wasn't until I took up modern fencing that I had any real body-kinesthetic sense (and what I have is still not that great). Other rationalist types will probably have something that looks rather like autism in that they are good at noticing things like flavor, smell, noise, or skin sensations.
It seems like this (sensory issues) could be lumped together with lack of bodily awareness in a sort of "low kinesthetic/proprioceptive IQ" category - if your suspicion is correct it would (vaugley/weakly, im just playing devils advocate) support the idea that rationalist don't get woo cause they aren't effectively processing input from their body
I'm naturally sensitive to loud noise, but I had to put in a of work to become sensitive to kinesthesia. I think they're different categories.
I have found that woo techniques work quite well as part of a balanced "Get your act together" approach. This means: do something for your body (yoga, gym), mind (reading on various topics, discussions), spirituality (meditation, prayer, others), trauma/shadow (traditional therapy, breathworks, guided psychedelics, various trauma releasing techniques), relationship, sexuality, art. People I know that work across all these areas visibly improved over the years. People that focused only on one technique or area of interest - didn't
I find it hard to comment on this one, since (1) I do instinctively recoil from "woo" (2) I can't get anywhere with things like meditation and mindfulness and (3) might as well throw this one in here - a lot of it seems to be "70s Californian middle-class nonsense because people had money and leisure and nothing to occupy themselves" (apologies to California which I am slandering as a state, but you gotta admit, you do have a reputation for 'where the nuts are').
On the other hand - (1) I'm Catholic, where do I get off calling other people's spiritual traditions and beliefs nonsense, huh? I think I've had one, or maybe partially one, spiritual/mystical experience in my life, and I don't mean that time I definitely bloody well *did* see a púca, and I have no inclination towards trying any of the mystical practices of my own faith, but I also believe in the reality of those mystical experiences (2) I really am the Poster Child for "not in touch with my body, not in touch with my emotions, barbed wire everywhere" so, eh, maybe I do need to work on that or something and (3) sorry, California, maybe you're just all pioneers in the field of being psychonauts.
Do you find yourself averse to talking about your mystical experience?
It’s deeply personal to me, I have thought about it a lot, and yet whenever I open my mouth to explain it to another person I just feel like I’m trying to explain a dream that I had because there’s a quality to it I can’t capture in words.
“Do not give what is sacred to dogs, or cast your pearls before swine. If you do they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.”
If you have had a mystical experience, sometimes it’s best to only share it with people who you can trust not to trample it into the mud and then tear you to bits about it.
It’s a bit of that too although swine feels over harsh. We don’t live in an age where it’s seen as wise to believe.
> you do have a reputation for 'where the nuts are'
According to Wikipedia, California produces 80% of the world's almonds. I dimly recall a comment years ago on this site saying that if California completely solved its water problems in a rational way, almond growing would still be a major agricultural use. Mmm, almonds.
If you've gotten "zero results" from tai chi, yoga or Wim Hoff Method you're doing something wrong. All of those are very solid physical training systems; Wim Hoff's techniques have been extensively studied and documented in multiple university labs all over the world. It's also well-documented that improving physical health improves mental and spiritual health. Trying to dismiss that connection, and the systems designed to facilitate it, as "woo" betrays a kind of "fundamentalist materialism" which is a Rationalist version of Fundamentalism.
What's your specific claim? That tai chi, yoga, etc will exercise your muscles and make you feel better, in the way a lot of exercise does? Those are very plausible claims--but also completely boring. They're not what anyone means by "woo".
What does woo mean in this context though? I would say yoga and Tai chi are different (not better) than other exercises in that they teach sustained self discipline, postural awareness and resilience to stress/discomfort. Plus similar benefits to meditation (which maybe is also woo), such as increased observation powers on what thoughts and motivations are going on in the mind moment to moment. Does that sound like woo? Other times yoga uses a lot of metaphors about energy lines and chakras which I feel like is sometimes woo and sometimes just a specialised vocabulary for helping you find ways to get deeper into a stretch. I'm not sure how often the woo talk is really relying on some science contradicted metaphysics...
Can you provide any of the studies on Wim Hoff? Searching "Wim Hoff" on pub med brings up only two results, neither of which is about Wim Hoff: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Wim+Hoff
Maybe there is a better term to use?
He lists a bunch of research on his site:
https://www.wimhofmethod.com/science
Alternatively, if you have gotten "zero results" from tai chi, yoga or Wim Hof Method, move on to something else. Maybe that will work for you instead.
The problem for rationalists whenever our worldview conflicts with others' is that we have to give them the benefit of the doubt while they are under no such obligation. As such, rationalism is doomed to failure under the marketplace of ideas. It's well-tuned to establishing the truth, but fatally flawed from a Darwinian/memetic perspective.
It feels like we've come at this from an odd direction. Can we define "woo" more precisely?[1] Does it make sense as a category? Who are the people who benefit from it and what benefit do they gain?[2] How do we know?
For example, you claim "the observation that the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most", but I don't have that observation, perhaps because I lack your background in psychiatry.
[1] The term seems unhelpful because in popular usage "woo" includes many things which are not wellness or spirituality practices.
[2] All your possibilities 1-4 seem to presuppose that the main benefit of woo involves processing emotions in the body, but I know some people who do a lot of yoga, and I'm confident they wouldn't say the purpose of yoga is to process their emotions.
It's fun to hear someone steelmanning woo
I mean, Scott did a much more thorough and intense steelmanning than this back on the old blog. You should look up his article on Vinay Gupta and all the related essays.
Woo (yoga, meditation) works GREAT for me, and I'm exactly the type of person who (used to) heavily identify with my thoughts to the exclusion of the body.
In fact I would have said that such a person is exactly the most likely to benefit from woo!
Exactly, it helps you get back in tune with the body. Being stuck in your mind all the time isn’t ideal for happiness, being present in the here and now and focused on what is going on within and in front of you is a good way to enjoy life to the fullest :)
Possible data point: I'm hyper-aware of my body sensations (it's not malfunctioning, I just have standard autistic sensory filtering issues). I also have a history of trauma/diagnosed PTSD. I get absolutely nothing out of 'bodywork' woo except for a feeling of profound silliness, plus some trauma-related discomfort from versions that involve another person.
So one doesn't necessarily have to be mentally-healthy in order to be a non-responder, nor does one have to be heavily dissociated from one's body. I suspect the common factor is probably a lack of faith in the woo, as is standard for all kinds of faith healing/spiritual wellness practices.
(We could go deeper and ask if people who lack the capacity for faith/spirituality are defective. I certainly have wondered that about myself.)
chemical dependencies and other things can interfere with aligning cakras - then arthur avalon, jung and richard wilhem are good bridges from western conceptualization to more holistic spiritual philosophies... jung even has a good warning somewhere in Secret of the Golden Flower about how sketchy it is for western folks to sample buffet style from eastern mysticism
Evidence in favor of 1:
You describe all of the woo things as being "bodily", but I'd say some of them are more bodily than others. Internal Family Systems is more on the "heady" end; you definitely need some body-ness to be able to access it properly, but not _that_ much. Some of the people doing IFS say they don't even experience feelings in their body at all, but it works anyway, because it's on a pretty cognitive level.
When I first started getting into this kind of thing, I was very body-averse. I didn't like the idea of doing much physical exercise, and I _definitely_ didn't want to get into bodywork or any of the other embodied stuff some of the more woo people were talking about. But IFS felt safe; it could be accessed on a more cognitive level and I could intellectualize it and mostly explain it to my satisfaction.
And it was useful for a lot of stuff. But then gradually I started to feel like I was hitting its limits. While I could still access some emotional material, pretty often it started feeling like the core of thing remained out of reach.
And also, over time I had started shifting towards more comfortable with my body. Still not totally comfortable, but much more. I stopped the IFS sessions I was having with my therapist and have instead started doing more physical things like bodywork massages, Alexander Technique, and also started going to the gym and doing ballroom dancing for the first time in my life.
I feel like I definitely started as your stereotypical body-averse nerd who processed everything mentally until I reached the limits of that approach, but going with that approach allowed me to unlock enough comfort with my body that I've been able to now shift more into the physical kinds of approaches.
Evidence kinda against, kinda in favor of 3:
I also facilitate IFS for people. I don't work with really heavily traumatized people - I don't have the experience or training for that. Rather, I target people in the "somewhat below to somewhat above average" range, with the occasional client who's a bit more below that.
And in my experience, people who are roughly around the normal range often (but not always) take to IFS easily and find it quite effective. And then people who are worse off (but still not _so_ badly off that I wouldn't work with them) often seem to have a harder time doing IFS, being less in contact with their bodies.
This seems kinda in favor of 3, in that there seems to be a u-curve. But also kinda against, in that you seem to be suggesting that healthy people wouldn't benefit from woo - and if we define IFS as woo, then I do feel like the healthy people who I've worked with have also benefited.
Also, more in favor of this hypothesis - I definitely think that if I hit a point where I was consistently happy over a long period, I'd stop doing a lot of this. (Well, probably going to the gym and dancing would still be fun.) I can tell because gradually there have been longer and longer periods when I've actually been able to feel happy with my life and not just be an anxious ball a large part of the time, and those periods have correlated with doing less of this stuff since I've been happy anyway and haven't felt like I needed to do so much of the woo.
But I'm still quite not there, and there are still some things that make me really anxious or that I feel I just can't do, so I keep at the woo stuff.
Evidence in favor of 4:
To add a caveat to what I just said, _some_ of the woo stuff is starting to feel like it's in territory of "makes me go from neutral to good" rather than just "makes me go from bad to neutral". So I could imagine keeping up with that. Some ecstatic dancing stuff, for example, feels outright fun for its own sake. So I might very well continue with my intermittent morning ritual of "do a three-minute ecstatic dance right after getting up from bed" even after I got my actual anxieties fixed.
Ah, perfect -- I always scroll through the comments to make sure that I wouldn't be repeating some other commenter, and here I find Kaj himself making some of the points I'd intended. (Note: thanks for the multi-agent theory of mind writings; I'd already been practicing IFS but MATM helps me explain it to people.)
My strong conclusions from working with (often very traumatized) people is that there are very many spectra that overlap, but for which the terms are all inadequate. Two in particular that matter here are the hyperphantasia-to-aphantasia spectrum and a "how borderline are you [capable of being]?" aka "how distinct and noticeable are your 'parts' and their activity?" spectrum. Someone who is hyperphantasic and highly partitioned (but not badly traumatized) is going to find methods that involve visualizations (and "energy") very obviously 'true'. Someone who is both of these and also very traumatized might benefit from IFS, but might also find it terrifying and disorganizing.
I've also noticed that folks on the autism spectrum (even mildly) often appear on the other end of the "partition" spectrum from folks with borderline (although I've worked with people with both).
As to the part about embodiment, I don't believe it is primarily about awareness of one's body. It's more about actually doing things with one's body -- including the ballroom dance you mention (i've forgotten what the scientific PTs call this part, increasing the neuromuscular connection density or something). I do Somatic IFS and other more 'woo' things in this space, but I won't make this about me.
A few comments down, Nolan brings up the inner verbal spectrum. I've known hyperphantasic internally nonverbal highly kinesthetic BPD folks, and wow the amount 'woo' they're capable of without drugs is astounding.
Glad to hear you've found my writings useful :)
I have a mystical vision of "Kaj Sotala personally trains Scott Alexander for a month, and then both post an article about their experience on ACX". Please make it happen!
Highly suspect new agey religious claims aside; I do think there is a dissassoation issue in the modern world. From increases in self harm and trans issues.
The thing is we are violent apes who have stopped getting into fist fights, having sex, chopping wood in the winter or walking/jogging for miles at a time.
Idk why the solution to that would be "think about your body in the way the magic cystals say" and not "take a 15 minutewalk in a thunderstorm" or any other sort of thing.
It's a question of what can be monetized.
For instance, the only diet you probably really need (unless you have some particular medical condition) is to eat varied food in moderate amounts, preferably with a lot of vegetables. But once you've said that, how do you make any money from it? Whereas if your proposed diet is so convoluted it requires an entire book, then you can sell the book, and probably hold courses as well.
> how do you make any money from it?
Many people would be happy to pay you for collecting those vegetables, preparing them, and delivering them to their home every morning.
But yeah, writing a book and selling it scales better.
The market for selling regular vegetables is already pretty well covered by well-funded and experienced professionals. This seems like a difficult spot to make money.
But if I don't sell merely any vegetables, but ones that I have blessed with the powers I claim to have received from godlike aliens, _now_ there's money to be made if I can find sufficiently gullible customers!
"The thing is we are violent apes who have stopped getting into fist fights, having sex, chopping wood in the winter or walking/jogging for miles at a time."
It's mostly men who did those things (aside from having sex, which is more common now than ever before for both genders). It's mostly women who are trans and cut themselves.
People are generally having less sex these days than even a generation or two ago, probably largely because of the decline of marriage.
Interesting. I used to have a fear of public speaking. I went to a therapist who suggested that this was general anxiety (I think it’s a specific phobia) and started on these mental exercises that involved “quieting my inner critical mind”. I did that for a while until I realised I never did have an inner critic at all.
I do have an internal monologue but it’s something I control, it’s just my thoughts about stuff. Could be the weather. Or thinking about this comment before I write it. Or conversations I might have in the future.
When worried I feel it in the gut. Maybe I need some woo?
So the therapy helped?
No.
Ok, because the way you described it at first sounded like you had this helpful realization as a result of doing the exercises. (Or at least I was unsure if that is what you meant.)
That's a bizarre coincidence. A couple comments up I was responding to Kaj and mentioned Somatic IFS, but didn't go into it. One of the other spectra I've noticed in people seems related to how verbal (or how uncontrollably verbal) their inner worlds are. You sound like the ideal use-case for the more somatic version.
Well I don’t feel anxious, mostly. Public speaking aside, I mostly never did.
I am internally verbal, just not overly self critical. And this therapist assumed that everybody had this critical internal voice.
It's fascinating in a Wittgensteinian way how the words we use for our experience generalize so poorly. Huge swathes of the population would regard the ability to 'control' the verbal contents of their minds as adjacent to the Buddha's claims about the jhanas -- many are pursued throughout the day by unstoppable cascades of words: criticizing, arguing against the criticism, ruminating on resentments, etc. They're not schizophrenic and don't believe these words originate outside, but they are similarly helpless to quiet the words or escape them. You and a person of the type I just described would occupy different places on a spectrum, but we don't have a concise agreed-upon term for what to call it.
👍
Yes, this also surprises me a lot. Some people seem completely ignorant of the possibility to think something on purpose, or make themselves feel something on purpose (e.g. by listening to music). Some people are even scared of the idea.
As if: "if I change my mood, it is no longer myself" (a phobia of being artificial/fake in some way?). Whereas from my perspective it's like "if it already happens naturally hundred times every day, what could possibly go wrong it I do it once or twice on purpose?". Especially if I do it so rarely that it doesn't meaningfully change the daily average anyway. (And there would be nothing wrong even if I did it often.)
I have a different interpretation that might be interesting (or, who knows, maybe even useful) to you.
In the general, I believe it's fair to say that anxiety type things are learned responses. Past experience of some sort accumulated in the mind as a conditioned response of sorts to a specific type of situation. Maybe it even started from the infamous "somebody said bad things to you in your childhood", but the actual "root of the problem" is irrelevant here. All that matters is that things from the past (recent or not) affect your immediate, "automatic" mental response to things in the present (including you thinking about the future; the thinking about the future happens in the present, too).
For the rest of this, we'll go with a contrived but easy-to-analyze example: you did public speaking 20 times and each time a few people in the audience frowned at you and now you have a fear of public speaking. In your mind, there's some sort of association between the idea of public speaking (PS) and danger (D) of criticism or whatever: PS -> D. I could call it S for "stress response" too but "danger" is a much more evocative word, so let's stick with that.
When you're reasonably well-adjusted, the vast majority of small everyday issues are something you can deal with through internal monologue and thoughts and all that, or just by noticing them and letting them slide off your back. However, if something's already a bit wonky or occasions pile up, that may no longer be enough, and this is where all of the failure modes start to creep in.
After the first time you get frowned at, that's easy to write off as an isolated situation. Situation handled with thinking, conditioning averted. However if it keeps happening, it's harder to just write it off as random chance, and the frowns start generating proper potential for conditioning to happen. Alternatively if you never really thought about the frowns, *potentially* they could result in conditioning from the get go. It would probably depend on what your internal estimator (of what the frowns might "mean") spits out.
Now, suppose you do notice the frowns, but they are getting too many for you to reason away... you might actually start conjuring up future scenarios in your head if you think about giving another talk, and feel a little nervous. Now, that's the beginning of a conditioned response right there – the conjuring up scenarios is a "somewhat automatic" response, and can quickly become an unintentional habit (at which point it's a fully automatic response). This can happen slowly or quickly. For instance, if you wallow in the worry and really get into it, you essentially reinforce it "harder" (in the same way large frights probably have a vastly higher probability of turning into a phobia than small frights).
In any case, at some point we have established PS -> D -> E+T (emotions and thoughts) happening automatically.
Now, the other big thing that virtually everyone tries for dealing with unwanted thoughts and emotions is trying to get rid of them by internally arguing against them (emphatically telling yourself that "this feeling is bad/useless", etc.) or by kind of pushing them aside. But once again, that can serve as conditioning: you end up "teaching" your mind that you don't want the unwanted thoughts and emotions to come up – think of it as operant conditioning you're doing on yourself –, and after some repetition maybe it happily obliges: the thoughts and the emotions go away… but that still leaves you with PS -> D. The path onward to E+T has been eliminated, but your mind will still try to let you know about the "danger", right? So you might be left with a rather more vague response, e.g. a racing heart, sweaty palms, a feeling in your gut or whatever, let's call it PS -> D -> G. Maybe you can manage to push that away in the same way, but then PS -> D is still there, and who knows, maybe next it will express itself as a rise in blood pressure...
Now, woo or not, the real problem is the PS -> D link. Once you've removed E+T and are left with PS -> D -> G (or perhaps PS -> D -> G+E), you can't argue with any thoughts anymore (not that this helped in the first place). However, that doesn't make "bodywork" the solution, either – at least if it doesn't, as a side effect, eliminate the PS -> D link.
