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deletedMay 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023
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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.

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Thank you, i'll check this out and the papers in the other link.

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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.”

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Yep!

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If you haven't seen it before, you might be interested in this post:

https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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Jun 1, 2023·edited Jun 1, 2023

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

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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?

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May 31, 2023·edited May 31, 2023

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.

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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.

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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.

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founding

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.

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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.

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I thought you were going to answer to this objection ^_^

https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1658998399436218369

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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"

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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?

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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You're absolutely right. I'm editing my comment to indicate the error.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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>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.

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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?

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.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?"

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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.

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"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"

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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.

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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.

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Betteridge’s law of headlines says no

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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The different kinds of yoga work about to the same extent as they overlap with secular gymnastics.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Quantum mechanics!

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So basically "the secret" for galaxy brain nerds

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Ideally we'd find some way to engage in trade with future AIs such that they simulate more woo.

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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)

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This could explain the Matrix, as an attempt to generate quale from human brains on an industrial scale.

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> 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.

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GPT will someday become the sum of all human knowledge, including the parts that are wrong.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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Genetic variation, for one thing. Some people find it easier to gain strength than others.

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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.

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Excuse me, I wasn't reading carefully.

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The effect is most dramatic initially. If you don't gain strength in your first couple lifting sessions there may be a problem

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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"

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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May 31, 2023·edited May 31, 2023

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

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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.

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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.

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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!)

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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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.

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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.

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It is a certain tell of someone who hasn't done much yoga.

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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.

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"...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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You don't know if something is nonsense or not until you've taken it seriously.

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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.

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As the saying goes: "Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out."

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

> 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.

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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.

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People _with_ power are far from immune either, though.

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I would wager that they are much *more* immune.

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Possibly, but what _really_ helps is scientific literacy (just as with religion).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Agree. Woo is _much_ wider than this.

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You view "going to the gym" as comparable to "cleansing diets" in terms of level of nonsense?

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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. ;)

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Jun 12, 2023·edited Jun 12, 2023

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

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Joining a cult can be helpful, probably due to the placebo effect.

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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.

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> 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?

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>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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Sure, workout the mind too. That's distinct from mysticism

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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.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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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.

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For some people (Scott?), there's nothing else to try, so it's reasonable to spend small amounts of time exploring the improbable.

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Woo as Pascal Robbery, indeed.

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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.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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_.)

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I mean yeah, but you have to check. You can't rule it out in advance.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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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?

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"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.'

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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.

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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.

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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.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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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.

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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.

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Let's just hope that David Attenborough never uses his powers for evil...

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> 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.

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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.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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?

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

>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".

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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

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"Woo" is probably being used because it originates in the tweet that Scott responded to.

But thanks for the relevant link!

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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.

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Agree. I mean, the etymology of the word is the "woo... woo..." sound you make when you pretend that you're doing magic.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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.

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I bet people classify Feldenkrais method as woo, too.

Could you tell me about the Taubman approach?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Thank you very much.

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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.

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‘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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

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).

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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.

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You can find research to support a lot of things that aren't actually true. You have to consider the weight of the research.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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> 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.

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> 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!"

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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

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May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023

"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.

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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)

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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.

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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...

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No Possibility #5? The one that says "Woo doesn't work, but some people are more susceptible to placebo effects than others."

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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.

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