This is a linkpost for https://jbostock.substack.com/p/beware-even-small-amounts-of-woo
I think the implicit premise of "woo is intrinsically anti-epistemic" is wrong. I think a lot of woo is just things that don't have legible mainstream explanations yet, and avoiding it just because it feels irrational is by itself having bad epistemics; the equivalent of avoiding anything that doesn't obviously wear the attire of science. E.g. at one point everything about meditation was thought to be pure woo, but by now there are lots of models about how it changes brain function and various RCT-backed standardized therapies borrowing concepts from it, etc.
There are certainly various anti-epistemic strands and ideas within woo, but some of it being bad doesn't imply the recommendation to avoid "even small amounts of it". You can just practice it while maintaining good form, instead.
I think most of woo is patently anti-epistemic: tarot, modern witchcraft, Buddhism, New Ageism, astrology, chiropractic, homeopathy, metaphysical "energy", spirit guides, &c. &c.
The few, rare things that do seem to work (mediation, acupuncture..) work in spectacularly different ways to the ways the woo practitioners claim they work. It's pretty clear the pioneers of these practices had no clue why they worked but had hit upon them through trial-and-error, and just constructed arbitrary post-hoc narratives about how they imagined they might work: this isn't just 'failing to wear the attire of science', it's essentially the opposite of the scientific method.
Even small amounts of alcohol are somewhat bad for you. I personally don’t care, because I love making and drinking alcohol and at the end of the day you have to live a little. This is fine for me, because I’m not an olympic athlete. If I were an olympic athlete, I’d have to cut it out (at least whenever I was training).
Lots of religions are heavily adapted to their host culture. They’ve been worn down by cultural evolution until they fit neatly into the fabric of society. It’s only when you move culture that they become a problem.
Woo
For our purposes, woo is a cluster of neo-pagan, buddhist-adjacent, tarot-ish beliefs and practices, which are particularly popular in the west amongst edgy people who are otherwise liberal-left-ish in their proclivities. Particularly a subset of techie people. I think woo is a bit like alcohol and a bit like a very well adapted religion.
On the religion side: woo is a big mishmash of different things, kinda like modern Christianity, which Katamari-ed its way across Europe, picking up pagan practices like a winter festival with a big tree, and a spring festival focusing on symbols of life and fertility (though it lacks any summer or autumn festival). It also lost a bunch of restrictions which made it incompatible with enlightenment living.
Woo is kinda like this. It’s highly adapted to be compatible with a techy-alty-edgy lifestyle. You can just do as much or as little woo as you’d like. It’s particularly appealing for evidence-based people because some parts of it do actually work. Yeah, you can get more focused by meditating, yeah you probably can also enter weird bliss states. Not all of it works though, you definitely can’t actually divine the future by tarot cards.
I also think that woo is like alcohol, but for epistemics. For most people, you can have fair amount of woo in your life before your epistemics get bad enough to matter. This is especially true if you’re a smart person overall, so you have some epistemic issues to spare. If the divine stag comes to you in a dream and tells you to maintain the sanctity of your body, you’ll be smart enough to interpret that as “eat fewer big macs” rather than “avoid vaccines and medications”.
Woo is also a decent social lubricant. I think a bit of woo can make you more charismatic and sociable, or at the very least, the techniques of woo do something in this direction. Woo is centred on a kind of “just feel it bro” attitude which doesn’t let details (like facts) get in the way of beliefs. This is very useful for small talk! Just vibing with what someone said, and accepting it, is a very useful skill!
The Singularity
If you’re close to AI, then (I claim) woo becomes very, very dangerous in the age of the singularity.
The singularity requires world-class epistemics. You don’t need a world-class athletic body to cycle to the office, but once you’re there you do need to be in the best epistemic shape possible. AI is extremely hard to think about.
The singularity is a new environment. Woo is well adapted to the informational environment of 1960-2015. It has not had time to adapt to the informational environment of 2020, where AIs are concerned.
To practise woo is to practise a mental motion with poor form. It’s fine until the weight gets too much and snaps your sinews. The form is following unexamined intuitions towards strong feelings. Most smart people are capable of subjugating those intuitions to logic when a good enough logical argument presents itself, but the more difficult it is to logically reason about a topic, the more likely they are to fail.
There are a few thinkers I could name whose brains seem to go to mush the moment they touch AI and the singularity. They’re good enough at subjugating their intuitions to reason, when the logical path is well-trodden, but they can’t do it when there is no logical path (I’m not talking about the Gary Marcus crowd here, I don’t think woo is their problem).
So be very careful around woo, it seems to line up pretty closely with (what I see as) uncharacteristically poor thinking around AI.
(And of course there are inherent dangers to things like meditation, but this seems to be common to all contexts, not just this particular case.)
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