Please let me know if you want to hear my ideas on necessary ingredients for dealing with the PS -> D part. I'll say up front that this is probably a little trickier to actually execute if you don't have a clear and direct emotional response to work with, but I don't believe in "impossible". :)
Fear of public speaking is a phobia, it’s not learned from previous examples not more than arachnophobia is learned, people fear spiders in countries where there are no dangerous spiders.
Anyway I eventually did solve this.
Of course phobias are learned (one trial learning, in many cases) – how else could they even develop? Fear bacteria? (I don't mean that, of course, I just honestly can't think of another way a phobia could possibly develop.)
Arachnophobia Is an example of an innate phobia. Plenty of people who have never given a public speech fear doing one. There are also learned phobias.
You can learn a fear of public speaking by taking prior observations of criticism, judgment and shunning from individuals and generalizing this to a whole audience of people.
True... turns out I don't actually disagree with that. Admittedly I limited myself to the purely classical conditioning explanation in my previous comments, but conditioning in a broader sense might just as well happen internally, i.e. on a cognitive level. You brought up a good example for that. Similarly, someone might develop any kind of specific fear/phobia without being exposed to that type of situation even once, simply based on the knowledge that something might happen, and then worrying excessively about the possibility (to simplify a little). For example, if I read about venomous snakes and I start obsessing about getting bitten, I can develop a fear response without ever seeing a snake.
However, in my view that's still a learning phenomenon, just not one that's as easy to model as classical conditioning. (I'm not going to get into genetic predispositions and such, which I suppose would still only raise the baseline chance of ending up with some type of phobia, without actually, strictly speaking, causing it.)
A phobia is a kind of anxiety disorder like how OCD is a kind of anxiety disorder, it's not generally a trauma response to a bad prior experience. Yes, some people who were bullied go on to develop social anxiety, but that's not the standard model for all of anxiety. The content of the feared thing isn't necessarily connected to a prior experience. It's generated by a mix of genetic and environmental factors, but the environmental factors are more varied and complex than a single kind of content-related antecedent.
As it happens I do not disagree; I think I failed to fully explain my view. Sorry about that.
I definitely acknowledge that anxiety disorders can have a less obvious origin, but as far as I'm concerned that simply makes it a different type of learning-induced outcome; learning not from a concrete situation but, instead, from a cognitive construct (e.g. imagined situation). Genetic predisposition or not, this is the only way I can make sense of how anxiety could possibly develop.
Oh interesting okay, I think I understand better what you're saying.
I would say I see anxiety on a spectrum of normal human traits rather than a thing a person has or doesn't have and that therefore needs a causal explanation. Like introversion or neuroticism or ability to interpret social cues or ability to focus on things by force of will, etc.
I imagine prior experience or environment may raise or lower a person's anxiety, as well that people can actively do things to raise or lower their anxiety.
I also think of anxiety as inherent to the human mind and experience, so it doesn't usually feel to me like there's so much something to explain. If a person falls really far outside the bell curve in terms of having a ton of anxiety, I think of that as having many potential causes -- genetics, trauma, past environment, current environment, lifestyle choices, reinforcing personality traits (high neuroticism for instance), physical processes (hyperthyroid, etc), degree of psychological skill and insight, etc.
Another angle (different from the one above but still about multiple lines of unknowable causality) might be to think of severe anxiety like cancer in that it's almost always multicausal -- genetics, exposure, prior illnesses, lifestyle, bad luck, things we don't understand. There are some instances like with years of cigarette smoking where the causality is more clear, but for most of cancer that's not the case. We can go back and try to tell a story about how a particular person came to have cancer, but we have to acknowledge most of the time we're fabricating a story.
The way you tell this, goes from a lack of self understanding to a understanding of the bodily location of the fear, if you stopped there it is incomplete and you could resolve the fear with some more therapy work.
If you think about the gut type sensation and look for a first memory of feeling that gut feel, you will probably find a root cause memory that you can do reparenting on. Specifically asking "what would I have wanted to happen differently in that memory?" and then imagining that happening instead and iterating until the burden feels better. If you have no concrete memory, working with an imagined scenario can also resolve the problem.
What fear are we talking about here exactly?
You said that you ended up finding a fear sensation in the gut. You can do further therapy on that sensation if you didn't already resolve it.
I don’t have general anxiety. I just had a public speaking phobia which I fixed.
I feel worry - when I do feel worried - in the gut but not the mind (ie I don’t over think things). I can hardly expect to eliminate all worry from life.
And in a certain light, eliminating all worry can be done in an unhealthy way (by suppression/denial). There's a certain healthy place for worry in a balanced life.
It's only relevant to address things if they are a problem.
May I ask how you fixed it?
“The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos, dye their hair, do drugs, break off contact with their families, cut themselves, and massively over-psychologize everything they do. Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors? Which are both at once, vicious cycles that convert present suffering into future suffering, and so need to be compassionately discouraged? A lot hinges on the answer!”
What is the correlation between traumatized people and various sexual predispositions? Anecdotally, I haven’t seen much of a correlation between trauma and homosexuality, although 30 years ago, I recall otherwise, perhaps this was a case of repression leading to trauma. I don’t imagine it’s controversial to say BDSM is associated with trauma, as it’s associated with the pursuit of pain. But it’s controversial to link trans predisposition with trauma, in spite of this being anecdotally self apparent, and objectively involving hormonal disruption and intense and irreversible cosmetic surgical procedures.
No matter what else might be at play, for sure early sexual trauma pulls the veil away from sexuality. The American Dream involved becoming happily heterosexual in high school (after cute harmless crushes in middle school) and going on to have a satisfying marriage and 2.3 kids. Turns out sexuality is more complicated than this, but without trauma it's easier to maintain the pretense of simplicity.
I think you missed a period at the end, there.
Possibility 5: it works, but it doesn't come in a flavour that I like
I'm prepared to believe that slowing down, breathing and moving my body in a very deliberate manner for a little while might make me feel better, calmer, more relaxed. But the only forms of "woo" that are available are all very close in meme-space to a whole bunch of things that I don't like, so I cannot do them without feeling silly, and if you're feeling silly and internally grumbling about it then you're not going to get any benefit from it.
What is needed is for someone to come up with a version of the same thing that is more congruent with my self-image so that I can do it while being comfortable with myself.
Sounds like the MBSR people have just the thing you're asking for. Take a minimalistic version of 'woo'-type exercises, explain how to do it in plain words, make hypotheses about its psychological effects, test them, publish.
Love the reclaiming of the word 'woo' to mean actual practices, as opposed to the disapproval of them, or of the worldviews that are often associated with them. Let's keep using the word in this sense.
Personal anecdata, you can take me as just one data point. I'm just at the spot where woo doesn't come easy for me, but I still have enough access to it to persevere, and I can say unequivocally over several decades that 'woo' has been a huge contributor to my well-being.
Having worked (and fought) plenty with with this space, I can attest that the experience of being "dissociated from bodily experience", and "processing emotions in the mind" (i.e by thinking) pretty well describe the experience I have when I stop doing any of it for an extended period. And by comparison it feels like shit. It's liveable shit - I've never had a mental health problem bad enough to be diagnosed, but the difference is very notable. Imagine having always had pretty bad fast food, and then one day trying gorgeous home-cooked gourmet food - that kind of difference.
In terms of woo itself, I've tried meditation / mindfulness, yoga, relaxation, Wim Hoff, and probably a few more. These days I'm not so much about specific techniques; what I've learned is that if I take a 15-20 minute break or two a day, where I step away from all goal or relationship oriented behavior, and just consciously give myself this time to go as deep into my inner feelings/sensations as it will go that day, just letting it be and breathing through it, there is a whole blanket of inner tension that lifts, at least a bit, and sometimes by a whole lot. The positive feeling is best described as one of integration, which is why I would tentatively agree with describing its absence as "dissociation".
I'm well aware that many people have no attraction to any of this, and don't feel any benefits when they try it, so I'm happy to see Scott express this so clearly. Which raises the interesting question about what woo is actually doing and why it helps some but not others. From my experience, I would clearly exclude option #4.
In terms of the other options, I tend towards #2. People are different in many ways, and there's no obvious reason to declare them defective if they respond (or fail to respond) to woo.
My speculation as to why this whole thing works, is to take a broad view of ourselves as evolved biological organisms. One of our core evolved senses is a general sense of well-being (or lack thereof), and I've even argued than on finer introspection, this is not a single sense, but a multiplicity of senses of valence that are not fungible with each other. To give a simple example, it's possible to be hopeful and sad at the same time. And of course every subsystem of our body feeds into these. So, by default, the idea that doing specific actions with your body/mind/attention/breath/etc should have all sorts of impacts on your well-being should not surprise anyone. It would be mighty weird if our rational centers were self-contained enough to override signals from everything else, and also to overpower signals feeding into the rest of our nervous system.
Another intesting point is that all of this requires no technology or science to function, it's low tech enough that plain old cultural evolution can explore the space and create a body of knowledge. Hence all these disciplines with old and exotic names...
More specifically, I recall a book about Wim Hoff technique speculating that a good part of what this technique does is to create some kinds of stimula that our ancestors regularly had, and that our modern lifestyle has lost. This applies to regular physical exercise too; for most of us it requires actual effort not to turn into couch potatoes, but when we do the effort, it pays off, because it's the kind of thing our bodies are built for.
Our modern lifestyles also arguably involve some kinds of cognitive stress that were not there in our evolutionary past, and that we are not so easily built to process. In this view it's not surprising the rise of technology goes together with a rise of mental problems, even when we are objectively safer and more comfortable than ever. So it's not surprising putting that attention *away* from the cognitive rational centers for a while (by putting it elsewhere) may help.
For the interesting question of why it appears helpful for some people and not for others, and restricting ourselves to Scott's emphasis on emotional processing, let me propose a tentative model with 3 variables:
1. How much emotional 'load' one generates. This probably corresponds pretty well with neuroticism of the Big 5, which like most everything, I would expect to be roughly bell shaped, and about 50% genetic. So the average person generates a fair amount, and there will be extreme outliers both ways.
2. How well the system 'processes' this load on its own, and gets it out of the way. The classic pop-psy idea is that if it's expressed rather than repressed, it doesn't accumulate. So if your system is good at that, it will get expressed through chatting with others, moving about, maybe doing some hobby or exercise or writing or art or music, and you probably won't be thinking of it as "therapeutic" or "woo". Otherwise, tension accumulates and discomfort ensues.
3. How much conscious access you have into the processing. If you manage to get some access to the accumulated load, you can learn to do specific things to ease it. So you start finding that various types of therapy or woo actually work for you. OTOH, if access is blocked, you try these things and they do nothing for you.
Hence you get different emotional styles. The rare person who just doesn't generate the load, and is genuinely fine just about all the time, and falls quickly back on their feet otherwise. The one who generates a moderate amount but fails to process it much, whose life basically works, and run around saying they're fine but looks just a bit rigid and complains of muscular tension. The one who generates lots but manages to get it out, so comes out as emotional but still has it together. The one who looks just fine but is actually getting more and more clogged until they have a breakdown. The one who generates a fair bit, has learned to work for it and manages to more or less ease it, and may become a loud advocate for their preferred technique. And the unlucky one who generates a lot and tries all kind of methods but they don't help.
I like this theory quite a lot.
Most woo systems (and I think a fair deal of psychodynamic therapy modalities) rely on an ability to think symbolically and to take that symbolism as more "true" than physical reality - a sort of Copernican turn or secret Kantianism.
The description that I've read in a number of other comments about having access to lots of low level sensation and that not working with woo practices adds evidence to this; the "magic" of woo is about taking that sensation and hammering it into a particular symbolic
This is also what happens in IFS as I understand - the client chooses to slot their psyche into the symbolic frame of IFS (child parts, protectors, self at best...) and then is able to use that frame to get particular results or resolutions to past experiences (which one can argue are also always already reconstructed in the personal symbolic of memory)
My sense is that entering into foreign symbolics is a really big ask for rationalists, but that without that entering into, none of these things really work (including organized religion?)
Does that land with others experiences?
That's a very interesting point. There's probably a spectrum there - you can do plenty of yoga or tai-chi exercises without hearing or adopting any symbolism, but they do come with associated symbolic systems (in this case: chakras, prana, qi, etc.). Same happens with meditation/mindfulness, you can just do the exercises and put the attention to bare sensation, or you can adopt the associated symbolism, a first-person or non-dual worldview.
Yes, it lands with mine.
I think about the common factors research on psychotherapy which looks at the shared attributes that are effective in therapy that transcend individual modalities. My memory is there are three that stand out: client motivation or willingness; quality of rapport between therapist and client; and a shared story told about what's going on with the client and how to get them where they want to go.
You could see how alternative treatments (what we're calling "woo" here) enlist the same common factors and so their efficacy could fall down where those factors aren't happening -- the patient/client isn't very willing to engage with the system; there isn't great rapport between the person delivering the woo and the person receiving it; and they're not on the same page about the story they're telling.
I imagine there are aesthetic and identity kinds of considerations that go into whether a person will be drawn to a particular kind of story (ie, system of diagnosis and treatment, including use of symbols). There are obviously some interventions where one's belief in the story is not as crucial to the outcome -- getting a broken bone set or having a kidney replaced maybe. But I'd venture that most interventions, including ones fairly well inside mainstream medicine, still depend a lot on shared story-telling in order to optimize outcomes.
"the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most" => egregiously false! The main demo at meditation retreats seem to be nice, left-leaning knowledge workers. Alexander Technique is taught at professional acting school, and dancers often learn it as well. In SE Asia, mostly stolidly normal reactionaries become monks. I would say the opposite, actually, that the sickest people tend to try everything for a short time and don't stick with or progress in anything, including woo.
"here “woo” means various more-or-less-alternative wellness and spirituality practices." => Why is Alexander Technique on the list? It's mainstream in performing arts and especially acting. It's not spiritual at all.
"it is the one mental health technique which works 100% of the time" => this seems to be sarcastic, but there's no reason to think that there shouldn't be broadly effective mental health interventions. Exercise and vegetables are broadly effective physical health interventions. Listening to somebody shouting insults at you is broadly harmful to mental health, so why couldn't something be broadly helpful?
Imo there's another explanation you skipped which seems most accurate to me: there are a bunch of good practices that are probably universally good, like bodily awareness, mindfulness, etc. Woo people are disproportionately likely to want and accept a layer of dubious semi-spiritual interpretations on top of this, for a variety of cultural and personal reasons. If someone tries to sell you on the framework, it won't help unless you have some of those reasons. But that doesn't rule out the usefulness of the underlying stuff. It's also very hard to disentangle which parts are just the physical reality of human bodies and which part are in the spiritual layer, largely because it's hard to find stuff about the former that isn't soaked in the latter.
One big important question is whether hormones for trans people are important life-saving technology which keeps them from killing themselves, as its proponents claim, or it's a gnarly treatment with lots of medical risks and side effects including mood swings which dramatically increase the risk of suicide, as the available info seems to indicate.
Got any like to “available info?
I don’t know about “woo” but I have read a lot of therapy books and some of them place a lot of emphasis on clients’ being able to experience their feelings in their bodies. I don’t really understand this well. The best way I understand it is that the point is to experience emotions as, well, experiences or sensations and not as narratives or interpretations.
I definitely agree with your understanding... but there are also people who are so removed from their feelings that they don't even know they have them (if that notion makes any sense), and that makes the feelings particularly hard to unravel. I'm not convinced that being able to experience your feelings in your body is useful in itself, or more useful than experiencing them as thoughts and in other less kinaesthetic ways, but it could be a helpful step along the way.
Yes, I see what you mean. For me personally, though, what seems like a natural way of describing feelings is like, "I feel sad as you would if your friends all left", or "I am anxious because I am afraid I will say the wrong thing and people will laugh", but "I feel anger as a tightness in the chest" or something like that is not so natural. But some people apparently have the sense that the connection to the body is essential, or healthy somehow.
I thought about it some more and it seems to me like there is another indirect benefit of feelings "connected to the body": it serves as evidence to yourself (and, potentially, therapists you might talk to) that it's "real". For example, if you just say to yourself, "I feel sad", that doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually sad (obviously). Now I'm assuming that you can distinguish a thought of "I feel sad" that is accompanied by sadness from a thought of "I feel sad" on its own... but if there is no sensation going on in the body, it might be much harder to describe (or even understand) the difference.
Once again this does not necessarily mean that feeling emotions in the body is superior, just that it's easier to talk about.
Body-oriented psychotherapy has been having an ascendant moment in recent years. That seems good for people who find it helpful to access psychological work at that level. But its rise brings the idea that everyone "should" be able to experience and talk about their feelings as bodily manifestations, and that seems potentially problematic since there's a lot of variation in subjective experience and no one needs to feel like they "should" be experiencing their feelings differently from how they do.
There are some situations where it can be helpful if a person does have access to better interoception. Like some anxious people have a lot of chronic neck and shoulder tension and some have migraines that are set off by psychological stress manifesting as tension in the body. So helping people link up the tight jaw, for instance, as an early warning sign in a stress cycle fed by anxiety can be helpful.
Dissociating from bodily sensations is a common response to trauma for some people and so helping them recover interoceptive awareness can help further recovery.
I don't think anyone should feel obligated to talk about their feelings as something they experience in their bodies. There are therapists who will come at clients repeatedly asking "where do you feel it in your body?" and I think it's fine to ask, but if it's repeatedly asked to someone who doesn't experience feelings that way, it can convey a kind of normative standard that isn't warranted.
As someone who feels ambivalent about woo - I’ve seen and experienced instances when it both worked and did not work - I appreciate Scott’s efforts in exploring this topic. With that said, I also think that psychiatry has a lot of woo in it, and I would also love to see him explore that area more.
Your mind is part of your body. All bodily sensation is within the nervous system, and inseparable from mind. If you feel emotionally fine in either your body or mind or both or neither, then what is the problem you are trying to solve?
I have a PhD in cognitive psychology, thesis involved neuroimaging, and perhaps as a result have perpetually got hung up on what we're talking about when we talk about "processing" esp wrt the body. What does it mean for the body and the mind to process something? I can invent explanations, some of which are more satisfying than others, but the term got such heavy use in the article that I suspect it's been treated formally somewhere. Can someone point me that way?
