Comment on It's barely a science.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 5 hours agoI’m not sure what realness has to do with it. Magic tends to have some kind of theoretical framework to explain observable phenomena (god(s), the planets, “energies”, etc.) the same way scientific theories do, they even have some experimental frameworks (e.g. my church growing up had a cadre of old ladies who were touted as “good at praying” because they apparently had a good track record with the man upstairs. To my knowledge these claims were never validated in a properly controlled laboratory environment against a random sample of similar parishioners. They also happened to be voracious gossips who wielded private information as a weapon, which is a funny coincidence.) The phenomena that magic explains are “real” insofar as they are experiences that humans have, but the underpinning theories are often unfalsifiable and/or contradictory (“prayer works” and “god’s plan is unknowable and perfect, eternal and unchanging”). That’s what I mean about coherent theories and predictable results. I guess you could say that theories that make accurate predictions are “more real” but I don’t think it makes sense to think about the realness of a scientific theory. It’s either proven false or not proven false so far.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 4 hours ago
Well, the whole point of magic and what makes it different from regular technology is that it straddles the border between consensus reality and the socially unreal. Otherwise, why wouldn’t it just be called technology?
And while I did not do so under laboratory conditions, I do have a case study of using magic to cure sleep apnea.
I would love to perform a replication study of this treatment, but I believe we first need to develop a stronger field of faith exercise science. I believe the patient’s strength of faith is a significant variable in these kinds of treatments, and thus we need a reliable faith measurement system so that we can control for faith. Otherwise our results will appear random and unreliable.
So here is My plan to verify the reproducibility of magical disease treatments:
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 2 hours ago
I think magic does get called technology, once we construct a sufficiently rigorous way to test its predictions and those predictions are validated. The first thing that comes to mind is the old folk remedy of using willow bark to treat fever. I don’t know if that specific treatment was ever described as “magic” per se, but for a broad swath of human history it was a rule: if fever, then willow bark. It was also used in a bunch of other remedies that didn’t work, and there were (still are) a ton of folk remedies for fever that either didn’t work or actively worsened the situation, but the combination of willow bark and fevers was eventually validated, salicin was identified as the active agent, and it became a technological commodity. Some magics, like homeopathy, have been scientifically _in_validated, and therefore get relegated to outside the domain of scientific inquiry. Some, like phrenology, gain broad acceptance within a scientific establishment before they are convincingly invalidated and discarded. Some, like astrology, are broadly scientifically rejected but still have a broad lay appeal for non-scientific reasons.
I think the testing of any magical effect is the same as the testing of anything non-magical. The Chaos Magick Servitor sounds like a useful mental model for “learning a new thing”. If it is proven an effective therapy in clinical trials for apnea, is it no longer magic? I just don’t find the question of whether it’s magic an interesting one in that case. I still want to understand the underlying mechanisms, possibly by conducting trials on which skills can be taught via the “Chaos Magick Servitor” method vs. a control, call it the “Mundane Learning of a Brain Technique” method. You could control for faith by surveying participants before sorting them into groups and blinding testers until the test is complete. If faith in Chaos Magick, or the Servitor technique, is predictive of being able to control apnea via that method, I would expect strong believers in the “Chaos Magick Servitor” method to get better results than their non-believing cohorts, and relatively little difference between believers and non-believers in the control group. One potential downside is that I don’t really know of a good method for measuring “faith” other than self-reporting, but I think if the participant pool is large enough you could probably still get some convincing results as long as you’re content to measure effectiveness vs “self-reported faith” rather than “actual faith”. I don’t know that there’s a reliable way to know someone’s innermost heart so that might be the best you can do with our current technology.
In addition to surveying for current faith strength, you could additionally poll for faith-adjacent wants or beliefs, e.g. “In general, do you want your faith in Chaos Magick to be stronger, weaker, or stay the same?” This would give you an additional dimension: instead of just having high faith and low faith, you could have six groups: high-aspirational, high-avoidant, high-content, low-aspirational, low-avoidant, and low-content. If these groups show significant variation in how well they use the Chaos Magick Servitor method, that could illuminate how one’s current faith and their belief about what their faith “should” be affect the treatment. I’d also be curious to see if there would be any differences among the different faith groups in the control group. It could well be that low faith individuals show no benefit, or that they show more improvement with a more scientific sounding presentation of the same concept.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 hours ago
I think “Faith based technology” is a fine working definition of magic for most practical uses. Many people say if something requires faith to work, it’s magic and not science. But I believe we can use science on faith the same as we can use science on anything else.
Capitalist economics only work if society has faith in the money issuing authority (e.g. the US treasury). Money is a faith based technology and therefore magic. So I think economics should be a field of magical theory. Magicians seem more qualified to answer economic questions than mathematicians. When we let mathematicians do economics, they start making up nonsense like perfectly free markets, because they’re not used to human fallibility. Magicians are perfectly aware of human fallibility, and that’s why we should be in charge of the science of economics. We know capitalism is a scam, just like horoscopes or three card monte.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 35 minutes ago
Ah, I’m glad you clarified. I think there are some magics that don’t have a specific requirement for belief, e.g. casting a spell on a non-believing target, or, depending on how broadly you define magic, gravity (in that, while we have robust theories about how gravity works, we still don’t have a broadly accepted theory about why gravity does what it does). But I do think it’s an interesting type of magic and it can absolutely be subjected to scientific testing. There are a lot of things in that category that aren’t traditionally called magic, like fiat currency, placebos, nation-states (for that matter, laws), human racial categorizations. The impact of belief on a fiat currency (or, belief in the value of that currency) is, I think, pretty well studied though I’m not enough of an economist to know what, if any, theoretical model predicts the fluctuation (or collapse) of a currency’s value.
I’m curious to know what your take is on behavioral economics. It essentially tries to incorporate human fallibility into classical economics. Thaler’s concept of “nudging” is the kind of sleight-of-hand trick that a magician might use to create the illusion of choice.
Also, I’m not a mathematician but they can’t be uniquely responsible for ignoring human fallibility with money. That’s a human problem and capitalists profit by exploiting that tendency, which is why econ (specifically, investments in economic research) tends to focus on research that enables capitalism. The same thing happens in chemistry, pharmaceuticals, anthropology, history, art. Any area of human endeavor can be distorted for personal gain. It just happens that the science of capital, particularly the jargon of economics, is useful for legitimizing and entrenching capitalistic nonsense. Mathematicians are (broadly speaking) more interested in scientific endeavor, at least as much as researchers in any other field.