thaiboxerken
Penultimate Amazing
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Some people just don't understand how valuable skepticism is or what it is. Suggestologist is one of those people. He doesn't understand that investigation and asking for evidence is skepticism. He wants people to place their skepticism aside, which means what? It means to simply believe what's being sold and fall for it. Maybe Suggestologist works for an homeopathy marketing agency.
Then again, he simply won't place skepticism aside and buy my car for $100K. I guess he's a hypocrit.
Then again, he simply won't place skepticism aside and buy my car for $100K. I guess he's a hypocrit.
I don't think anyone really knows where belief comes from. There's probably several doctorates out there for the person who figures it out.
I think we've all found the place the disagreement stems from. Suggestologist places personal experience (ancedotes?) much higher on the tree of evidentiary value that the rest of us do. I would hazard that any debate about more specific issues is pointless (from a convince-the-other-guy point of view) unless this issue is resolved.
But this is far simpler than a belief in a full blown system. And note that the belief in the presence of the chair actually led you to fall on the floor. Is this the problem with a false belief?
The chair belief was also tested very strongly. Their is no other reasonable explanation than "the chair is not there." A Reiki healing does have other possible explanations- like the immune system or the placebo effect.
I don't think this is exactly correct. You only need to show that it works better than placebo (certainly, I think this would be the case for the JREF million). Actual therapeutic use is another story, though. It would depend on the current therapy for whatever the condition is.
Not true. Especially if one of the people you are talking to is a pro magician themselves. Simple magic tricks are proof that our senses are not completely accurate.
"You know about psychoneuroimmunology, too?" might be a response. But if the sum total of reiki's effect is the placebo effect/suggestion (I see the two as linked, the latter merely taking advantage of the former), why not just use regualr hypnosis? Then there's no need for pseudoscientific energy fields or what have you.
To put a finer point on this question: Why bother with Reiki when hypnosis does the same thing with less effort and less smoke and mirrors, while at the same time not lying to the client or deluding the practitioner? Hypnotists don't need to be "attuned."
I think we've all found the place the disagreement stems from. Suggestologist places personal experience (ancedotes?) much higher on the tree of evidentiary value that the rest of us do. I would hazard that any debate about more specific issues is pointless (from a convince-the-other-guy point of view) unless this issue is resolved.
But this is far simpler than a belief in a full blown system. And note that the belief in the presence of the chair actually led you to fall on the floor. Is this the problem with a false belief?
The chair belief was also tested very strongly. Their is no other reasonable explanation than "the chair is not there." A Reiki healing does have other possible explanations- like the immune system or the placebo effect.
I don't think this is exactly correct. You only need to show that it works better than placebo (certainly, I think this would be the case for the JREF million). Actual therapeutic use is another story, though. It would depend on the current therapy for whatever the condition is.
Not true. Especially if one of the people you are talking to is a pro magician themselves. Simple magic tricks are proof that our senses are not completely accurate.
"You know about psychoneuroimmunology, too?" might be a response. But if the sum total of reiki's effect is the placebo effect/suggestion (I see the two as linked, the latter merely taking advantage of the former), why not just use regualr hypnosis? Then there's no need for pseudoscientific energy fields or what have you.
To put a finer point on this question: Why bother with Reiki when hypnosis does the same thing with less effort and less smoke and mirrors, while at the same time not lying to the client or deluding the practitioner? Hypnotists don't need to be "attuned."
magicflute
Thinker
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posted by Suggestologist
Gee, I don't recall reading on any bottle of aspirins, tylenol, advil, etc, that I must "put my skepticism aside for the moment" in order for the pill to work.
Gee, I don't recall reading on any bottle of aspirins, tylenol, advil, etc, that I must "put my skepticism aside for the moment" in order for the pill to work.
Suggestologist
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thaiboxerken said:
Again, thaiboxer, you have not sold me on the car. Just as I'm not sold on the idea of Atlantis. They are both uninteresting to me.
Now, I've also said that I'm not sold on Reiki, but if someone offered to do a free demonstration, I would not decline.
I think the problem is that you're mixing resources (money) in with hypothesis testing. Those are separate things for me.
Suggestologist
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Loon said:
Well, there are other possible explanations. I may have accidentally turned to face a slightly different direction without noticing, for example.
I'm really surprised sometimes by the lack of imagination of some of the skeptics here.
I agree with that. But recall how you came to believe that. Was it through experiencing a magic trick that proved your own senses (and your causal modeling) could not be fully trusted? Or did you just read about how people are fooled by tricks.
I see placebo effect as a subset of suggestion. I see placebo as the expectancy component.