I suspect that it's more of a metaphor really, for "cognitive activity" (which, of course, is not directly measurable: you might be able to see neurological activity but I don't think we're at a point where you could derive from that a sequence of thoughts and symbolic matching and whatever other things we presume to be common cognitive processes) that takes inputs (and internal feedback loops) and transforms the state of "the mind" somehow. Computers process information and in the same sense brains process information, but obviously we lack a lot of insight in the middle layers of abstraction: we know [some of] what the individual cells do and we know about some particular structures they comprise, and how some larger areas in the brain are correlated with certain tasks, etc. – but I don't think we can adequately explain how the brain creates the subjective experience of "I'm thinking of the colour blue", let alone "I'm doing this chain of thinking with inner monologue and imagining hypothetical situations and recalling memories and contrasting them to the hypothetical situations" (just as an example)...
Given those limitations, I can't see a way to get much more concrete about what "processing" might mean, at least without a lot of hand-waving. Of course, if anyone has a definition with some actual substance, I too would be interested in seeing it.
I could say a lot about some of that -- e.g., enumerating the things that are probably occurring (that are inferentially occurring) from a purely psychological / cognitive perspective during "processing" -- but if there's really no agreed upon sense of what people are talking about when they talk about it w/ a somatic lens, then I'm even more confused, since they're often talking about it w/ great virulence and certainty.
Although, upon further reflection, I suppose this is the last thing in the world I should be surprised about.
In my experience, almost all modern dancers and most ballet dancers partake of some amount of "woo" as used here (yoga, meditation, Alexander, Feldenkrais—usually focusing more on the somatic education than the transcendence). Among my acquaintances, there's not an obvious correlation with mental health: you get well-adjusted dancers doing a little or a lot, along with anorexics who don't and high-strung people examining their chakras all day.
This is a population of people exceptionally attentive to their bodies, to the point of spending ten hours a day obsessively testing whether they can hold their leg behind them at exactly such and such an angle while balancing on the other and swinging their torso from exactly position A to position B, etc. Some do well on academic tests and others don't, but the real community value is "physical intelligence"—being able to understand and imitate complex movements after seeing them once, predicting how a movement will feel and how the physics will work without actually doing it, being able to trust your body to find a safe and elegant way to land when you find yourself in a strange midair position. And among this community, it's just taken for granted that it's worthwhile and healthy to dedicate time to explicitly reflecting on how energy and emotion flow through your body.
My take is that different people's cognition is "embodied" to different extents: some people do all their thinking in an armchair and think their body is a tedious irrelevance, other people's executive cortices interface more extensively with their motor cortices and they prefer to do their thinking through motion. Accordingly, "woo" is simply the embodied-cognition side of mentalization or introspection: some people reflect on their intellectualized minds by thinking about their cognitive biases and intellectual competencies, others reflect on their embodied minds by paying attention to how energy moves through their daily sun salutation. Psychologists are familiar with problems associated with insufficient or excessive metacognition about one's intellectual cognition (BPD and neurosis respectively), and similar to Scott's "U-shaped curve" there are parallel unhealthy conditions in which people engage in either insufficient or obsessive metacognition about their physical cognition.
In the Michael Teaching, and also in Gurdjieff's Fourth Way teaching, there are three main centers: intellectual, emotional, and moving/physical. (Technically there is also instinctive, and 3 higher centers mirroring those 3, but beyond the scope here).
Everyone has a preferred center, and a secondary center, and they tend to view and access the world thru those lens.
In short, Think or Feel or Do, pick two, and that's your typical perspective/operation.
Body awareness is one center. Woo comes in many flavors, but most of the Woos listed are body/moving centered woo, often then using that platform to do emotional center work. Works well for those folks who pick those centers, but poorly for non Moving centered people. Talk therapeutics might work better for someone Intellectual centered to reach their Emotional center, as an example. (Or counter to this, picking the center you use least might help balance and free up stuck patterns... So getting you out of your head and into your body, for example)
In other words, Woo has many flavors, and there is Woo to explain why there are many flavors.
If I watch TV all day and eat a gallon of ice cream, I feel meh. If I bus, plane, train, and then bus again, I feel meh. When I do breath meditation, I feel very un-meh. Scott seems to think of body awareness practices as trying to remove DSM-5 disorders. At least for me, that's not what body awareness is about at all!
Possibility 5: Woo works on some people because the placebo effect is very powerful in psychological conditions, and some people have a worldview in which it would obviously work.
Possibility 6: Woo doesn’t work on some people because the nocebo effect is very powerful in psychological conditions, and some people have a worldview in which it obviously wouldn’t work.
I like to use the Moties' approach to quick analysis, so here's a first stab. On the one hand, I love the generosity, the willingness to grant the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much doubt to grant the benefit of. On the gripping hand, the vagueness of Woo Language traps anyone who jumps in carelessly. I conclude that it would take even more effort to break down and address the specific claims that go under the Woo heading.
That doesn't resolve my curiosity, though, there is still some mystery in my head about this post. I set a five minute alarm and sit back in my chair. It takes only seconds to think the thought that this post isn't about Woo, it's about exploring ways to organize belief and disbelief so that these natural enemies can get along. The alarm went off, I haven't thought of anything better, and I notice my curiosity feels suitably destroyed.
I seem to remember that in the distant naive past rationalists used to hope to disentangle actually working parts of mystical traditions from obviously worthless "woo" nonsense that they were enveloped in. Is it fair to say that, judging by this post, those hopes have been thoroughly dashed? It certainly looks like nobody ever gets far into untangling, they either dive into that stuff headlong, "woo" and all, or dismiss it altogether.
Probably people just changed the topic, because both sides got tired of trying to convince the other and failing. A similar thing happened previously with using drugs.
There are people in the rationalist community who believe that taking drugs or meditating have changed their lives profoundly, and there are also people who remain skeptical about it.
(I happen to be in the skeptical crowd on both issues.)
My n=1 case study: I have Crohn's disease and have been prescribed anti-depressants multiple times. Several years ago, my Crohn's symptoms and depression became crippling and I was hospitalized repeatedly. I was referred to a surgeon to have part of my intestine removed. My depression was pretty bad. I had previously dabbled in Woo, but never with any serious commitment. From this rock bottom state, I embraced Woo (meditation, tai chi, studying Eastern philosophy) and also made a significant career and location change. I managed to avoid surgery, I have not taken any prescription medication of any kind in the past seven years, my Crohn's symptoms have been very minimal during this time, and I'm feeling pretty good. While the career and location change undoubtedly helped as well, I am convinced that Woo has contributed substantially to my greatly improved physical and mental health.
I think I lean towards possibility 2 based on my experience. I suppose one could interpret my story as support for possibility 4 and Scott's assertion that "the sickest and most traumatized people seem interested in woo the most." But I think this is an oversimplification. I certainly went all-in on Woo when I was in my sickest and most traumatized stage of my life. This is not unusual. But I find longstanding members of the various Woo communities I've engaged with to be the sanest, most emotionally and mentally stable, and most compassionate people I know. After all, the hero's journey requires descent into the underworld before emergence as a hero.
in my experience, meditation provides a very particular kind of stress, and the process of adaptation to that stress increases my capabilities in certain ways. by stress here i mean mentally challenging my mental inertia. certainly it's specific to the person, but i'd be surprised if controlling your environment in such a way as to provide particular stresses that you feel are helpful and that help you function or feel alive, whatever that is to you - i'd be surprised if that isn't something you do; and i'd be surprised that if your life changed to stop giving you that, that you'd remain vital and happy for very long.
Tentative theory: I've gotten a lot of good out of some kinds of woo, while starting out as being pretty numb.
On the other hand, even though I was numb, it seemed obvious to me that there was *something* in the mind/body/emotions connection.
Maybe woo of whatever kind works better for people who think some part of the premise is obviously true.
I gather Myers-Briggs doesn't get a lot of respect these days, but I think there's something to the Sensory/Intuitive distinction. Sensory people think that what they perceive is fundamental truth and iNtuitive people think that there's something more real within/beneath/behind/above what they perceive.
Of the four Myers-Briggs axes, it's the Introverted/Extroverted one that has scientific backing (it's in the Big Five, unlike the others).
I think that's a false dichotomy, though. Personally I am quite aware of the limitations of perception (many of which are well-documented) and, as a result, some of the things I experience could be either real or not real – there's just no way of knowing. In practice I find that it doesn't really matter all that much. In quotable terms: perception is perception, everything else is just semantics.
It seems to me that “woo” is incredibly poorly defined and/or steel-manned here. An analysis that lumps together processes as different as Wim Hof and Internal Family Sustems (and as wildly different in their methodologies and goals) without defining the similarities is facially useless. To me, it seems like an old man shouting at the clouds.
Perhaps you're overgeneralizing when you say "emotions". Perhaps a certain set of emotions are stored as tensions in the body, and others aren't. It's definitely true that every "woo" practitioner I've encountered has overpromissed. but some of them seem to believe their promises. There are a lot of possible hypotheses that cover that, but a combination of marketing and believing what they hear themselves saying often seems to fit. So that's a "body oriented" feedback loop that they don't seem to be noticing.
FWIW, storing emotions in the body has Reichian echoes to me, and I think that he both had some valid insights, and also tended to believe what he heard himself saying. (Better evidence would be better, but since so much was officially suppressed it's not available.)
To me it SEEMS as if many of my emotions echo somewhere in my body (just where varies), but many of them don't seem to have that echo. Now the question is "Is this echo the long term memory of the emotion?". It could just be an related effect. Consider the itch of an insect bite. Is the itch the memory of that bite? A lot depends on the precise definition used. I've got a weak knee that I injured. Is that weakness the memory of that injury? Certainly traumatic events can cause injuries and associated strong emotions. Because of the nature of memory, one might expect them to reinforce each other.
I think the basic mistake is mind-body dualism. They are a unitary whole. You can't split them apart. The idea that you can do so is an illusion. You can't feel WITH you finger, it requires the finger, the neural connection, AND the processing of that sensation. A break anywhere along that chain causes malfunction. I expect that emotions act similarly. Memories have to be stored somewhere, but there's nothing that says all memories have to be stored in the same place. And sensations reinforce memories. Break the chain and the reinforcement disappears. But if you want to change things, a better choice is often to instead establish a wider link of alternative meanings for the emotion or tension. Perhaps this is what some forms of "woo" do for some kinds of emotion.
I definitely have low body-awareness, and that *does* come with problems. As an example, over the past 10 years I've been diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety disorders, and depression. I've lost three jobs. I recently went to a doctor who listened to my symptoms and immediately said "you have sleep apnea and you're tired. Do you feel tired?" "No," I answered, "but my wife mentioned I snore a lot." A sleep study showed that I was waking myself 60 times an hour from inability to breathe. A week into using a CPAP almost all of those "disorders" have resolved.
Better body awareness definitely would have identified the problem. And I can imagine that better body awareness coming from traditionally "woo" practices like meditation or body work. I was about to say it would not have "solved" the problem but actually a more active lifestyle leading to weight loss would in fact make me sleep better. Still, what fixed the problem wasn't body work, it was a doctor, and a medical device.
I'm not a big fan of various "woo" ideas, but I do think that American doctors and lifestyles de-emphasize body feedback in a way that's likely causing us to miss diagnostic data and treatment options. That might partially account for the worse health outcomes in the U.S.
I don't know if it counts as woo or not, but when I'm driving and the sleepiness descends on me, and I return to alertness by inducing some flow in the lesser chi circulation.
Wait what, how do you do this?
10 years of Tai Chi practice?
Yeah, for a while I was able to warm up my arms and hands by extending chi through them, which I think increased blood flow or something like that.
You are roping in stuff that is very new-age (cranial-sacral, etc.) with stuff that is totally substantial and physical (Alexander technique). Alexander technique is basically what you see LeBron James doing before games, where he isolates aspects of his movement and balance, to practice getting the parts of his body to move in sync in various ways. You might as well say that learning to ice skate doesn't "work". I mean, you might not be a more enlightened person once you learn to ice skate, but you'll sure be able to ice skate.
Re #3, what about bodily pleasure? I wonder to what extent some people feel physically good throughout the day vs bad.
Re. "Buddhism teaches that life is suffering, and some Buddhist practitioners say that at sufficiently advanced levels of meditation, they realize they were suffering in hard-to-notice ways all their life, which they can then correct.":
If all life is suffering, and the objective of Buddhism is to free oneself from that suffering, then people who are dissociated from bodily experience (like the traumatized who can't tell when they're being massaged) are the most-enlightened of people, and becoming like them should be the objective of Buddhism.
Huh, I'm a little surprised to see Alexander Technique both 1) listed as woo and 2) something you got 0 results from. (Unless you didn't actually try it and just thought of it as part of a 'bodywork' category, which makes sense to me.)
[I think it will often be the case that someone has already got the basics of what AT is trying to teach, and so both they and the teacher should go "yeah, you're fine"; situations where the AT teacher is like "yikes" and does an adjustment and then the person goes "eh this is the same" seem super surprising to me / likely to require immense dissociation.]
I wonder if in the history of woo, it has ever happened that you go to a woo practitioner, have them check you out, and it turns out that in fact you're fine and don't need any kind of treatment.
If it does happen, that's probably a sign that even if they're not factually correct they're at least serious-minded.
That misunderstands the nature of at least some of the activities mentioned. If you go to a gym coach, they won't turn you away, likewise when learning one of these other skills.
Just one data point, but as a rationalist/very much "head" centered person, somatic work and IFS have been enormously helpful to me.
For example, I fully buy the idea that all thoughts with emotional valence have a corresponding sensation in one's body (may not be true for everyone!) and learning to notice and interact with that sensation is a useful skill. As I've gotten more skilled at noticing, often I'll see that bodily sensations arise first and then thoughts come after, and by catching the bodily sensations before the arising of the corresponding thoughts I can often halt the process and let it dissipate, instead of becoming a story that my mind is stuck in.
I don’t understand the confusion. I don’t know anyone who is baffled if I say something like:
“I can’t eat before a big talk because I’m so anxious.”
That is, most people are familiar with nausea, a bodily sensation, coming from an emotion. If I am angry, I have the desire to reflexively ball my fists, if I am happy, I reflexively smile. Why? This is not the result of top down control, again there is some low level signal in the body driving this (for me, it feels like a tension that is relieved in the reflex, but it is very very subtle, unlike anxious nausea).
We have words like heartache to describe serious grief. Do people think this is metaphoric? I have felt it as real tension and anguish almost bordering physical pain, and in the chest and left arm. I can’t be the only one, right?
This doesn’t need to be a woo claim. Emotions having a realization in the body seems like something many people are familiar with. A healthy woman I know had a breakup and she said it felt like she was having a heart attack. Is she secretly traumatized? Disordered?
Yep, I feel emotional heart-break as actual pain in the heart area
+1, anxiety-induced nausea was a big problem for me in the past. Even though I knew it was anxiety-induced, I didn't know how to break the loop until much later.
Wooers shouldn't say "rationalist" when they mean "empiricist". Woo is such a good case study for clarifying the difference between the two, that I hate to see it ruined by using them exactly backwards.
"Rationalist" does NOT mean one who thinks scientifically and wants tangible evidence. That's "empiricist", which is the opposite of "rationalist". A rationalist is one who believes we can prove things about reality in the same way we prove theories in geometry, and have the same absolute certainty in our conclusions. Rationalists believe that scientific experiments are useless because the senses are deceiving, and the only source of knowledge is our own intuition, plus logical deduction.
Theology is rational; science is empirical. Scientists need to understand this, because the religious and post-modernist attacks on science, which have done so much harm in the past 60 years, all work by assuming that science is rational, which theologians and post-modernists justify by pointing out that scientists (who don't know any better) keep /saying/ science is rational.
Woo clarifies the difference because what distinguishes "woo" from medicine is that woo relies entirely on private phenomenology.
Back in the 18th century, Kant gobsmacked rationalists by convincing them that the empiricists were right in saying we can never reach absolute truth, nor penetrate to the essences of things (the "noumena" or "ding an sich"), because our minds grasp only phenomena (qualia, feelings, sensations). The rationalists spent the next 140 or so years trying to find ways around Kant. One of these ways is phenomenology, which, as near as I can tell, says that phenomena /are/ noumena, or that we should pretend they are. That is, human reality is built entirely from phenomena, so you can forget about the noumena, which aren't part of our reality, and reconstruct the rationalist geometricization of your reality by taking your own personal perceptions as the rock-bottom axioms and facts of your logic. Everyone has their own personal truths and their own personal reality, all just as valid as anyone else's.
Psychology became a science late because it's phenomenological: it wants to talk about feelings, which aren't directly observable by experimenters. We can, however, operationalize feelings, which means quantifying them by agreeing on a list of observable behaviors which we think correlate with those feelings. So you get a checklist of behaviors that correlate with depression, and measure how depressed someone is by counting how many times they do something on that list. You have empiricized the phenomenological.
But that's possible only because feelings are largely universal. We are pretty confident that when I say "I'm sad", I mean something pretty much the same as you do when you say it. Woo practices instead revolve around phenomenological descriptions with inscrutable meanings, like "empty your mind" or "feel your chakra". They haven't been operationalized, so we have no way of knowing whether you empty your mind the same way I do, or feel your chakra like I do. Until they can be, they're entirely rational, and not at all empirical.
Hm. Not sure if this post is being deliberately strawman-ish. Couple of thoughts:
"Woo" needs a much tighter definition. Yoga, tai chi, IFS , and chakra meditation do not seem like a coherent set. Based on an informal sample of dating profiles, I would estimate that roughly 100% of women living in a typical American city are into yoga. And that seems fine. It's a set of stretching and strength exercises. I don't practice yoga, but when I have done it in the past, I felt good afterwards, as I would expect after doing some mildly intense exercise for an hour. I've never done tai chi, but I would expect something similar. IFS is a therapeutic modality with some clinical research behind it. Taken literally, its premises seem pretty goofy to me, but taken as a guide to a structured form of introspection, it seems like it could be as useful as many other forms of therapy. Point being, this stuff seems like a far cry from crystal healing.
The idea that "woo" is good for everyone isn't as absurd as it's supposed to sound. Mild aerobic exercise like walking is good for (almost) everyone. Eating fresh vegetables is good for just about everyone. These practices aren't likely to transform your life, at least by themselves, and ditto for various forms of woo. But you don't need to posit that the woo-averse are broken human beings to accept that there might be some broad benefits to woo.
Finally, I think it's pretty much factually wrong to say that "really traumatized people" are the ones who are into woo. I find it pretty depressing how many seemingly functional people are into astrology. I know tons of happy, non-hippy dippy people who swear by the benefits of acupuncture. As mentioned, pretty much every woman I've ever met seems to harbor a secret desire to leave their career and become a yoga instructor. Woo is pretty much omnipresent, at least in the sloppy definition used here.
