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It is remarkable that in rationalist circles there seems to be a strong demand for woo techniques, rituals and behavior, reinterpreted in some way or emphasizing the possibly useful aspects, but overlooking how they switch off your critical thinking.
I'm mostly pro kicking the woo people out. A real community has to at some point converge on standards of conduct that demarcate it from the rest of society. What is the point of having an art of rationality if you just repurpose it to justify tarot readings?
4Karl Krueger
There's a demarcation problem: what is woo and what isn't? Is woo even a useful category?
I put horoscopes solidly on the woo side; I put many forms of meditation solidly on the non-woo side. But I know folks who disagree on meditation; or on some meditation. I've seen people describe Focusing, Circling, and other practices that have been taught at CFAR workshops as woo. There's probably someone out there who thinks that group singing is woo, because after all, religious people do it!
I doubt that "woo" is a useful category for community policy-making of the sort implied by "kicking the woo people out". (Who are "the woo people" anyway? Are QRI "woo people"?)
It would be more useful to critique particular practices or traditions; or to try to come up with some more cruxworthy demarcations ... and probably not in the context of the threat of kicking anyone out (of what exactly?).
(A different take: Goetia is woo. Double-entry bookkeeping is not woo. Everything else is somewhere in between.)
I totally agree that "woo" is an insufficient category. It does not even have the full status of "I know it when I see it", with all the advantages and disadvantages, because I am not always completely sure about each individual practice.
There are several properties that I find worrying:
a practice that does not work as it is explicitly claimed to work,
when a practice only works because of an atmosphere of authority and "letting go" while participants make themselves vulnerable,
strong reliance on selection bias (a technique "works" for some people or the... (read more)