Though, I have been curious recently as to whether placebos could actually be conditioned responses in some cases. For example, you swallow what you beleive to be an aspirin pill and you feel better due to the drug effect. You do this, let's say, 30 times over 10 years. Could this not be the basis of a conditioned immune response when you now swallow a sugar pill you believe to be the active aspirin?
I agree that the energy fields are not "real" (I'm 97% certain
). They are metaphorical, just like many interventions involving hypnosis utilize metaphor. And a principal metaphor in hypnosis is the metaphor of "conscious" vs. "unconscious".Now, you may say that of course we can see that there really is something called "consciousness" and something else called "unconsciousness". But these are just word labels (anchors) which organize our understanding of different types of behaviors and thoughts into categories. Thought field metaphors just organize the categories differently. I agree that they do not
"exist" outside of the mind. However, they may or may not be more useful for the particular intervention.
It helps if the hypnotist gains rapport, and paces the ongoing experience of the hypnotic subject. I'm not sure if that's analogous to being "attuned" in reiki. Perhaps you can educate me on what that means. Another possibility is just that the hypnotist needs to be in the right frame of mind for hypnotising someone; in other words, sometimes it is useful to be in a light hypnotic state yourself before hypnotising somebody else -- it can make you more congruent and thus easier to follow.
It came from optical illusions (my ruler says the lines are the same length, but my eyes tell me differently) and my younger brother being into magic. I learned a lot of tricks from him (I'm but a two-trick magician myself). The part about magic indicating the fallability of the human senses came from this forum, though I don't remember whose post it was. Maybe it was a commentary. I'm not quite sure how this is relevant (perhaps because I'm sorta sleepy), but I'm pretty sure you've got a point to make about it.
My understanding of suggestion and placebos and whatnot certainly says it would be, to some degree. Not exactly sure how to test it, but I think we could come up with something.
I think this is the sort of thing that loses a lot of people here. This is a very fancy way of saying (with additional jargon thrown in) "Words are arbitrary things."
But why go to all the trouble of having this expansive theory when regular old hypnosis will will do the trick just fine. A skilled hypnotist can gain rapport without having to talk about energy fields. Remember, Reiki is not self-evident. Someone had to come up with the idea. They may not have known that they were doing hypnosis type stuff, but now that we know they were, why not just discard the whole bulky framework of reiki and do the "1000 times deeper" bit?
I heard someone say once that it doesn't matter if it's true, it's just a model. Judge it by the results. But the results here seem (based on more than one anecdote
) to indicate that hypnosis does everything Reiki claims to do.In fact, even if energy fields are real, why worry about them if they have no more effect than hypnosis? You get the same benefit but you need a *whole* lot more theory to explain it.
I'll try, but it may be the blind leading the blind. My understanding of the matter is a quite shaky, but I'll give it my best shot. Perhaps some of the other posters who have had or seen Reiki or talked about it with people can assist me. Being attuned in Reiki is something like becoming an antenna. You learn to feel the spirits of something, and then they act through you. Or maybe it's more like learning about wine. To the uninitiated, like myself, most wines taste pretty much the same. But a wine expert has a lot of experience with the stuff and can tell you all sorts of things about a wine.
Or at least, I think that's the theory. There might be something about guiding spirits, too.
In other words, it looks to me like Reiki offers nothing beyond a very complicated (and unnecessary) framework in which to do hypnosis work.
Suggestologist
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Loon said:
The point is that you gained experience and then learned a model of why that experience worked the way it did. Without the experience, the model wouldn't make visceral sense.
Well, I see at least two distinct possibilities for how placebo works. And while they may work in conjunction, it seems that at times only one of the two is at work.
On the one hand, we have expectancy created by establishing mental sets -- which increases responsiveness to some stimuli and decreases responsiveness to other stimuli based on mental activation. In other words, if you were looking for a loose diamond on the carpet, you would ignore bread crumbs -- yeah, bad example, but it's what came to mind.
On the other hand, we have conditioning which doesn't require establishment of expectancy sets. You hear a loud noise and you automatically wince or duck your head and have a bad gut feeling. You train your fingers to type and you don't have to stay aware of the exact muscle movements of your fingers anymore. You can train your "gut" to respond to minimal cues, and you can develop trust in your "gut reaction".
So Expectancy is like: look for the diamond (presupposing the diamond exists). Conditioning is like: Learn to trust your gut reaction by giving it feedback on whether it was wrong or right. Or: Learn to trust your typing fingers by giving them feedback on whether they pressed the right button or not.
Well, it's true.
Mesmer liked the energy fields metaphor.
Erickson used the metaphor of flattening synapses when dealing with pain control. The only way we can know which is better is to try it out. Reiki is definately more elaborate than most hypnosis metaphors. But detail does make things seem more real.I prefer "double it", "triple that", "all the way down".