A silly example of "causation vs. treatment" that comes up in my own life is the observation that healthy people something like 7-8 hours per day, while unhealthy people sleep less or more. Sometimes you see articles saying that if you want to stay healthy, then, you shouldn't sleep more than 8 hours a day. To me there's an obvious possibility that sicklier people require more sleep!
This is an incredibly frustrating article because it’s based on a derogatory term that you don’t attempt to define very well.
I think that you’re almost exclusively talking about embodiment practices, but it’s hard to tell.
And I find the comments section to be doubly frustrating because people are attempting to judge and dismiss a whole range of disparate practices based on lumping them into a bucket based on a term that is intended to do just that.
In the process a lot of talking past each other is happening… maybe that’s just normal. I don’t tend to venture down here very often.
Woo is placebo so it sort of works for some things, especially if you believe in it, so it wouldn't work as well for Scott or I who are non-believers.
Doctors have been around for millennia but medicine started working in a modern sense only in the last 150 years. why did patients kept paying them if they provided no benefit?
The roots go even deeper with shamans and other people that we would call spiritual healers. It is believed by some historians that the Venus statues of prehistoric Europe had a healing function for giving birth. The oldest are about 40 000 years old.
People have been doing woo in basically in all cultures that we know off so it must provide some benefit and given the variety of practices the positive result is due to the healing ritual itself not a particular practice.
Is "woo" operationalizable or universally recognized? If not why waste ink?
Not a woo responder and have made a good faith effort at some of it. If this is woo at all, I do find there’s something about the act of being totally focused on something you do with your body that helps you keep your mind healthy and happy. However, the most non-woo example I have of that is doing cuts on my mitre or table saw. When I do all day I feel like a lot of the sort of existential milieu “what does it all mean, really, when you think about it?” just evaporates. I hear racing cars is the same.
I think fundamentally we’re minds in conversations with our bodies which are in conversation with the reality around us and the more you get yourself in that feedback loop the better. That’s the thing we evolved to do. When I have to rip a sheet of plywood or something my mind and body are totally focused on making sure I keep the blade on the chalk line.
One form of woo that might help is laughter yoga.
I have a friend who's a big woo fan, but also super rationalist and doesn't *actually* believe in anything woo (but he suspends disbelief). He's special in that he:
1. Is entirely unjudgemental. He's not 'triggered' by irrationality or nonsense, he finds it quite funny and interesting.
2. Is aesthetically really into all the incense, faux Indian music, imagery, chanting etc.
3. Has the balls to go to these events and say with full confidence: "No, I don't believe any of it, but I just love the feeling and the aesthetics." And people are cool with that. Weirdly, some of the woo people actually don't believe that he doesn't believe in it.
He's a really mentally healthy guy, gets some pretty deep experiences, as well as loads of superficial aesthetic enjoyment. When I've attended events with him, I 100% feel like the defective one for having intrusive thoughts such as: "this is bullshit, how can anyone believe that!" and failing to absorb the positive spiritual vibes.
An acquaintance of mine is part of an odd "cultural-only" Christian "church" where they *explicitly* don't believe in God or Christ but do the rites and everything anyway because they believe it's good for you socially and psychologically.
(Of course, the only odd thing about this is that it's explicit - plenty of churchgoers and even priests don't particularly believe either, but they have to shut up about it.)
I have a lot of opinions on this, having let a bunch of nominally-"woo" practices into my life in the past couple of years. I should say that experience has been that there is nothing magical about it, irrational people layer that on top to make what they're doing feel important, but, that the embodied emotions *feel* like we imagine magic feeling.
My model is pretty different and IMO more plausible than the ones you write about here, I think there are some unjustified assumptions in yours.
First my objections:
To (1)—I don't think the claim is that woo is "great", but moreso that it feels extremely good. However, it is likely that pursuing it comes at the cost of losing access, at least temporarily, to the full rational capability of the mind, basically because your awareness is elsewhere. I can't seem to play chess right now, but if I go play a ton of chess it will probably come back.
To (2), that woo is good for different people, everyone's OK—"This seems like the opposite complaint as the woo people" presumes that "right" is either "processing emotions in the mind", or vice versa. Not so. The better model is: that "right" is "the mind receives emotions clearly from the body and processes them".
This can fail either if the mind can't process them, or it can't receive them. If you aren't receiving emotions clearly from the body (because of dissociation, tension, blockage by trauma etc), they arrive instead as vague hopeless confusing impressions. Bodywork practices make these signals *clearer*—which in the short-term makes them WORSE, and more intense.
It sounds like the earlier psychotherapists, in this model, were doing something a little woo-like, trying to connect to suppressed emotions that were there but were confusing, but they didn't describe it in terms of the body, so it doesn't really pattern-match to the same thing.
You slip in "People who process [in the mind]... might benefit from ... cognitive therapy": CBT, in this model, teaches the other part—responsibly processing the emotions you receive. It will be very hard if you are not receiving clear signals. But CBT seems (vague impression) to be most immediately effective for people who have clear and strongly-felt emotions but no idea how to responsibly think through them—thinking about feelings, for them, is an immediate win. (CBT-style processing doesn't work for me at all when my feelings are blocked in my body.)
"woo practitioners considering their treatment a success when they shift people back towards more bodily processing"—in my experience, not having access to emotions in the body is deeply confusing, disconnected, and painful (if there is pain there.) For the dissociated, woo is clarifying. For the already-embodied, woo is *deeply pleasurable* and feels *meaningful*, significant—feels religious.
On theory (3), treats a specific defect: "[normal people] process emotions in their minds, where emotions belong." vs "shunting to the body... this is a non-normative and defective state". See above, this is not the model, rather, "normal"—healthy—people process in the minds but with full access to the emotion from the body, as opposed to little/no access.
"A correctly-running body part usually feels like nothing"—not so, at least for muscles—a correctly running muscle glows with energy and vitality, is a joy to get to use and wants to be used all the time, like a child running around, for no reason but the joy of it. This is accessible to adults through bodywork. And the lungs, correctly used, feel like breathing divine mana.
The "U-shaped curve"—sounds basically right. Very healthy people—fit, good posture, visibly healthy, glowing—don't seem to "need" woo, although it is very enjoyable for them. They have ready access to their emotions. Kids have ready access but are immature and their emotions are too large and harmful. If you mature without closing that access to the emotions—to the "bodymind"—your emotions remain large and significant but can be wielded responsibly.
If you do not have good access to the body, probably because it's holding a ton of pain, or you spend all day at a computer—then emotions are confusing and vague and everything seems to hurt. The immediate "problem" that your body wants to fix is not "I'm not fit", it's "I can't feel my body", so it's drawn to things that immediately let you feel your body—bodywork, weed.
On theory 4:
* "whooshes of energy will happen in an exciting pattern" —no, they're deeply pleasurable feelings.
* re sex scandals—the optimal amount of thinking is nonzero. Adults who are *fully* in their body are potentially—I expect, if this is even possible—animalistic and dangerous, with the responsibility of a child, in a body that the world sees as an adult.
Re "messed-up, traumatized people"... "Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors?" Here is a more specific theory:
* The traumatized mind is wounded and wants to heal. It will naturally try to convalesce—to sink into depression, or to seek ritual practices and the presence of healers, or things that point to healing, like insight into the source of the pain—receiving this insight can be healing itself, e.g. the Sarno Amazon review anecdote. Convalescing behaviors, and bodily practices that expose emotion, are trying to fix the problem—but the body does not necessarily know the best way to be fixed. (I have a chronic hip problem and my body mostly wants to lay around and draw my attention to the pain and try to untangle the clump in my IT band, not *see a PT*.)
* The self demands to be seen, to be differentiated, have an identity, feel belonging, to feel connected, to feel embodied in space with other bodies—"wants" in that it is painful not to. If your confidence is high, your self happily inhabits your body, and feels connected and present with other bodies. If it's not, your "self" hides, peeks out—acts of self-expression assert its desire to be seen anyway. You could call them "coping" but they're not *trying* to fix the problem, they're trying to *exist anyway*. They are not morally bad or good or working or not working. But they might not have been how you expressed yourself if you were perfectly healthy.
* Addictive behavior, seeking dopamine hits, is fully just "coping", sort of. It says: I don't feel like I have the safety to address to my emotions now, to heal—there are too many responsibilities. I can't have any long-term goals, I don't know what I want, because the emotion of deep resonance that ratifies decisions is one that is felt in the body ("gut feeling"), and I'm cut off from that, or because I cannot work through all the feelings I have, they're too overwhelming, I don't have any strongly-held beliefs to orient with, so the only option is to distract myself. Instead I'm going to go in circles and *wait*, hoping fate will intervene, or somebody will see that I'm suffering and engage with it and help me heal.
Addendum: how to fit the rationalist into this?
On days when I'm feeling highly connected to my body I can seem to see in other people what they are paying attention to—the sort of shape of their "proprioceptive body", which appears kind of subtly superimposed over their actual body. Kind of how if you watch somebody walking from far away, you can kind of get a vague sense of what kind of person they are from their gait, or read confidence off posture, or read a personality off of facial expressions.
(There's a tweet out there that says "I hate the tiktok-therapist face", with a bunch of examples—all pulling their faces into certain shapes to "appear trustworthy" but not actually *being* trustworthy, instead needing to be seen as wise.) Pain in particular is very visible.
The rationalist seems to have all their attention on a huge invisible cathedral of knowledge in front of and above their head. They look up at it a lot to find things. It feels like, talking to intensely-rational people, that they are extremely far away from me, I can't even see them. But they don't seem to be in pain.
There's another tweet (I feel insufferable..) that has been getting a lot of attention the last few days, https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1662995686819004417 "The majority of human beings cannot fully comprehend a statement that has a conditional as a key part of its meaning.". Most of the replies say: yeah because this is weird. Using a strict logical conditional like programming is an unnatural thing to do, because that's not how human communication works. IMO, in fact, it is *painful* to be that logical talking to a person, because you are refusing to "mirror", refusing to connect.
"But overall it’s left me feeling grateful that whatever “skills” predispose one to bodywork seem to have passed me by..."—it does seem to be trauma, and low self-esteem. The confident rationalist (perhaps because he has lots of interesting people to talk to and a highly successful blog) has no reason to try to rebuild! Confidence—particularly as ratified by "being a respected member of a community you respect"—seems to validate anything, and the lack of it leaves one wanting to search for identity elsewhere. I never really rooted in the STEM world, so I have wandered off, and found that to truly resonate with *anything* I need to cultivate the emotional body where resonance would be felt.
Also, fyi, chakras are just something you can feel if you connect to the body. It seems to be the case that different emotions are localized to different parts of the spine. The feeling of love radiating from your heart and flowing through your whole body is the best thing I've ever felt, basically like meditation-induced heroin. But the point of it is not the pleasure—indeed, I haven't once felt a desire to access it for pleasure. The point is the *clarity*. That emotion is always there, telling you who you love and what you enjoy and alerting you when you are being selfish. But feeling it clearly gives is like seeing the matrix of your own nature—you get to *know* rather than haphazardly guess, what will fulfill you.
Couple more things because if I'm going to dump my worldview here I might as well dump a lot of it.
> irrational people layer [magical language] on [woo] to make what they're doing feel important
A belief system to which all of this is a corollary is that, foundationally, emotions are real, and anything that rejects this or suppresses emotions is harmful. Pain goes unhealed, and healing is good.
But, different emotions contradict each other, so the mind gets involved to responsibly sort them out and reconcile them to reality by understanding the consequences of actions (if I get angry will it help? will I just hurt myself?) The pathologically-woo person is under-indexing on rational thought, but still wants to explain things, so they reach for magical causes. Unfortunately they probably end up hurting themselves, because most people won't listen to their magical explanations, and because trying to justify emotions on a basis of magic is actually a denial of the foundational truth, that the emotions are real in themself.
And, this is all pretty important for treating mental illness. A lot of people seem to have a ton of fear that lives in their body all the time, but they can't feel it. It comes out at times of stress as a panic disorder, but it was actually always there. Body-connection will give them access to the ambient fear, which will *tell them what they need to be paying attention to*. A therapy that just tries to address the panic in a vacuum is missing this entirely and will probably progress very slowly, grasping onto fleeting glimpses of the underlying emotion, vs one that first targets the body directly to make the full feeling accessible.
>Buddhism teaches that life is suffering, and some Buddhist practitioners say that at sufficiently advanced levels of meditation, they realize they were suffering in hard-to-notice ways all their life, which they can then correct. This is a pretty crazy claim, but I take it seriously enough not to find “I feel fine so there’s no room for improvement” a complete knockdown argument against this.
I grew up in Utah and did a lot of camping, skiing, etc. Basically sometimes you will be very very cold and I learned that it basically does not matter. There is a huge space between feeling cold and getting hypothermia. Living in Boston, I would bike through the winter, snow or shine. I always planned for ten minutes of pain at the beginning before warming up, but found it easy to ignore. Just don't think about it!
It wasn't until my mid-twenties when I was high and walking outside that I realized that I was in fact cold all the time wearing my sports coats that were too thin unless I was moving. This is an example of a connection lowering quality of life. Once I took the feeling more seriously I was less likely to go play sports if it was cold outside.
Seems the woo practictioners/advocates/whatever are trying to get you to prove a negative.
"Well, maybe it's having effects that you don't know about and prove that it isn't!"
"Bodywork" is a bad term to apply here because it gets used, at least in my experience, to describe a range of things from Reiki (pure woo) to massage (some forms are clearly clinically useful but there's also plenty of woo in the field) to PNF stretching (not woo).
I'm curious of where the woo-line is being drawn here - yoga obvi has workout benefits, but for a more ambiguous case, meditation does lead to physical changes in the brain? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8633496/#:~:text=Analysis%20of%20the%20subcortical%20structures,thickness%20and%20gray%20matter%20volumes.
The regions most impacted are the ones around memory and executive control, and it seems likely it has a protective impact. However, the set of folks actually doing focused meditation that consistently I'd say is a teensy tiny minuscule fraction of the woo folks.
(Then again, the overlap between woo-folks and the kind of anti-chemical people who still do cocaine seems uncommonly high to me, so I'm curious when you say that the folks into bodywork seem screwed up, how many are doing it rigorously vs just talking loudly about it a lot? I'm in a lot of hippie circles and folks tend to talk about the benefits of various practices but then not actually stick with them in practice)
I’m leaning towards option (3), though I’d phrase in a less essentializing way. That is, I’d interpret “defect” to be more of a contextual problem in one’s life situation than a fundamental flaw in one’s psychology. There are times in my life where the discipline or ritual of things like Wim Hof or spiritual yoga feel like they have made a big difference. Though, tbh, these times correlate with poorer mental health for me. When life is swell, my empiricist side will start to tell me that these things are a waste of time.
There's woo and then there's woo.
There's a lot of woo I like and trust, like auras, but it took me a long time to figure out the difference between that and the woo that drove me up a wall.
The difference (aside from things like preferring Chinese methods over Indian methods) is that I don't tolerate the New Thought style of intention creating reality. I mean, it's hard to even get people to agree on putting putting a dinner party, so why would I believe people's subconsciousness got together to make 9/11 happen?
Another commenter mentioned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose model is very useful here. He would say that seeing this as direct brain-body interactions or the brain gating sensations from the body is not the whole picture.
Rationalists know well that the brain is in large part a machine to make maps or representations or "models" of the world around itself, including spatial relationships, forces, other animals and people, etc.
Damasio argues that the brain spends a great deal of effort making "maps" of the body (specifically in areas like the periaqueductal gray and insular cortex). This map should be constantly updating; the brain is constantly simulating the body, in addition to receiving actual input from the body proper. One advantage is that this is much faster and more efficient than waiting for your body to send signals; it's a bit like a cache.
Different people's body-maps may have very different resolutions, and this leads directly to the signal:noise problems that Scott alludes to.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "a correctly functioning body part feels like nothing". To me, there are 2 parts to this kind of self-analysis.
1. Focusing in on a small part of experience (the body, a part of the body, sensations)
2. Understanding your own attention mechanism, turning it on itself.
Ideally, following this path leads to self-validation, loving yourself without the need for external rewards. But it can go off the rails. The people who get a lot out of the process treat it as an exercise, and part of a balanced life. People who clutch onto it and need it to provide meaning in their life can really screw themselves up. It's dangerous to tamper with your own attention/motivation loop.
I think you miss some complexity by categorizing so many possibilities as "psychosomatic." The term diminishes the common phenomenon of stubborn physical diseases emerging from thought patterns; generally healthy people tend to assume that if one's chronic stress (for example) led to mitochondrial energy dysfunction, all should be quickly repaired once the stress is dealt with properly. Modern medicine simply doesn't yet understand why sometimes a disease is irreversible even if it was triggered by mental processes (which are NEVER the sole etiology, as genetics and experience complete the unfortunate cocktail).
As for woo (which is short for woo woo), t'ai chi, for example, teaches practitioners to move their bodies through space in a state of balance. This is not primarily a "spiritual" education. It is a recognition that balance is impossible without "flow." Flow occurs in relationship to the everchanging OUTSIDE world (think of a musician or an athlete), so it is outside the purview of rational thought -- and it is certainly much more than just a whoosh of pleasant feelings. It is something your body can actually learn.
If you're relatively healthy, you can get by (with obvious limitations) relying primarily on cerebral consciousness, but imagine being weak and sick, so that all your interactions with the outside world take ten times the effort as someone who can put on a pair of socks mindlessly relying on muscles alone. Muscular movement is deprecated in t'ai chi because the more efficient way to move a body in motion is with balanced momentum, which requires a particular focusing of awareness. The result doesn't have to be a "cure" to constitute an effective disease management strategy marrying mind and body.
Consider the following categories of experience:
1. "I feel worse today than I did yesterday, and I know why. "
The reason is that this morning, I got hit by a bus.
I don't need science to explain this. You could say that, at some point in human history, or at some point as I was becoming sentient, someone did some "science" to connect the experience of feeling bad and the experience of being hit by a bus, but fundamentally, these kinds of immediately obvious connections between gross phenomena aren't the kind of things we need science to explain, though we might need science to fix our post-bus broken leg.
2. "I feel worse today than I did yesterday, and I don't know why."
The reason is that I was bitten by a mosquito and I contracted malaria. I went to the hospital, and they used science to diagnose me and give my the correct treatment.
