From a perspective of a “magician”, checking for placebo effect is probably not worth it. Suppose I do a ritual to… increase my willpower, so that I stop procrastinating or improve my diet. And it works! Was it really the magic? Or was it just my belief in the ritual that made me do the right thing? It doesn’t matter; I got the desired effect either way. And if it was just my belief (narrator: it was), investigating too deeply might actually ruin the effect.
Of course, making this excuse openly would practically mean admitting that it was a placebo effect. So the traditional excuses are more like: “skepticism ruins the mood, which is a necessary component of the magic”.
I find it puzzling why significant numbers of intelligent-seeming people claim to have strong evidence that magic does exist.
I have much less trust in rationality of the intelligent people. Science is not instinctive. Well, curiosity and generating hypotheses, they are. But testing the hypotheses (as opposed to just collecting confirmatory data, or rationalizing the outcome) is not.
From status perspective, if you convince some people that you have magical powers, it gives you high status in the community. On the other hand, examining your magic with actual skepticism (not just pretended one) means being perceived as a loser in both worlds: the non-magicians will laugh at you for taking it seriously, the magicians will laugh at you for doing it wrong. People naturally follow their status incentives. Also, trying to examine someone else’s magic will be perceived as a status attack.
From a perspective of a “magician”, checking for placebo effect is probably not worth it. Suppose I do a ritual to… increase my willpower, so that I stop procrastinating or improve my diet. And it works! Was it really the magic? Or was it just my belief in the ritual that made me do the right thing? It doesn’t matter; I got the desired effect either way. And if it was just my belief (narrator: it was), investigating too deeply might actually ruin the effect.
Of course, making this excuse openly would practically mean admitting that it was a placebo effect. So the traditional excuses are more like: “skepticism ruins the mood, which is a necessary component of the magic”.
I have much less trust in rationality of the intelligent people. Science is not instinctive. Well, curiosity and generating hypotheses, they are. But testing the hypotheses (as opposed to just collecting confirmatory data, or rationalizing the outcome) is not.
From status perspective, if you convince some people that you have magical powers, it gives you high status in the community. On the other hand, examining your magic with actual skepticism (not just pretended one) means being perceived as a loser in both worlds: the non-magicians will laugh at you for taking it seriously, the magicians will laugh at you for doing it wrong. People naturally follow their status incentives. Also, trying to examine someone else’s magic will be perceived as a status attack.
Very good points! Thanks.