I heard someone say once that it doesn't matter if it's true, it's just a model. Judge it by the results. But the results here seem (based on more than one anecdote
Oh, but you see, you don't really know that. It's all anecdotal. So we have to spend mucho dinero studying if Reiki can actually work better than other hypnotic techniques. Because, remember, hypnosis isn't a technique -- it's what you do when you get in the hypnosis that is the technique -- and it differs widely. And some techniques are effective, and that's based on scientific studies, and nobody would mind if those studies were replicated as long as they do the same technique precisely correctly. And inevitably, some techniques aren't effective.
And then you get people who criticise particular hypnotic techniques because they look like cognitive behavioral therapy. Albert Ellis, who created RET (rational-emotive therapy), the forerunner to CBT; used hypnosis in conjunction with RET. Ellis even presented workshops at Ericksonian Hypnosis Congresses.
Ah, here's the thing. Watch what happens when you study something that utilizes "energy fields" and get positive results. The scientific community will criticise the experiment, because, of course, there are no energy fields. They'll miss the point completely. They'll take people into the physics lab and try to find them energy fields. And when they don't, they'll declare that people didn't really get better because the energy fields don't really exist. They'll confuse the result with the theory behind the technique that brought about the result. Even Ben Franklin did.
It's likely a hypnotic technique. Whether it works better than other hypnotic techniques needs to be studied. Who's got a few $million sitting around to conduct a "well done" large (replicated by different lead investigators) study? Yes, and let's double-blind the Reiki practitioners so that they don't know whether or not they're really doing Reiki or sham Reiki -- yeah, that's workable.
Suggestologist
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BillHoyt said:
Subjective, isn't it?
My post was rather short and rather unlikely to have been so drastically misunderstood. So, would you care to read it again, see that I clearly do not agree with this claim of subjectivity. Would you, in short, care to address my questions? If, however, you prefer to play games, may I suggest either a sandbox or a video arcade?Suggestologist said:
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
On the placebo thing, you left out the largest reason for the placebo effect, regression to the mean.
Most people do not seek help until they feel really really really bad, there are a certain percent who will return to thier mean without any intervention. So regression to the mean. To really test the placebo effect you would need a fairy pill that disappears, as a control against the placebo.
Most people do not seek help until they feel really really really bad, there are a certain percent who will return to thier mean without any intervention. So regression to the mean. To really test the placebo effect you would need a fairy pill that disappears, as a control against the placebo.
Jeff Corey
New York Skeptic
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Good point about regression to the mean. One of the threats to internal validity described by Cambell and Stanley, also see the Sports Illustrated Jinx in Gilovich's "How We Know What Isn;t So", the book that I would most like to be updated for my Critical Behavior course,
Suggestologist
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Dancing David said:
I thought that I have seen some studies where there is a no-treatment group (or whatever they call it) that receives neither placebo nor active pill. They basically leave them on the "waiting list" or something.
The fact that placebo often does better than no treatment at all should point to the reason why such things as Reiki are probably more helpful than hurtful to social health. As Bandler has joked, "Since it's a placebo cure, it will last forever."
Suggestologist
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BillHoyt said:
Confusion comes before understanding something new. I'm not confused.
Science is misused as authority rather than as a source of information for individual verification and individual logical evaluation against experience.
It seems to be decided in many cases by availability of funding. The real process is sometimes corporate interest directed.
Peter S.
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Here's what the National Council Against Health Fraud has to say about Reiki.
http://www.ncahf.org/articles/o-r/reiki.html
http://www.ncahf.org/articles/o-r/reiki.html
thaiboxerken
Penultimate Amazing
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Peter S. said:
Such articles are of no use in a conversation with people like Suggestologist. He would have you believe that personal experience is better than all the evidence in the world. How can you know that Reiki is just power of suggestion unless you actually tried.
Yes, it sounds like a stupid opinion..........but consider the source.
I have to wonder how many people don't get real medical treatment because they are getting this quackery done instead. It reminds me of the commentary story where a lady lost her child to alternative medicine.
Perhaps you've forgotten that you posed the question about who decides when the study is to be believed? Perhaps you've forgotten that you are the one claiming that personal experience trumps the scientific process?Suggestologist said:
I can't help nor be held responsible for some people misusing the discipline. But you shifted the topic here, didn't you? The topic was "how do we know what we know." You claim personal experience is epistemologically sound, but clearly it is not. The complexity of the scientific process has grown in response to the realization of just how many ways we can misunderstand, misconstrue and are willing to misrepresent in some cases, our personal experience. This is exactly why scientists have added layers well beyond the basic rules of sound research design. These layers amount to a system of intersubjective validation.
Here you are engaging in two errors. One is the fallacy of the subject/motive shift. The other error is to mistake a halting of further research for the scientific community having decided an issue. They are not the same at all.