Without science, there is absolutely no fucking way I could have made the connection between that tiny, to-me-insignificant experience of getting bitten by a mosquito, and feeling bad. The way science did this, roughly, was to compare millions of people who were feeling bad in a particular way (malaria symptoms) and experiences they had in common, (mosquito bites) and the solution that worked (mefloquine.) On my own, I would've been absolutely unable to separate the signal (mosquito bite) from the noise (everything else that happened to me that day), never mind try every possible solution on earth until I found one that worked. But over the course of years, and combing through millions of individual human experiences, science did, and that's why science is GREAT.
3. "I feel worse than yesterday, and I don't know why."
I went to the hospital, and they ran a bunch of tests, and at the end they were like, "We don't know why either, sorry, but you could try this anti-depressant" so I left and I took the anti-depressant for a while but it didn't make any difference so I stopped. And so then, it was just me and the millions of experiences that make up my days - [eating a fried egg] [eating a salad] [sleeping 10 hours] [playing video games] [getting bitten by a mosquito] [going to yoga] [talking to my friend Zelda]. And slowly, over time, I started noticing some rough correlations between things I did and feeling better and other things and feeling worse, so I started tacking towards those things that resulted in good feelings [yoga] [salads] [Zelda] and away from others. I didn't know why yoga and salads, worked; they just did, and I felt a little better, but not much.
And one day after [yoga], while I was talking to [Zelda] over my [salad], I was telling [Zelda] about the particular way I felt bad, and correlations I'd noticed, and she was like, I have a lot of the same symptoms as you, and you know what helped for me? [Bottled Woo]. So I thought, why not, and I ordered at $30 bottle of it on the internet and I drank it, and it didn't help.
But when I told [Zelda] that, she said, No, [Bottled Woo] only helps if you [fast] and you [meditate] and you stand in a [posture] and [pray] while you drink it, and I tried it [meditation] + [posture} + [prayer] + [Bottled Woo] and I felt a little better, better than I did with just [yoga] and [salads] and [Zelda] but not THAT much better. And I told Zelda that, and she said, oh, that's weird, it usually helps me a ton, why don't you come over and do it with me, and I went to her house and we did the things and I felt AMAZING, better than I ever had, and my problems didn't come back; in fact, I felt even better than I had before all these problems started, and I was really happy because I found a solution that worked.
And then I ran into a scientist I met at the hospital and he was like, how are you feeling, and I said, AMAZING, and he said, Oh great, what did you do? and it was pretty complicated to give him the whole answer so I said [Bottled Woo] and he was like, no, that's pseudoscientific nonsense there's absolutely no way that worked.
And I'm like, but it did, though. And he's like, no, you're wrong [Bottled Woo] has been scientifically proven to do nothing in double-blind lab tests. And I'm like BUT I'M BETTER LOOK AT ME and he shows me all the controlled studies that show that [Bottled Woo] is absolutely useless, and I said, "Oh yeah, I thought that too at first, but you have to [meditate] and [fast] and stand in [posture] and [pray], it's a whole thing."
And he was like THOSE ARE CONFOUNDING FACTORS YOU ARE NOT DOING SCIENCE RIGHT and I was like, I'm not trying to do science I'm just trying to feel better, which I do, so checkmate, buster. He said, okay, well, try doing all the things you're doing but stop drinking {Bottled Woo] and see what happens. And I was like, why would I mess with perfection, I'm better, so changing anything seems risky. But I felt bad for the scientist, so I did...and on some days without [Bottled Woo] I felt the same, and on some days I felt a little worse, and maybe it was all just noise but I really, really didn't want to mess up whatever had caused me to feel amazing, so I went back to drinking it and it definitely didn't hurt.
And then I ran into the scientist again and I tried to duck behind the corner so he wouldn't see me, but he grabbed me by the collar and was like "ARE YOU STILL DRINKING BOTTLED WOO?!" and I was like yeah, and he was like, look, if you're feeling better, that's an amazing miracle, I'm not even mad at you for being bad at science, come be a part of my experiment, maybe it's [Bottled Woo] in combination with some other thing, and maybe we can figure it out and help some people. So I went to the lab and helped the scientist put together the experiment, and separated out as many confounding factors as we could -- [Bottled Woo] [Posture] [Meditation] [Fasting] [Salads] [Yoga] and obviously 99% of the way they were able to replicate my experience in the lab was extremely mediocre, for example, the only salad they could afford to give people was a cruddy one from the cafeteria and the yoga teacher they picked was kind of a ding-dong as opposed to mine who is the best, but the scientist did the best he could.
And I'm a woman, and I'm overweight, and I have a college education, so the subjects they picked for the study were also overweight, college educated women, because that's what the scientist thought that was most relevant about me, as opposed to the fact that I grew up in Pittsburgh, and broke my leg when I was seven, and live on the thirteenth floor of an apartment building, and am Jewish, and was bullied as a child, but I guess they had to start somewhere; and they tried to pick people who felt bad in roughly the same way as I did, which in some ways was obvious but in others they weren't, for example, they let in one woman whose husband had just died, and another lady who came to the experiment straight off of back-to-back shifts at McDonald's, and it seemed to me that those ladies maybe had different problems than I did but I'm not a scientist and even I didn't know what my problem was, exactly, so I just let it go.
Anyway, they ran the experiment, and four ladies got a lot better but the other 96 didn't, and I pointed to the four ladies who'd gotten better, and I was like, "See! It works!" and the scientist was like, wow, you are really bad at science, so I quit the experiment and me and those four ladies went over to Zelda's house and did the whole thing her way, and our lives got so, so much better, like amazingly better than they had ever been before, and when people saw us and wanted to know what we'd done, we told them, and some of us tried it, and it didn't work for them, so they left, and others tried it, and it did work for them, and they stayed.
And meanwhile the scientist kept toiling away in his lab and I kept living my life, and one day he called me and he said, "Listen, I've been thinking, what if the actual magic ingredient is your relationship with Zelda; I've been trying to come up with studies that isolate "Friendship" or "Connection," or "Faith in a Guru" as a confounding factor, but it's not working; I'm not sure what it's missing." And I was like, "Yeah, it's true, the particular constellation of qualities that make Zelda, Zelda are utterly unique anywhere on earth; there is only one of her, so really would be difficult to replicate the experience of knowing her in a lab." And he said, "Well, then, what good is that to anyone?" and I was like, "Ummmm...I'm not sure how to answer that question" and he said, "Here's an idea; what if we run an experiment of one, and you cut Zelda out of your life, and we see if you feel better or worse, it's not the best design but maybe it will do." So I hung up on him and we never spoke again.
And then, many years later, I died, and Zelda died, and so did the scientist, and Zelda's daughter continued this thing called THE ZELDA MOVEMENT that got some traction for a while then petered out, and then one hundred years later, after a massive amount of SCIENCE, a scientist working in the original scientist's lab discovered that Zelda's house was located over a mineral deposit that had some healing effect on the extreme subtle and rare blood disorder that hadn't even been discovered yet, but which genetic testing of their descendants revealed that 40% of the people in her original cult had had! So that's crazy. Score one for science. A funny thing is, though, I didn't have that disorder! To this day, the reason I got better remains unknown. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe Zelda really was unique.
Science doesn't work on the level of the individual. If you are feeling bad, you should go to a hospital, because that's where they keep most of the non-obvious solutions to common problems. If you're still feeling bad after that, in between ["science says this will kill you"] and ["Science says this will absolutely, 100% heal you] is the vast majority of human experience. A perfectly reasonable thing to do, at that point, is look around for people who are roughly like you, and are having roughly the same problem as you are, and do what they're doing. If it helps, keeping doing it. If it doesn't, stop.
If you ask those people why the thing they're doing works, and the answer they give you is garbled nonsense, don't worry about it. Most people don't know why anything they do works, because most people aren't scientists, and there are lots of things scientists do (like prescribe anti-depressants!) without knowing how they work, either. When it comes to feeling better, knowing why is overrated. A placebo effect is meaningfully indistinguishable from a 'real' drug, if the only person you're trying to heal is you.
Now, if somebody comes along and says, I *definitely* have an answer to this problem, science is lying and trying to hide it from you and I can give it to you along with some secret knowledge for the low-low price of $1,000" they're probably a charlatan and you shouldn't pay them. We need science to know with any certainty why anything works, and science can rule out bad explanations for why things work better than it can do almost anything else. But we *don't* need to know why things work to use them. If you're feeling bad, and yet you limit everything you're willing to try in your life to things that science has already found an explanation for, then the person who is being irrational is you.
This (including the longer piece above) was marvelous to read, thank you.
I feel similarly about believing in deities. I tried for many years but couldn't suspend my disbelief enough. I have envied the religious for that ability, and I do think I'm missing out on one way that people find meaning in and cope with life, but I don't think that makes me defective. It's a normal human variation that doesn't preclude me from being well and fulfilled.
Dan Harris had nervous breakdowns while performing. It took serious work with meditation for him to figure out that he had a drinking problem.
I'd mistakenly attributed this to Sam Harris, a completely different person.
This is a shorter version of my comment. In my efforts to edit it, I somehow deleted the comment and the replies to it.
I was able to recover the replies from email notifications.
Stephen Klunk: "Are you thinking of Dan Harris? I have never heard any of this about Sam Harris, and I’ve been following him for a long time."
Yes, thank you very much. I've been wrong about that for a while.
Deiseach, replying to my being surprised Dan Harris had so much trouble figuring out he had a drinking problem: "In my limited experience, when people drink too much but are functional/not yet at the stage of alcoholism, they will rationalise it all away. "I'm a social drinker, therefore I don't have a problem/I have a drink or two after work to unwind, that's not excessive/I've never been blackout drunk/Sure, I like to have some fun and get a buzz on, what's wrong with that?" and so on. The person we can lie to best is our self. And I mean me in that as well. Other people can see there is a problem, but we deny it until slapped in the face with it. Maybe what meditation did for him was strip away all the "I only/I'm not/I don't" layers of excuses and made him see the raw reality of what he was doing."
I've tried to post this several times and it hasn't posted. I'll delete the extras if they show up.
"Dan Harris had nervous breakdowns while performing. It took serious work with meditation for him to figure out that he had a drinking problem.
I'd mistakenly attributed this to Sam Harris, a completely different person."
Thank you for this update! I'd googled about this for Sam Harris and couldn't find anything. Now I know why :-) These things happen!
You can have a name like mine which is rare enough that a lot of people have trouble spelling or remembering it, or you can have a name like Harris and get confused with other people.
Can we define "woo" here? "Bodywork" - so, like, yoga? Stretches? Exercise and flexibility is generally good for people, both mentally and physically.
When I hear "woo" I generally think of astrology, crystals, auras, vaginal eggs that you pay $500 to Gwyneth Paltrow for the privilege, etc... What exactly are we referring to here? Can Scott give some examples?
Yuck. I find all of these framings (1-4) tendentious, beginning with the choice to call this "woo."
I would encourage folks to dig into the work of David Spiegel [1] at Stanford Medical School on hypnosis. One of the tools he works with is the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, which measures just what it says on the tin. The bottom line: there is natural variation around these things, and there's nothing normative about it. It's not that one level of susceptibility is "normal" and another "defective" or anything like that.
Likewise, the fact that some people take to various bodywork practices more than others strikes me as no more strange or in need of special explanation than that the fact that some people take to long-distance running more than others. There might have been an interesting piece to write on this topic, but the normative talk is really getting in the way.
1. https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/david-spiegel
How is this different from possibility #2?
WOO is a successful social/political structure akin to the Medieval Church. The practitioners have a decent living, and the patients have a treatment that usually keeps them from becoming seriously anti social.
Why question its utility? Neurosis is a companion of Alienation which is an integral aspect of Modernity.
Modernity itself was questioned in the 19th century, resulting in the roots of WOO.
To be sure, the Developing World doesn't seem to have much time for it: too busy building High Speed Rail and elevating billions of people out of subsitence living.
Their time will come.
The specific Western form of hippie-adjacent woo is probably rarer in the developing world, but believing in all kinds of different nonsense is rampant and very likely _far_ exceeds what we see in the West.
Regarding Possibility 1, and in particular the writings of Bessel van der Kolk, this relates to the message I get from the story of Princess and the Pea: Being highly sensitive to discomfort caused by a real "thing", no matter how subtle, is actually good. I suspect it's been observed for a long time, and certainly matches my personal anecdotal experience, that people who don't seem to be aware that their body is functioning suboptimally or their environment is suboptimal have worse lives. On the surface it would appear to be a disadvantage to be so easily irritated by feelings in your body, but it might pay off if those feelings are genuinely indicative of a health issue or something that can be fixed. For example, if someone's breathing is suboptimal (maybe they have dust mite allergies and sleep in a bed of them) or their joints are stressed by being obese, but they can easily put up with it because they're barely aware of it.
I suspect a large proportion of woo proponents are highly sensitive in this way, but either their sensitivities are misfiring (i.e. they feel bodily feelings that are decoupled from genuine problems, and therefore other solutions don't work any better) or they simply misattribute the causes of these sensitivities. But I do think it's possible some proportion have accurate sensitivities for which there just aren't any good scientific solutions to, and some woo techniques actually do help here.
I have lots of tattoos, dye my hair, sometimes do drugs for fun, but am mentally/physically quite healthy and don’t practice woo. No trauma here. I’m curious if there’s actually a correlation show between trauma and tattoo/hair color? I can believe drug use for sure but probably not occasional recreational use.
My explanation is a simple "woo is often the only thing bringing some of these people out of their house to join in recreational activity with other people and build community out of shared belief/practice," of course that's going to be healthy and make people feel better and more well. If you don't feel like it works, it's probably for the same reason a non-sports fan won't get a lot out of going to a baseball game.
# The "Atypical Woo" Conundrum
1. We are all broken in different ways
2. Social norms invariably pathologize some normalcies and normalize other pathologies
3. Every treatment helps some people with certain conditions (even if just placebo)
4. Many treatments can help most people in the right context
5. In the wrong context, every treatment will be ineffective.
6. In the most wrong context, every treatment can be harmful
7. The generous approach is to fit the treatment to the person, not vice versa.
8. That is surprisingly difficult to do, because the emotional investment necessary to believe "this treatment can help people" creates a sunk cost that is difficult to ignore
9. This effect is worse if "people like me" benefit from the treatment, because then identity is added to the sunk costs
Tai chi (aka taijquan) is an interesting case because the vast majority of western teachers of it are just purveying woo along with light calisthenics, but if you're lucky enough to study with Chinese experts they are much more down to earth about it. My teacher says westerners are stupid for separating mind from body in the first place, before throwing me across the room.
A fifth possibility occurs to me (kinda like number 3 above, but not quite): Mentally and emotionally healthy people process emotions largely in their bodies, while traumatized-and-unrecovered people tend to repress them and block them out. But healthy people (including, I assume, Scott) don't get into woo because they don't need any kind of external aid or practice to get back in touch with their bodily emotional sense. It's already their default. In fact it's so natural to a healthy person that they don't even consciously think about it, and so paradoxically may not realize that that's what they're doing. It's only people who have an unhealthy disconnect from their bodily emotional sense who can notice this problem, and then find woo helpful as a treatment.
My perspective on this is as someone with some degree of childhood PTSD I've been working through, particularly in the last few years. I was never at a point where I couldn't tell what part of my body was being massaged. But as I've learned to pay more attention to my bodily sensations, I've definitely noticed that there's a strong correlation between negative mental states / thought patterns, and strong bodily emotional sensations; and that the more I bring my attention to the latter, the more both are alleviated. I haven't really gotten into any form of woo to accomplish this though; I practised breath-following meditation for some time but didn't find it very helpful. What's been most helpful has just been getting into the habit of *remembering to check* for bodily sensations.
This makes sense to me.
While yoga might be 'woo' in the US, it's fairly normal in India, and I don't think that there are larger percentages of people with mental illnesses that practice it than the general population (I may be wrong...?). Still those people often report great benefit. So I'm not sure the last hypothesis holds.
Speaking of Yoga in India, this was the absolute best:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Tantra_Challenge
Lol that's a good one. While this may seem nitpicky to those not from India, I'd be careful about confusing Tantra (a religion) with Yoga (more of a meditative practice).
Evidence for somatic obliviousness: I felt nothing special after my first Alexander Technique lesson and figured I had wasted money on the lesson. Then later that day I had lunch with a friend, and before I said anything about the lesson she told me that my shoulders looked completely different and asked what had happened. So I went for a second lesson with a different teacher, and felt something so unlike anything else I'd experienced that I went on to train as an AT teacher though I never made a career of it.
Like many other commenters here, I don't think AT fits in the same category as some of these other practices. What AT addresses is the interface between high level intention and low level motor control. Obviously you aren't consciously controlling individual bundles of muscle fiber when you move, there must be some higher level way in which desire is converted to movement, and it stands to reason that this is trainable. AT tries to teach you an effective language for your consciousness to work with your reflexes.
I would encourage you to try again with a different teacher, ideally one who isn't dabbling in mysticism or psychotherapy at the same time. Maybe find someone who trained in England instead of California.
"AT tries to teach you an effective language for your consciousness to work with your reflexes"
This is absolutely part of what Tai Chi does too: using visualisations to create biofeedback loops that enable you to retrain the way your body moves. These concepts are widely accepted in modern sports science and are not really "woo" at all in the predominant sense of the term. (No one's talking about emotions when we do this!)
There is a Taiji saying that I think captures this well by analogy to a general directing an army. Roughly "the mind is the commander, the qi is the flag, and the waist is the banner". Unfortunately "qi" means a lot of different things in Chinese philosophy, and in martial arts it often gets identified as some sort of physical energy instead of a subjective internal construct. In this regard, Alexander Technique benefits from having a more modern origin.
The other difference is that AT is taught using very simple everyday movements, one on one with hands on feedback. A skilled Alexander teacher can evoke an experience in a half hour where a Taiji student is likely to flail around for years imitating external forms and never learn anything about walking and talking.
"Unfortunately "qi" means a lot of different things in Chinese philosophy, and in martial arts it often gets identified as some sort of physical energy instead of a subjective internal construct"
Yes, this is a huge problem. Your average western woo Tai Chi or Kung Fu instructor will talk about qi as though it's the Force, but (ime) it's more like a useful umbrella concept to describe and train the ways (sometimes very surprising ways!) that physical forces can move through the body. (And good instruction absolutely includes hands-on feedback, as well as partner work.)
> The other difference is that AT is taught using very simple everyday movements, one on one with hands on feedback.
I think this is a big reason why children of martial arts instructors tend to be very good themselves. Put aside genetics and Secret Techniques; they simply have access to a level of instruction that isn't ,and cannot be, generally available.
Confuse at this definition of "woo": I thought it meant *definitely* supernatural stuff, implying supernatural beliefs of some kind, and that things like tarot reading would fall within the "woo" umbrella.
I realise you define your usage of the word, so I'm not saying you're unclear, it's just weird and jarring to me, like if you'd decided to up and use the word "magic" to talk about the yoga-tai-chi-meditation cluster. Is this common?
I don't think it has to be supernatural to count as woo. Everything that comes out of Gwyneth Paltrow's mouth is woo, but only some of it requires the supernatural.
I also think a lot of the US 'hippie movement' turned a lot of practices into things they were not. For example, if you go to a new age yoga studio promising to 'relieve the stress of intergenerational trauma' (something I saw the other day) and then find that it doesn't do what was promised, you shouldn't be too surprised.
I think the government ought to subsidize cigarettes for schizophrenics. It sounds like a joke, but they have hard enough lives. I genuinely think that it's the right thing to do.
I agree.
I used to be insensitive to body-focused attention, and identify with the "can't imagine any relevant information there" tweet.
A recent meditation retreat I went on was more body focused than the type of meditation I usually do (retreat included lots of body scans and walking meditation, where you pay attention to the feeling of your feet on the ground etc). At first I was annoyed because that felt like a waste of time, but after 3 days of intensive practice I got onboard. I found moving my awareness down into my body (if that makes sense) super stabilizing -- after all, the head is a pretty chaotic place to be, with your attention caught up in discursive thinking and shifting emotions. The body is much more stable... Again though, it took some practice to really believe this, but is empirically testable (although maybe I confounded myself just by testing, my big gripe with self-experimentation).
> Maybe these are just two different ways of processing things
I think they are in fact two different things entirely. One is about learning to notice something, and the other is about developing a “vocabulary “ to report on what they notice.
The processing might be very physical (dance, sport, fighting, singing, sex etc)[all the above sound good to me], or very verbal (Jane Austin, Herman Melville, Charles Bukowski ( couldn’t resist seeing those three in the same paragraph…))
And it could be a Zen Master processing all their emotions in real time while remaining perfectly still. No matter how you process, though, first you need to notice.
In the bigger picture, I think a hell of a lot of people grow up feeling uneasy, in a broad sense of that word; anxious, uncertain, confused by what the big people are doing. The obvious strategy to deal with this if you don’t have, a lot of priors is disassociation. The eventual grown-up is still uneasy, but it’s sort of vague and not really related to anything. Cosmic hum…kind of killing the buzz, but how would you know? You were trained not to notice.
>"You were trained not to notice."
I think you're really on to something here.
Slightly gross but on-topic parenting anecdote: shortly after bringing my eldest home from the hospital, I went to change her and the moment the diaper was removed she projectile shat across the bathroom; I dodged almost in time. After that, I took to aiming her at the open toilet while removing the soiled diaper, which was quite effective.
Follow up research turned up some solid literature around this. Newborns are disinclined to soil themselves but are trained not to notice over the first month or two of life; noticing has to be trained back in during conventional potty training. FWIW, although they still required assistance and were far from perfect, both my kids were functionally done with diapers around 13 months because they *weren't* trained not to notice.
That’s a funny story, with some interesting info attached. Thanks!
> I think you're really on to something here.
I really believe it to be true.
Human beings have to develop a relationship with their physical selves; the curse of The Fall if you will. We must cover our nakedness.
In practical terms (and this is my parenting story) it plays out like this:
My son (age 4~) is on a bicycle in Central Park and he miscalculates a turn or something, and he crashes and falls to the ground and starts wailing (you know the drill). I am on the ground holding him and trying to console him. He keeps screaming
“Why Papa!? Why did that happen?”
I have no fucking idea, and neither does he, there is just pain and shock and frustration and a deep sense of betrayal. It sucks.. There’s no way of reasoning out of this; it’s a squall on the sea- the weather changed. Out of nowhere a very well-meaning woman appears next to us (it’s Central Park after all) and offers us a cookie. To distract him.
This is my point…Distraction, dissociation, the replacement of of one need with another (cookies in this case).
We declined the cookie.
5 minutes later he was fine.
Your kids’ meltdowns are the most profound teaching opportunities.
I’m coming generally from the rationalist perspective.
I’m not sure if it makes sense to create the responder and non-responder distinction.
I think the core thing is how much you pay attention to the moment-to-moment operation of your body.
The body has responses to all sorts of stimuli in the environment. These can be low-level/physically close to the body in space and time (sympathetic nervous system spike from a loud sound in the environment) or high-level (sympathetic nervous system spike from thoughts about being able to pay bills at the end of the month and what happens if you can’t).
In both situations there is a response in the body. These bodily responses can be observed by the mind.
This fact can be useful when there are high-level negative thoughts (worry about the financial future) that don’t line up with reality (there’s enough money in the checking account). In that situation, the awareness of the feeling of the sympathetic nervous system being active can be enough to get out of thinking about worrying about the imagined situation and instead evaluate reality.
I think this is the skill that they’re referring to. Using bodily experience as a source of information about your mental state, then being able to use that information to correct mental course, if necessary.
My guess is that rationalists do an above average amount of the practices labeled "woo" here ("yoga, “bodywork”, tai chi, Alexander Technique, chakra meditation, Wim Hof, Internal Family Systems, somatic experiencing, some trauma therapies, etc.").
That is, the percentage of Western rationalists who would say that they've benefited from at least one of the things on this list is larger than the base rate in their countries.
I remember when behavioral therapy always worked. And when it didn’t, you obviously weren’t doing it right! Woo!
There’s a Possibility 11 (or whatever number we’re at) which some commenters have pointed at but I’ll describe a little more. If one can be somewhat dissociated from one’s body, as van der Kolk describes, I want to take this a step further and say certain faculties or responses can become frozen to the point of being glaciated and that this is not always “bad.” There may be, um, psychological mutos in that ice and maybe the subconscious just is not interested in waking them yet. There might be some quantity of woo - in whatever units, woonits, sorry - that would have to be directed into that dissociation or blockage. It might take hours/days/months/years and then what you’d get would be months or years of flashbacks and assorted agonies while your system processed whatever Godzillas were in the ice. After you got it all cleaned up you’d find yourself feeling freer perhaps, and responding to woo. But generally people get dragged into those because they feel they simply must heal x in the present, and then the archaeological expedition reveals itself and the time frame for relief is - well, it takes time.
So it might be that someone is not “defective” or a “nonresponder” per se but rather diverting or dodging those energies, not letting go too much to prevent a mass thaw. Based on the little I know of Scott’s backstory I would say the odds of this configuration are nonzero. I did Alexander technique years ago to deal with some carpal tunnel syndrome issues and it helped a lot - and I would say feeling absolutely nothing different after a session or several would be atypical. I also use lots of other woo and appreciate it - and I would say after my own “thaw” I responded to it much more. But the thaw itself was painful and time-consuming. If someone is high functioning and well-adjusted, there isn’t that urgency, so they can take time and find a modality and course of treatment that might provide them something they actually want and then pay top dollar for a full course with a reputable practitioner and see what happens. When someone is in crisis there’s much more of the casting about in desperation for something to take the edge off. Body modification, hair modification, it can be a way to mark transformation or grieve loss. Telling a story of the possibility of change that involves beauty or self-empowerment. Not everyone wants that or would find it in hair or tattoos. But some do.
Anyway long story. People inevitably become interested in their frozen spots - some always choose to leave them alone, others eventually investigate - the investigation is up to the individual. Contemporary society does allow us to freeze and stay frozen in ways past civilizations couldn’t accommodate (I think). “Waking the Tiger” is interesting in patches and addresses these ideas.
This is an interesting thought, but:
>Contemporary society does allow us to freeze and stay frozen in ways past civilizations couldn’t accommodate (I think).
My impression of the past is that people used to be more actively encouraged to repress parts of themselves, lest they became unwilling to serve in the war/leave their husband/refused to work in the mines/whatever thing was personally horrific but allowed civilization to function.
Perhaps the civilization of, say, India was different, I don't really know anything about it. Or perhaps it was different for certain subsets of the population, anyway.
Am I misunderstanding what you're talking about with "freeze" here?
You’re right, I oversimplified. I think in some societies in the past at some times, yes, people were actively encouraged to repress parts of themselves and I think that still goes on. In Peter Levine’s book “Waking the Tiger” he observes that animals, which are in life-or-death situations regularly, don’t carry trauma the way many humans do - some animals will literally “shake it off” by shaking and moving when they survive a situation, and then they keep on with their lives, not developing trauma symptoms. It’s been a while since I read the actual book but IIRC that observation was a significant moment in the development of somatic experiencing therapy. Which I guess when done well leads people to release traumas, then leading to a decrease in symptoms. “My Grandmother’s Hands” by Resmaa Menakem is pretty much the only other somatic experiencing methodology book I’ve read, and he describes the way small-seeming practices such as humming and rocking can be culturally traditional elements of what we might call “coping skills” to reduce trauma stress load for individuals. IIRC he also describes some mourning and grief traditions as more conducive to getting all the stress out and leaving people with fewer symptoms afterwards. I think different cultures valued different balances of this - doing one’s duty to the family might involve a lot of repression, while still utilizing daily and ritual somatic stress-management behaviors to a much greater degree than contemporary suburban America typically would. I think regular intensive exercise makes it hard to maintain certain types of repression (this is a digression, but one reason I think US culture encourages weight gain is people don’t learn how to let go of minimal stress and it builds up, creating a wall they hit every time they try to exercise). Some people seem to use exercise to strengthen the repression though. But I think in general we don’t do basic somatic maintenance and so we can get quite a buildup of trauma. Especially in early years things can get baked in or frozen in to use the other metaphor, and it can be quite disruptive to the system to let go of those old frozen traumas or at least it entails significant reorganization. Someone intelligent and strong-minded might develop a very rigorous type of self-protection. Some of it individual, some of it culturally encouraged repression. I think there is a lot of flexibility here, I don’t have this all ironed out. What I did want to communicate to Scott & readers was that being desensitized or even seemingly resistant to woo might be sort of a temporary state, one that could be created for reasons and be serving a psychologically protective function. Not that he was going to sign up for some month-long meditation retreat and end up in psychosis or something. I think he has better instincts. But to point to the “borderline skills” as not necessarily bad either. Some would say that it’s a sign of serious repression in the culture if the only people reaching for what would be healthier somatic coping skills are people with severe trauma. I don’t want to say the repression is bad - it serves a purpose - there is a sort of implicit hierarchy of whose experiences are better and I don’t want to cast shade in whatever stage anyone is in. I tried to get rid of repression much too fast and did damage, so I don’t recommend that. But I think the repression can occur on different levels and in different ways. Willingness to give oneself over to an experience is an element of it. Anyway this response is already way too long but thank you for your question.
I was going to make some point in support of IFS as pretty useful (and non-woo if you take it metaphorically rather than literally), and then I remembered that I have a significant mental illness and thus I'm not providing any counterevidence...
This reminds me of how people respond to people who say they cant orgasm/cant do it very well (which is like, 11% of all adult women!)
"You can't?? Well, clearly you havnt tried hard enough. have you tried X? how about Y?"
Ive tried a bunch of things, I feel like ive put in a pretty decent effort at this point, and its honestly not worth more stress
"Well, you're obviously repressed and emotionally frigid. You HAVE to keep trying!"
Im really not unhappy or anything, If i figure it out eventually, great! If not, I've got lots of other interesting experiences
"You can't know what you're talking about. Orgasm is THE MOST IMPORTANT experience. You are missing out on so much."
... gee, thanks?
Asexuals often get similar responses. I think it's partly a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy -- they experience things a certain way and can't properly understand what it's like (or that it's possible) to have a very different experience.
This was kind of jarring to read linguistically, because at least in my personal idiolect, "woo" is entirely pejorative – "woo is great" would be akin to saying "quackery is great" or "snake oil is great".
I thought from reading that Scott Alexander was being pejorative?
I can make myself cry thinking how one day my daughter will be old and die and forget all our adventures together. Or stare at the sea until shivers go down my spine. Mostly I don't toy with the emotional subsystem thus. Has a masturbatory quality to it.
One related observation that's impressed me from both the posts and the comments section here is that there is a _lot_ of variation in baseline bodily sensation across the population. From the discussions on CO2 sensing (from "Ondine's Curse" to panic attacks) to those on obesity to those on libido levels, there seems to be a large dynamic range in basic bodily drives.
Insofar as "woo" at least starts with concentrating on bodily sensations, this tends to support hypotheses that one should expect significantly different reactions to "woo" from people with different baseline sensitivities to particular bodily sensations.
-- I think part of the explanation for woo's reported success may be a selection effect. People who are capable of maintaining a regular practice are going to be more mentally healthy than people who can't. People who are capable of light non-damaging physical activity (yoga, taiji) are going to be healthier than people who aren't. Further, if these practices are designed to ease people into them and encourage participation, the act of participating may actually increase participants' mental and physical health. And even with that aside, if a person is trying one woo after another but is in a bad enough condition that they can't keep up with any of them, and then for unrelated reasons their condition improves, the next woo they try will stick, and for them it will be correlated with improvement. Plus, other people have mentioned the beneficial effects of being in groups, working toward a shared goal, and making incremental progress.
-- Here's another hypothesis for some of the body-work type stuff. There's a lot of factors involved, and a lot of mechanisms, and we don't understand and haven't isolated many of them. Until the point that we do, we have to rely on intuitive, non-rational understanding to work with them. (Compare a chef who "just knows" what spices to add, to a computer program that can analyze flavor compounds and calculate how combinations match against the standard human palate.) There may be a body of knowledge built up using various metaphors that have over time been productive. Accessing the patterns at higher levels requires understanding the building blocks at lower levels. And none of this stuff is like Lost Knowledge from the Gods in a fantasy story; it's simply a lot of best practices built up over time a la "The Secret of Our Success". A further complication is that we are not disembodied intellects, or even a pure intellect in a clean implementation of a neural network: our meat brains are hooked into our bodies in all sorts of weird ways. Biofeedback aside, in certain domains, we (most of us) have hard-coded instincts and biases that are difficult to overcome or even notice. At times like that, being able to operate at the level of a metaphor can allow results that are (for most people) more difficult to accomplish through pure rationality. (Treating people as numbers makes it easier to do things that talking with them, face to face, would make harder. And, perhaps, treating all living things including yourself as incarnation of the same "world spirit" might produce a type of ethical treatment of animals that is difficult to reach and sustain by purely rational methods. Maybe. I dunno. That's just a thought.)
-- Some of this stuff seems close to sympathetic magic. That is, there's a bigger problem, perhaps psychological in nature, and also a smaller problem, perhaps physical tension due to inefficient use of the mechanisms of the body. If a correspondence is built up over time, then part of the treatment for the bigger problem could involve resolving the smaller problem. Probably not at once; it would seem best to match the lengths of treatment and create correspondences and stuff like that. And breakthroughs in the smaller problem could be re-purposed to unblock seemingly-intractable aspects of the larger problem. Alternatively, this would be a great way to scam people into thinking that you'd fixed their big problems.
-- A personal anecdote: in my EMDR treatment for PTSD, I'm often asked after a few minutes of EMDR to notice where in my body I'm feeling tension. I respond with where or not, I'm reminded to hold attention on that, and then we go for another few minutes. I can see how someone might interpret this as woo, but to me it's that I simply react to stress with certain types of physical compensation. Not like fully curling up into a fetal position, but minor things like hunching, fidgeting, and so forth. (There's a strong correlation between those physical sensations and working on something important, but only a moderate correlation the other way.) So if I'm noticing sensations like this, we can use them to track how well I'm processing, as long as I don't fall into the trap of persuading myself that the sensations are whatever I might want them to be. I try to keep the causality flowing one way.
> Schizophrenics smoke much more often than other people; is this because nicotine causes schizophrenia, or because it controls the symptoms schizophrenia (studies suggest the latter). What about marijuana? (here the studies are unclear, a lot of people think it might contribute).
My personal experience with pot and PTSD is that there's a linear scale going from PTSDing to normal to stoned. Call it from -1 to 1, and a standard 10mg indica THC edible moves me 0.5 to the right. If I'm heavily PTSDing (-0.75), I'll get somewhat better (-0.25). If I'm moderately PTSDing (-0.5), I'll go to normal (0). If I'm lightly PTSDing (-0.25), I'll get slightly stoned (0.25). If I'm normal (0), I'll get moderately stoned (0.5). Multiple doses appear to be additive, but I've never gone over 2 doses (I don't actually **like** being stoned). One could conceptualize the scale as visceral agreement with the statement, "It's all cool, dude, just relax and let go." If I were not suffering from PTSD, I would not have discovered this about myself.
Does it generalize to other people or other conditions? I don't know. Does it help long-term in dealing with the condition? I don't think so; it seems like temporary relief. Does the drug itself have long-term effects? I don't know. Would someone who spent a lot of time stoned forget how to deal with their condition when not stoned? I rather suspect the answer is "yes": why the FUCK would you want to keep these FUCKING coping mechanisms in your head if you didn't absolutely FUCKING have to? Pardon my FUCKING French.
is meditation woo?
No, it's "om". ;-P
Sufficiently strong claims about its effects are.
"Woo" is usually a mixture of placebos, poorly regulated folk medicine, and practices that are normally part of medicine, such as things like stretching, talk therapy, or meditation. Placebos work for different people to varying degrees so long as it is a condition placebos can touch. And good health practices remain that even if you dress it up in dubious theories about what is going on. So woo absolutely can "work" if you keep your expectations focused on what is actually going on. But people adopting the surrounding mythology is pernicious insofar as it 1) encourages them to try actively harmful treatments 2) causes people to choose it in lieu of more effective options or 3) causes people to form poor habits of mind that end up resulting in them adopting (other) harmful beliefs. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, all three are all over so-called woo communities and people with a good background in rational skepticism rightly should look at that with a mixture of concern and contempt.
I think woo is fake systematicity, and this is separate from the question of which things have an underlying practice that has an effect for some people. Fake systematicity has lots of bad side effects related to misrepresenting what's actually going on in any given practice community and the biases and emotional problems of the people drawn to that community.
I am an engineer, very healthy physically and mentally, and score about 9.5 out of 10 as a rationalist. Been following and aligned that way for a decade or more.
I have also practiced Chen style Taiji for over 20 years (over 10,000 hours of practice and instruction). For the first 5 years it was just a complicated exercise - good for the body but comparable to Pilates. Then one day I experienced feelings that were not correlated with Western Medicine and my world view changed. The Taiji teachers would say I experienced “chi”.
I practice Taiji very rationally. If I practice “correctly” then I experience chi and observers will state that my Taiji is objectively better. The chi experience is repeatable and seems to be teachable.
I do not know what chi is and do not care. I simply accept that my sensations are not entirely correlated with the predictions of western medicine. That’s OK, the sensations are useful and repeatable and teachable. I don’t need more than that.
I would be glad to answer questions about this. I think it is valuable for the Rationalist community to accept the possibility that there are “real” experiences that are not explained by current Western models.
Is it possible at all to explain what the chi state feels like?
Individuals vary a lot. Describing this as normal vs. defective is the opposite of helpful.
Many variations may be due to hemisphere dominance. Left-brained people may have little interest in their bodies, while right-brained people may find their bodies rich with information. These differences can be a combination of genetic and learned. Learned responses may include trauma responses, but not only that. Simply imitating parents' emotional styles can cause large differences. Both hemispheres have value. See The Master and His Emissary. (The Master is the right hemisphere, so if anyone is defective, it's overly left-brained people, according to McGilchrist). The rational brain is easily fooled, while a "gut feeling" is hard to fake or make up as a rationalization.
Responses to different woo practices vary a lot among people, and practices like meditation can take a long time to get good at. No benefit from one practice says nothing about practices you haven't tried yet.
Only the mind separates the organism into body and mind. The body makes no such distinction.
Right brain / left brain distinctions in pop culture derived from pop science summaries of split brain studies are almost entirely wrong, fwiw.
That may be, but the book I cited is about as far from "pop" as you can get.
I would say I enjoy doing some woo practices (I meditate regularly, stretch (yoga) almost every morning, I love cold dips at Scandinavian spas or after a gruesome physical effort.
I do this stuff because I enjoy them. Simple as that.
I also enjoy a ñarge variety of sports, I enjoy watching TV and films, and I love reading. To me, these woo activities are hobbies that keep me entertained and busy and make me feel good. And I understand that others don't enjoy them as much!
That's fine. I share the preferences you named. Our host seems to have written mainly about a distinct aspect of woo as I understood him. Less agency, more having something done or taught to you.
Is WOO X named after Woo? See https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/woo-x-the-next-ftx.
Forgive me if someone else made this point and I didn't see it among the comments, but I think there's another aspect to woo that is not being considered here: most kinds of woo involve a intimate, trusting relationship with someone who very likely comes across as caring about you. That in itself can be beneficial to those with emotional or psychological trauma or instability, much like a relationship with a good therapist. To wit: we offer Reiki to nurses as part of staff care at the hospital where I work. Reiki is obviously woo, and I have never heard a remotely plausible explanation for it, but I agreed to try it once, and it was really quite pleasant. I felt that the Reiki guy cared about me, I trusted him, that relaxed me, I was less stressed and more focussed the rest of the day, and so on. Would it have been the same if he'd just given me a hug, or I'd played with the therapy dog for a bit?
Maybe! But I get why people like it.
Important point. Encounters with sufficiently trustworthy people (or animals) that show genuine interest in you and try to do you good promote your health. I may repeat myself here, the best evidence-backed indication for classical massage treatment is depression, with effects in the range of psychotherapy and antidepressant medication.
Can anyone give me an explanation of what “woo” is? I never heard of it until this article, and Scott’s brief description seems to encompass an awful lot. I mean, I do yoga, and it certainly helped - fixed my back right up. It’s boring as hell but it worked!
There's no exact definition because it is a catch-all term meant to refer to a whole grab-bag of treatments and practices frequently associated with new-age spirituality with an almost total overlap with what is meant by complimentary/alternative/integrative medicine. It's a shortened version of the "woo-woo" pejorative that is more generally aimed at pseudoscience, superstition, and mysticism, but is heavily connotated with a particular subset that one might call "crunchy."
One the one end you have things that likely have a positive effect for plausible theoretical reasons like yoga. In the middle you have things that are nothing more than a placebo, but probably aren't actively harmful apart from the fact that they affect how people reason with evidence and their health choices like homeopathy or acupuncture. Then on the other end you have things that are straight up harmful like chelation therapy to treat autism.
One woo peddler I know claimed that Kundalini would be able to cure cancer and genetic diseases. I'm really, really dubious.
Yes, it is possible.
But rarely done because it would condition others in the same direction. Instead, the teacher will ask questions “how do you feel?” to encourage the student to be aware of their body. A group of people might all agree that “we feel chi when we do XYZ” but would generally not go into any more detail.
But I would share my experiences privately. Peter.houser@gmail.com
(FYI, if you respond via email, your response just goes to the root level. So the person you're responding to won't necessarily see this comment. I happened to catch this because I was eagerly awaiting your response; I've done a fair bit of martial arts myself, including a few years of Chen Taiji.)
As a variation of 2, maybe woo could have a placebo/nocebo effect (which in this context is pretty much equivalent to it having a real effect), but the specific kinds of woo work only for specific kinds of people, because of their expectations? Those who are open to the idea of spirituality are able to benefit from it, while those who are skeptical about it as a category and more open to traditional medicine would be better off with other forms of treatment. For example, they might get better effects from new, supposedly scientifically-based practices, supplements and medicine with studies proving their efficacy. Even if the studies fail to replicate in a few years, or further studies reveal that the treatment has insignificant effects, the treatment still works for them, as the context at the time allowed for them to be open to the suggestion that it would work.
Conversely, a treatment that is scientifically-proven to be effective, but sounds woo, might be made ineffective if the patient is unable to do their part because they believe it won't work. Adapting the treatment to sound less woo and more scientific would remove the nocebo effect that stops an effective treatment from working.
On the topic of emotions and body sensations, there was one thing that I personally found really useful, as I might be one of these people who repress their body sensations. So, at one point my therapist recommended I try to experience my emotions with my body rather than with my mind. I found it a rather weird concept, but after some period of trying managed to get it working. And it helped a lot! The way I see it works is that when I try to consciously experience my emotions as body sensations (pain, tightness, difficulty to breathe, whatever), it might be unpleasant. But it always passes, and most of the times quickly. But when I try to deal with emotions in my head - it often creates an obsessive feedback loop when I keep circling around the particular problem, reliving it a hundred times and basically re-creating the emotion raw again and again and again. No such feedback loop in body - it hurts, then it goes away, sort of like when I hit my knee on something and an hour later it is just back to the way it was, no pain.
One thing I'd like to point out about woo is that it's often (not always, but often) better than nothing. I had relatives who genuinely believed in woo. If I had a headache as a kid, they'd run their hands over my body to channel breath magic or something like that. It was placebo, so it worked.
My question: would kiddie aspirin have been an improvement? Should I have been given ibuprofen instead? Consider the risk of liver / stomach toxicity of these drugs - should you still administer them to young children, or should you try magic tricks that don't run that risk first?
Woo works well for transient, minor pains (for most otherwise healthy people is the bulk of most pains). Woo does not work for serious ailments, and if there is a treatment, it's obviously better to pursue that treatment. But in the absence of available treatment .... Is it better than nothing?
I'm solidly on Team Possibility 2. I had depression where the symptoms were *so* somaticized that it took over 5 years to realize my problem was mental health related and not a sleep disorder. I'm also someone who easily falls into meditative states and experiences the kinds of things described in the stages of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, including things that happened, in the "correct" order, quite a few years before I read the book or started any kind of structured meditative practice. I prefer unguided meditation. My wife is exactly the opposite: trained as a therapist, processes emotions mentally and verbally, prefers guided meditations and gets lots of benefits from them but not the more woo-y experiences.
I would question the whole framing, actually. All four possibilities are likely actual. Scott wrote about how meds are both overprescribed and underprescribed at the same time,sometimes to the same people. It is similar to this "woo" thing.
First, we are all at least somewhat dissociated from our bodily sensations at all times, otherwise we would be constantly distracted, itching, scratching and ow-ing. Sometimes we are dissociated so much, we don't feel rather pain in the rush of the moment, not until later. We are often also hyper-sensitized to our bodily sensations, say, feeling more pain in a specific area when we are scared of it. Again, Scott covered this a number of times. One very common example is a person yelling "I am not angry!!!" when pointed out that they are. It is not a "U-shaped curve", more like a bunch of random points.
Second, some people experience a lot more of this than others. A child who was regularly beaten and/or raped growing up learns to both not feel pain to survive the experience, and later experience body-memory pain when triggered. The sensation perception is completely warped in them. Sometimes it is "useful" (I know a person who can choose not to feel mild burns), but most of the time it is not a great thing (a person who has a severe health anxiety and simply thinking about potential heart issues can trigger heart ache, heart palpitations, and all the symptoms of a panic attack that mimic a heart attack). Stigmata is another classic example.
Third, this can often be normalized, at least temporarily, by mindfulness meditation, (self)trance, and all the other "body work" "woo". There are people who are both receptive to this and accepting of it. There are other people who hate the sensation of feeling their body and refuse anything that could "raise awareness" or it. Yet others would love to normalize their bodily perceptions but are not good at it.
Finally, like with psych meds, the trick is to match the treatment to the person, or else one does more harm than good, creating long-term negative side effects without having any primary benefit.
> The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos, dye their hair, do drugs, break off contact with their families, cut themselves, and massively over-psychologize everything they do. Which of these are coping strategies and which are risk factors? Which are both at once, vicious cycles that convert present suffering into future suffering, and so need to be compassionately discouraged? A lot hinges on the answer!
Well, some are vicious cycles, and some are virtuous cycles and some are ad hoc coping strategies, and sometimes all three at once, depending on the day of the week.
I know lots of people who do not have severe problems who are into woo, and feel very helped by some or several varieties of it. It seems to me that their belief in it has a different quality than their belief in science-based treatments, which most also take seriously. They have a special bond with their woopractitioners and with other people they know who are believers in this particular woo. One clear sign of it is that if you say, "but that can't possibly work," they are hurt in a special way -- almost as though you had laughed at their religion, or scoffed at a photo of a loved one that's important to them. It's much different from how they'd respond if you said, "I don't think cholesterol-lowering drugs have any effect." To that they'd say, "What?! Where did you read that? Mine sure works on my cholesterol."
Also, I think people who respond to woo are more suggestible -- better hypnotic subjects.
I'm sure there's also a group of people who are suffering greatly from some illness that conventional medicine cannot treat, and who turn to woo as a last resort. Ross Douthat wrote about doing that.
> Also, I think people who respond to woo are more suggestible -- better hypnotic subjects.
That could explain some things. (Although, the problem is, Scott already made a few hypotheses in the article, and each of them "could explain some things".)
Maybe each form of "woo" provides some mild benefits -- meditation improves your focus, yoga makes you exercise, Wim Hof method makes you less afraid of cold -- but more practice provides diminishing returns... Except for the people who are "hypnotized" into believing that it makes their lives miraculously better. And those definitely do feel better, it's just their explanations (that they feel better because they have perfect control over their minds or bodies, can remember their previous lives, and get energy from the universe) that are bullshit. They merely feel better because they convinced themselves to feel better whenever they do X. (In other words, they made X their hobby.)
Was curious whether there's any research about suggestibility and responsiveness to woo. Did a quick Google Scholar search and found this:
Hypnotizability and the use of traditional dhami-jhankri healing in nepal
Amitava Biswas , Donna See , Manuela M. Kogon & David Spiegel
Pages 6-21 | Received 22 Apr 1998, Published online: 31 Jan 2008
Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/00207140008410357
This study examined the role of hypnotic responsiveness in the practice of a dhami-jhankri, a traditional Nepali healer. The hypnotic capacity of 248 male patients was measured in an allopathic (Western) clinic, an Ayurvedic (ancient Hindu healing art) clinic, and a dhami-jhankri's practice. Hypnotizability was assessed using the Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP). The Induction scores of the HIP were significantly higher among the dhami-jhankri's patients than among either the Ayurvedic or allopathic patients. Furthermore, patients who returned to the dhami-jhankri were more highly hypnotizable than first-time dhami-jhankri patients. In addition, treatment satisfaction as reported by dhami-jhankri patients was positively correlated with HIP scores. The authors conclude that hypnotic phenomena as measured in the West might be an important component of the dhami-jhankri's treatment in the East.
Here's one more -- but after this I promise, no more!
Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields
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Pehr Granqvist a, Mats Fredrikson a, Patrik Unge a, Andrea Hagenfeldt a, Sven Valind b, Dan Larhammar c, Marcus Larsson d
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2004.10.057
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Abstract
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with weak (micro Tesla) complex waveform fields have been claimed to evoke the sensed presence of a sentient being in up to 80% in the general population. These findings have had a questionable neurophysiological foundation as the fields are approximately six orders of magnitude weaker than ordinary TMS fields. Also, no independent replication has been reported. To replicate and extend previous findings, we performed a double-blind experiment (N = 89), with a sham-field control group. Personality characteristics indicating suggestibility (absorption, signs of abnormal temporal lobe activity, and a “new age”-life-style orientation) were used as predictors. Sensed presence, mystical, and other somatosensory experiences previously reported from the magnetic field stimulation were outcome measures. We found no evidence for any effects of the magnetic fields, neither in the entire group, nor in individuals high in suggestibility. Because the personality characteristics significantly predicted outcomes, suggestibility may account for previously reported effects. Our results strongly question the earlier claims of experiential effects of weak magnetic fields.
My answer to this column is going to be heavily coloured by my experience as a member of Gen X (born in 1970). I had an entirely analogue childhood, which largely involved around running around parks, climbing trees and swimming in rivers. I didn't own a computer until after I graduated university. Since the mid-1990s, my work has almost entirely been based on a computer After an analogue childhood and youth, this has always felt a little jarring to me. The way I've made it work is by looking for hobbies that emphasize physical movement and physicality to provide some balance.
It's interesting that your list includes a lot of options that are based on physicality, including yoga, tai chi, Alexander technique, Wim Hof, etc. The "woo" is often based on the way people talk about these activities (particularly the alleged benefits) and not so much on the activities themselves, which could be included in a much larger category that includes everything from powerlifting to salsa dancing to marathon running to playing tennis and going for a nice walk in the countryside.
I suspect that the drive to include some analogue physicality in our increasingly digital lives is the real story here. Many of our ancestors would probably be more surprised to see us doing abstract work while sitting still in offices and staring at screens than they would be to see some people stretching enthusiastically, getting up early to move gracefully in traditional ways, trying to work on their posture, swimming in cold water and so on.
A more superficial issue is why one activity resonates with one person but not somebody else. Yoga, tai chi, Alexander technique, Wim Hof are non-competitive; involve regular practice; are light on equipment; and often come attached with whole worldviews. That is fine. Some will like these aspects more than others. On the other hand, someone else will enjoy cycle races, with one long training session at the weekend and lots of shopping trips for gear, while any sense of transcendence goes unspoken. That is also fine. But the drive to do something physical is largely the same.
Ok. I think I have a vague understanding of whats going on here. Scott has touched on Conectome Specific Harmonic Wave Theory. If you check out rhw qualia insititue and testing models of valence theory, you will hear a lot about "neural annealing"
To greatly simplfiy, the idea is sort of that instead of a single brain wave, the brain has multiple connectomes with their own waves. The degree to which these harmonize or are in discord affect something like "mood." Neural annealing happens when people are stuck in "entropy sinks"- feedback patterns that keep the connectomes misalinged in a posiitve feedback loop.
A lot of "spiritual experiences", despite the specifci religious content, seem to happen in similar ways. Data or experiences that the entropy sink cant handle can force an adjustment, which can, under the right conditions, restore the harmonics and thus increase valence. This is something like the idea of Chod in Tibetan buddhism where people would partake in orgies or meditate in a charna field. Note the orgy thing probably wouldnt work for a westerner. The idea was to have an experience so shocking to the senses that a person's normal ego boundaries couldnt contain it and would force a sort of reordering or the percpetion of reality.
Probably, differnt specific traditions describe the process in specifi ways that then become self fulfilling prophecies. For example, there are "many" buddhism that insist theres is the true path and others are getting it wrong. What might happen there is they have their own means and interpretation of the steps of this process, and as Buddhists will point out, initial entry level expereinces are NOT the end goal. So if these different processes lead to people harmoning their connectomes, if unchecked that would feel incredibly significant and convince them their process was the true one.
So what the woo people might be saying is that our models, communties, and ways of understanding things lead to having these types of experiences more easily then a rationalist perspective. This could be true without any of the specific claims being true as the word sare substitutes for vague culturally shared an reinforced intuitons. I have noticed that in the "rationalist world" people tend to beleive they are more aware oif their own cognitive processes then they actually are. This COULD be a block for many, as if one believes they are more ware of their own cognition in rationalist terms, and are in terms of certain models,. they would be less open to poking around at the things that that they form parts of their cognition they are not consciously aware of, which is sort of necessary for a neural anneling process- a degree of honesty with oneself where the subconscious or "shadow self" is explicitly recognized and merged with the conscous ego identity.
sorry for the typos, I'm not particulalry good at typing
Sorry Scott, but to me, it's hardly possible to have a meaningful discussion about these issues if one uses categories like "woo", which lump together very different techniques rooted in different contexts. I see your point, but using a more nuanced language would be helpful here.
BTW, lumping all these things under a blob-like label "woo" feels to me like the intellectual counterpart of treating bodily sensations like an undifferentiated blob.
+1
Also, labeling as "woo" things as different as Somatic Experiencing, yoga and "chakra meditation" (not to mention "crystals and witchcraft", which appear in the comments) seems actually harmful. It's like treating libertarianism, oldschool conservatism, nationalist populism and downright Nazism all as "right wing" - correct from some point of view, but all in all hardly useful for making cogent arguments.
+1
Yeah not all woo practices are in the same category, some actually have good evidence backing them up and are frequently used in business, acting , psychological practices etc. precisely because they work.
I’m a little bit skeptical of people who say they have tried meditating / yoga / breathwork / affirmations / etc. seriously (with proper instruction) and regularly (ideally daily) for a longer period of time and experienced absolutely no benefits.
If you had someone tell you they tried antidepressants / diet change / new exercise routine and they didn’t work but they had only taken them for a month you’d tell them that they need a way longer timeframe to experience benefits, and surely all these three things are effective without a doubt.
Irrelevant to your point: most antidepressants can pretty safely be said to show their benefit or the lack of it in 4-6 weeks, but not necessarily sooner than that.
Just for general information, when you say you tried all these woo things in good faith, what does that exactly mean? Daily over a period of a month/year? Guided instruction? Would be nice to hear a detailed report on your experiences
Also, there's a world of difference between trying something "out of intellectual curiosity" (or to establish an intellectual point) and going all in (because you feel a raw, pressing need). I imagine Scott's motivation was the former (I could be wrong on this), which might contribute to lack of perceived results.
Yeah its the difference between going to the gym out of curiosity and going to the gym because you’re serious about building muscle
I’ll put in my two cents.
When I was younger, I went through many years of severe depression culminating in a suicide attempt.
The psychologist who saved me was able to identify that I was suppressing my emotions and rationalising them to avoid feeling them profoundly. It was only through a process of feeling emotions - literally, bodily sensations - in the psychologist’s office that I became able to process how angry I was at my father (very stereotypical.)
During and since that period I have done a fair bit of Vipassana meditation (or “body-scan” as it is called in Western tradition) and that has helped to keep me grounded.
As a result of my experience, I have roughly the same reaction to someone hypothesising “maybe body-work is all woo” as I would to “maybe hair doesn’t exist.” It comes out of my head! I can see it on many people I meet! Perhaps being bald is not a pathological state, to extend the analogy, BUT (to extend it even further) if eg it is a result of chemotherapy it might be a sign of deeper problems within.
So I suppose I come down somewhere between possibility 1 and possibility 2 on Scott’s list above. I don’t think you should necessarily seek out body work if you’re not inclined to it, but feeling your real feelings, without resistance, without interference from thought or rationalisation, is the gateway to unwinding a ton of mental pathology.
To wax more philosophically, there is a sense in which your feelings are the only true thing. All interpretation can be misguided, this might all be a simulation or a hallucination, there might not be a “you” at all (Buddhist philosophers teach that there is not) but there is certainly a perception. That is immediate and cannot be denied.
Scott, your comment in the first paragraph about how you have tried body work and not gotten results begs the further question (which you don’t have to answer if you don’t feel comfortable.) What results exactly were you trying to achieve?
My hypothesis is that the difference between those drawn to woo and those not is how much congruence there is between the way you've learnt you "should" feel and how you actually feel. I believe the term in psychoanalysis is "splitting".
From the snippets I read of this blog's author he doesn't seem wracked with anxiety, doesn't seem to question himself constantly. He writes blog posts quickly, not a lot of second guessing. So I'm extrapolating to say, for him there is no split. How he feels, where ever he feels it, is just that. Thoughts, feelings, body, mind: congruent. Not saying happy necessarily, just congruent.
But then there are those in various communities who have splits of various kinds: people who have experienced trauma that isolates them from others, people who are neurodivergent and have been told constantly that the do things wrong, people who feel the need to mask, people who for whatever reason have a feeling deep down that something is just fundamentally wrong with them. And for them, maybe their brain feelings and body feeling don't match up. Or maybe even it's just their thoughts and their feelings that don't match up. There's some incongruence that leads to confusion and distress, and leads people to be interested in woo because woo attempts to address this incongruence.
This doesn't match my experience of woo, which was mostly in Quaker circles. I lived and worked at a Quaker center for a year. The central practice, after the breakfast of whole-wheat bread and fair-trade coffee, is the 350-year-old woo practice of sitting quietly and waiting to see if God will speak to you (meeting for worship). People were into listening to your inner light and looong discussion sessions. Most of the staff seemed like pretty stable people.
Of the dozen people in the youth program there, I don't see an obvious connection between who was most into woo and how they were doing personally. The one who went on to become a shiatsu practitioner seemed fine. The one with a lot of trauma from childhood cancer went on to get more into neopaganism. The one who was most obviously struggling mental-health-wise was not particularly into woo.
I meditated for 7 years before I had any body issues. So its kind of hard for me to grasp that I picked these practices up as a coping mechanism. They were already in tact.
I think this article gets to the crux of the paradox of awareness. You don't know you unaware, until you are. What many people think is a normal mind, is actually not normal. It's kind of just how this all works.
I don't particularly like your examples. Having been around a lot of woo over the course of my life. Woo, I would categorize this things that solely or at least primarily function through physical or biological mechanisms that have been categorically disproven to exist, so some combination of placebo effect, cultural pressure, wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of the fundamental science mixed in with outright fraud is the animating principle. People do have positive responses to these, and I think the idea that non-responders might be defective in some way is possible, or just neurodivergent better at some things than others.
What I would call woo are things like Deepak chopra's Quantum longevity, Homeopathy which has been done to death, energy healing, Crystal healing, psychic surgery which is pretty much just fraud but can still have Placebo effects, certain forms of detox, High colonics, Etc.
Things that I wouldn't call woo are things that map on to meditation or stretching or exercise such as Tai Chi and yoga, and I wouldn't call internal family systems woo either, because that's just a multi-agent psychology. It may not actually work because there has not been enough scientific validation yet but it's not based on an unscientific model. Multi-agent psychology is arguably the dominant neurophysiological model of how the brain, mind and cognition works.
Are these practices hard medical science? No not at all. There's still a lot of work to be done that may show that they have less value than their proponents think they do. Is there a lot of woo attached to them, yeah I think that's a reasonable accusation though I don't think there's any form of medicine or motivational theory that doesn't wind up with superstitious and exaggerated claims connected to them.
I don't disagree with what I think is the intended conclusion here, but I do want to flag this:
> But somehow depressed borderlines with five past suicide attempts never need to “learn the prerequisite skills”. It always comes naturally to them!
This is approximately what I'd expect. If you're mostly psychologically/physically healthy, you can move through life without really understand how your internals work and by just trusting your mind and body in a fairly straightforward way. If you're a depressed borderline with multiple suicide attempts, odds are you're used to treating your body and mind with a level of distrust and error-correction that most people don't have to deal with at all. So yes, obviously, the people that have had to sink or swim on their self-awareness will have more deliberate and finely-tuned self-awareness than people whose general level of health never brings them into situations where they'd need that.
In the many and long-term interactions that I've had in my life with them, I have not found Borderline folks to be particularly self-aware. If anything, it's generally been the utter opposite. (I'm not saying this to be a jerk, but merely because it's true to my experience.)
I mean, the ones I meet are typically not self-aware in the "models self in social situations and does the globally appropriate things" but _are_ self-aware in the "my general functioning is at a low point today, so I won't commit to doing stressful/involved/intellectually demanding work now" and the "I can precisely and deliberately move my body in space, and know its relative and absolute limits to a remarkable degree" sense. The latter two to a much higher level than neurotypical people I meet. What I'm trying to say is that it seems to make sense that you'd have these levels of self-awareness if you didn't have the capability to effectively ignore those limits on a day-to-day basis but were still able to act in the world (I'm assuming there are lots of borderline folks who I never meet because their functioning is low enough that I just never encounter them in real life).
Ah, I think you were using "self-aware" in a much different sense than I was. If you meant, primarily, bodily awareness, I don't feel like I can really judge how bodily aware the ones I've known have been, but you could well be right. I was using "self-aware" more in terms of having an accurate mental model of themselves as an agent, their inner workings, their behavior, and their interactions in the world, and on that count, I have found them to have relatively quite low awareness (or, more precisely, inaccurate awareness).
One’s sense of wonder is another’s experience of the mundane. If meditation practice makes you experience your body and mind in a somewhat new way, one is enthralled, while another just files the experience away as any other new experience. So I’m going for door number 2.
I lived in Boulder for 11 years and tried all kinds of woo stuff — mediation, herbs, hynotization, sweat lodges, reiki etc. etc.
I always felt like it had zero effect.
Then I did a long series of weekend workshops with a particularly talented couple of teachers, during which they put a great deal of pressure on me to essentially get over myself.
One Saturday evening I just opened up. I cried and I felt vulnerable for the first time, and all that woo stuff suddenly made sense. It was like suddenly developing a "sense" of emotion after never having had it. Imagine that all your life you've heard people talking about how food tastes, but it didn't really taste like much to you. You learn to fake having a sense of taste, and you can sort of distinguish food but it mostly tastes quite similar. Then one day BOOM you get the full taste experience and it's completely overwhelming.
It was far and a way the most beautiful and important experience of my life.
It was terrifying, and during the next few hours I gradually shut down again, back to my impenetrable self. I never again felt that way.
But it was clear to me at the time that I live in a particular sort of hardened state that keeps woo from working on me.
I don't think all people are like me, though it sounds like you might be. Maybe very few people are like this.
Afterwards, I did some research into trauma, post traumatic stress disorder etc., but the state of the art at that time seemed primitive and I didn't pursue it.
I studied Buddhism for a long time, and I remember hearing that sometimes a teacher has to help a student build up an ego before helping to tear it down. That resonated with me — I think I shut down so completely, so early in life, that I didn't develop a "normal" psychology, with normal emotional reactions.
There have been a couple of times when I've had a faint shadow of that experience, and it was when I was in stressful and chaotic situations that I couldn't control. I think the shell I developed served as a way to control my emotional exposure to the world from a very early age. It's become so deeply ingrained that I can't see it or choose to stop.
I can't tell whether 1, 2 and 3 are being offered as genuine possibilities here or not.
I'm a woo non-responder, and like Scott I have given a few things quite a serious try. I don't think it's a sign of defectiveness not to respond to woo, but in my case I think the lack of responsiveness to woo is part of a larger trait that I do view as a defect: I'm a non-responder to ceremonies where people come together to grieve or celebrate: weddings, funerals, parades, concerts. In my case I think it's something about difficulty connecting with the group vibe. At funerals, especially, you'd think that wouldn't be hard. Most of the other people are feeling sad in much the same way I am, and I know it. I simply am not comforted by their presence, and I can't kind of roll with what's offered -- some music, some talks, some of them mostly about grief, others lighter in tone, memories of fun times and great jokes with the deceased. I'd like to get on that train and ride it but I can't. My experience is that I am sitting alone in a public place, forced so powerfully to think about the dead person that I can't keep from sobbing, yearning to be alone so I can cry in privacy and peace. Dunno why I'm like that.
Anyhow, the woo stuff seems to me to have a groupiness to it -- people feel a bond with the practiioner and with the other people who also feel a benefit from the treatment. It's almost like a little religion. Compare the way people talk about visitis their dentist or their physical therapist to the way they talk about energy healing sessions.
Hmm. Maybe the non-responders are a wee bit too rational?
https://youtu.be/v4IeuIg9nGY
Lucid dreaming is an interesting case study. It's something that would be considered woo, except that there's solid evidence it's a real phenomenon. It clearly comes naturally for some, while others struggle to experience it even with persistent effort. Getting zero results is not unusual. Anectodally, lucid dreaming non-responders do not seem defective as a group.
A possibly related example is the constrast between people who have visionary experiences with psychedelics versus people who don't experience visual effects at all on these substances.
My guess is that unusual bodily experiences are similar: people are wired differently.
"All of these people also “do bodywork”. Is this a coping strategy? A risk factor? An innocent diversion? I don’t know. But overall it’s left me feeling grateful that whatever “skills” predispose one to bodywork seem to have passed me by"
I do some 'bodywork' in the context of meditative practice (mostly samadhi-related body scanning and working with the sensations and related subjective phenomena). Causality is beyond me, but I can say very confidently that doing lots of meditation and some related stuff has coincided with a steady, big improvement in mental well-being and general sense of easiness compared to before. On top of that, the coinciding sense of easiness and happiness eerily resemble the experiences during my meditative - I'm sorry, woo practices.
I also don't hold many if any (woo-related) weird beliefs, and I remain quite skeptical of, say, epistemic or philosophical frameworks related to meditative practices. I have no issues doing meditative or otherwise woo work, however, if I can see I benefit from doing it. Whether or not I have good explanations for why that is.
Now, as for the quoted part - that is, the explanation that I'm just a sick, traumatized druggie: I'm pretty smart, I have a ton of friends, I'm happily married, my sex life is amazing, my income is in the top <5% in my country, I'm productive, I exercise a lot (another thing, by the way, which has tremendously helped me psychologically over the years), I don't have substance dependence issues, and psychologically I'd estimate that over the last few years - coinciding with woo - my anxiety levels have dropped to perhaps 5-10% of what they used to be, while my ability to generally enjoy what I'm doing has slightly increased (maybe 10%).
Impossible to control for confounders and likely (surely) all of the aforementioned also positively affect my sense of well-being. However, I'm just posting this here to point out that sneery rhetorical insinuations along the lines of "woo people are stereotypically very unhappy and sick, wow I'm so glad I'm not into woo" don't fit into my experience, and that of a lot of other people as well. I'm of course sorry if some woo people have said mean things to you.
> Buddhism teaches that life is suffering
No, it doesn't. It teaches that a certain way of relating to life is suffering.
To add a shade on Possibility 2, maybe both are OK but it's beneficial for any individual to be minimally capable of both from the perspective
of being a well rounded person. So we can say that both methods have advantages and disadvantages and neither is normative/defective but also
that it would behoove folks that naturally only do one to give the other method a good faith try.
This might be a shade of the old SSX "the advice a specific person needs to hear" post.
Regarding your remark about "The most messed-up, traumatized people I know tend to get lots of tattoos [...]" It seems like you are only considering
BPD-type messed up people. What about dark-tetrad type messed up people who might look very conservative and appear to lead normal respectable lives
but then go home to systematically torture their family (e.g. Josef Fritzl)? My observation is that these type of messed up people are not particularly into woo and I would regard them as more messed up then the tattooed druggie self-mutilators.
My point being that if 'woo' correlates with a specific defect from your description it sounds like BPD. However there are people who score way higher
on my hierarchy of messed-upness and don't seem to be attracted to to any kind of therapy.
Another 'why did Scott include x in his woo list' remarks - this time on IFS. Does Dick Schwarz make any spiritual claims? As far as I know he does not, although I can see how the system can easily be integrated with spiritual beliefs especially the concept of 'Self'. As a non esoteric believer I found the IFS model of 'parts' to be very useful. I think of it as at the very least a useful metaphor for my emotional world and talking to my 'parts' has actually brought a lot of insights that I don't get from things like CBT. I also appreciate that for a lot of people this would feel odd and uncomfortable, in the same way that ordinary acting or role play can feel odd and uncomfortable to a lot of people, which suggests possibility 2.
It could be a few options simultaneously. For example, consider a spiritual practice that promises to give you supernatural powers, but in reality only makes you relax.
* some people can't loosen up and they may find the exercise deeply unpleasant, while everyone else finds it pleasant (albeit with different opinions on how useful it is);
* some people are in a stressful situation and can benefit greatly from taking a regular time to relax, other people are already relaxed enough and it's a waste of time for them;
* some people are more suggestible and they may genuinely believe they are getting supernatural powers, other people may perceive actual positive effects of relaxation (and either report them correctly, or interpret them in the perspective of the supernatural claims).
For example, a person could report: "I've been doing the magical exercises for three months, and although I cannot shoot lasers from my eyes yet, I can already magically cure minor health problems, and make people react more positively to me. Magic definitely works!"
An outside observer might describe the same situation as: "The person was under a lot of stress recently, the tension of muscles started causing them some pain, and their unpleasant behavior made their family and colleagues react negatively to them. After three months of regular relaxation, the muscle tension and the unpleasant behavior are gone, their family and colleagues react positively to the change."
So, on one hand, this kind of woo provides actual benefits in real life, beyond what we would typically call a placebo effect. On the other hand, the official explanation is wrong. A skeptic may argue that the positive effects are all imaginary, which would be clearly wrong (but may sound convincing to other skeptics). If you correctly realize that it is all the effect of relaxation... but you won't relax (e.g. because "let's relax, it can loosen muscle tension" is way less motivating than "let's get magical powers")... then you won't get the benefits.
I came across this study about peoples reports about experiencing what you guys call whooshes of energy:
“Like a Vibration Cascading through the Body”: Energy-Like Somatic Experiences Reported by Western Buddhist Meditators
Abstract
There are numerous historical and textual references to energy-like somatic experiences (ELSEs) from religious traditions, and even a few psychological studies that have documented related phenomena. However, ELSEs remain an understudied effect of meditation in contemporary research. Based upon narratives from a large qualitative sample of Buddhist meditators in the West reporting meditation-related challenges, this paper offers a unique glimpse into how ELSEs play out in the lives of contemporary meditation practitioners and meditation experts. Departing from studies presuming a “kundalini awakening” framework, this paper presents a broader scope for understanding ELSEs by describing the metaphors practitioners used when speaking about them; the trajectories and impacts of ELSEs, including the factors that were reported as influencing their nature or trajectory; the various ways in which they were interpreted and appraised by practitioners, teachers, and specialists, such as doctors and therapists; and how practitioners responded to them or managed them with particular remedies. Deciding how to interpret and manage ELSEs entailed recruiting frameworks from within and/or beyond the meditator’s specific Buddhist lineage.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/12/1042
I feel like you're missing a pretty apparent (to me) option here...
Option 3, but the reverse. This is at least where I've found the greatest benefit from these practices.
Revised, this would be: "Some people are good and normal. They feel emotions in their bodies, and process them in their mind, together as a unified process. Other people can’t do this, intellectualize their emotions entirely, dissociate, and with no 'outlet valve' for these emotions, end up ruminating all the type, constantly tying their mind into knots every time something goes wrong in their life. This is a non-normative and defective state. Maybe they got this way because they were traumatized as children."
The point is that for some of us, as hyper-rational people, our brains are our worst enemies for emotional processing. Any practice that helps us get out of our mind and into the bodies more can help relieve tension. If something makes you upset but you end up thinking about it all the time, doom and glooming, and don't actually *cry*, this may be you, especially as a man trained to swallow most physical display of emotion. Encouraging the physical manifestation of an emotion to take place, like crying, is actually a healthy thing, to a limited extent. And I'd bet you tons and tons of 'mentally healthy' people cant remember the last time they displayed emotion like this.
Things these practices have helped me with:
Maintaining presence, even when not intellectually stimulated. Very useful for small talk and connecting with people.
Developing a deeper understanding how I feel about boundaries, people, activities in distinction to what my brain thinks I "should" like.
Empathy. Real empathy.