The in-person community seems much less skeptical of these things than the online community. Which isn’t to say there are no skeptics, but (especially among the higher status members) it’s kind of distressing to see how little skepticism there is about outright silly claims and models. At last year’s CFAR reunion, for instance, there was a talk uncritically presenting chakras as a real thing, and when someone in the audience proposed doing an experiment to verify if they are real or it’s a placebo effect, the presenter said (paraphrasing) “Hmm, no, let’s not do that. It makes me uncomfortable. I can’t tell why, but I don’t want to do it, so let’s not” and then they didn’t.
This is extremely concerning to me, and I think it should be to everyone else who cares about the epistemological standards of this community
At last year’s CFAR reunion, for instance, there was a talk uncritically presenting chakras as a real thing, and when someone in the audience proposed doing an experiment to verify if they are real or it’s a placebo effect, the presenter said (paraphrasing) “Hmm, no, let’s not do that. It makes me uncomfortable. I can’t tell why, but I don’t want to do it, so let’s not” and then they didn’t.
I attended that talk and have a slightly different memory.
To my memory, the claim was “I tried this exercise related to my body, and it had a strong internal effect. Then I started playing around with other areas related to chakras, and they had really strong effects too. Try playing around with this exercise on different parts of your body, and see if there’s a strong effect on you.”
The second part matches my memory, and I was a bit dissapointed we didn’t get to do more of an experiment, but in no way were “chakras uncritically presented as a real thing.”
Hmm, no, let’s not do that. It makes me uncomfortable. I can’t tell why, but I don’t want to do it, so let’s not
After 100 years of parapsychology research, it’s pretty obvious to anyone with a halfway functioning outside view that any quick experiment will either be flawed or say chakras are not real, so I’m not sure whether to take this as face value of the person thinking chakras are real-real and genuinely not being able to say why they don’t want to do the experiment, or just saying a polite-speak version of “we both know doing the experiment will show chakras aren’t real and will make me lose face, you’re making a status grab against me for putting me on the spot by demanding the experiment so fuck you and fuck your experiment.”
After 100 years of parapsychology research, it’s pretty obvious to anyone with a halfway functioning outside view that any quick experiment will either be flawed or say chakras are not real
I don’t know why the person didn’t want to do an experiment, and I’d be willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt, but is there some particular research disproving chakras? So far I’d been going with the non-mystical chakra model that
In general, if you translate all mystical statements to be talking about the internal experiences, they’ll make a lot more sense. Let’s take a few common mystical concepts and see how we can translate them.
Energy—there are sensations that form a feeling of something liquid (or gaseous) that moves within or outside of your body. When unpacked, it’s likely to be made up of sensations of light (visual), warmth, tingling, and tension (physical). “Channeling energy” is adjusting your state of mind so as to cause these sensations to “move” in a certain way, to appear or disappear.
Chakras—points in your body where it’s particularly easy to feel certain types of energies. It’s also particularly easy to visualize / feel the energy moving into or out of those places. “Aligning chakras” is about adjusting your state of mind so as to cause the energy to flow evenly through all chakras. (Chakras are a great example of a model that pays rent. You can read about chakras, see what predictions people are making about your internal experience when you explore chakras, and then you can go and explore them within yourself to see if the predictions are accurate.)
… and after meditation caused me to have these kinds of persistent sensations on my forehead, I assumed that “oh, I guess that’s what the forehead chakra thing is referring to”. Another post suggested that experiences of “energy” correspond to conscious representations of autonomic nervous system activity, and the chakras to physiological hubs of that activity.
That has seemed sensible enough to me, but the topic hasn’t seemed important enough to explore in detail; should I assume that this model is actually wrong?
The description sounded like both parties were assuming chakras involved some actual mystical energy and were doing the invisible garage dragon dance. The parapsychology angle to this one is simple that even without knowing about a specific rebuttal, chakras are a well-known mystical concept, parapsychology research has been poking at most of the obvious mystical claims, and if parapsychology had verified that some supernatural phenomenon is actually real, we’d have heard of it.
If they were talking about the non-mystical model, the first person could’ve just said that it’s a possibly helpful visualization shorthand for doing relaxation and biofeedback exercises and there’s no actual supernatural energies involved.
Yeah I don’t know what exactly was said, but given that this was the CFAR alumni reunion, I would be willing to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and assume a non-crazy presentation until I hear more details. Especially since a lot of things which have sounded crazy and mystical have turned out to have reasonable explanations.
My sense of what the person-at-the-reunion was talking about (having chatted with them a bit, although not sure I understand their position well enough to speak for them) was a model where Chakras roughly correspond to “application of Gendlin’s Focusing, directed to particular areas of the body, turns out to yield different information.”
i.e. a thing that I’ve heard reported by several LessWrongers is that focusing directed at your stomach tends to give a set of information about what your subconscious is thinking/feeling/interested-in, than focusing other areas of your body, or without any directed attention at all.
I’ve heard a couple people make the broader, somewhat stronger claim that each of the body-areas associated with a chakra tend to have consistent effects across people when used as introspection targets.
This doesn’t seem particularly mysterious to me, although it seems reasonable to be escalatingly skeptical of:
“introspecting with a focus on particular body parts yields different information about what’s going on with you subconsciously than generic introspection”
“one particular body part tends to be particular useful for this”
“seven body parts tend to be particularly useful for this in a way that corresponds to traditional chakras, and there’s a model of how those areas relate with particular introspective techniques that tend to cause particular effects, across people”
The in-person community seems much less skeptical of these things than the online community. Which isn’t to say there are no skeptics, but (especially among the higher status members) it’s kind of distressing to see how little skepticism there is about outright silly claims and models. At last year’s CFAR reunion, for instance, there was a talk uncritically presenting chakras as a real thing, and when someone in the audience proposed doing an experiment to verify if they are real or it’s a placebo effect, the presenter said (paraphrasing) “Hmm, no, let’s not do that. It makes me uncomfortable. I can’t tell why, but I don’t want to do it, so let’s not” and then they didn’t.
This is extremely concerning to me, and I think it should be to everyone else who cares about the epistemological standards of this community
I attended that talk and have a slightly different memory.
To my memory, the claim was “I tried this exercise related to my body, and it had a strong internal effect. Then I started playing around with other areas related to chakras, and they had really strong effects too. Try playing around with this exercise on different parts of your body, and see if there’s a strong effect on you.”
The second part matches my memory, and I was a bit dissapointed we didn’t get to do more of an experiment, but in no way were “chakras uncritically presented as a real thing.”
After 100 years of parapsychology research, it’s pretty obvious to anyone with a halfway functioning outside view that any quick experiment will either be flawed or say chakras are not real, so I’m not sure whether to take this as face value of the person thinking chakras are real-real and genuinely not being able to say why they don’t want to do the experiment, or just saying a polite-speak version of “we both know doing the experiment will show chakras aren’t real and will make me lose face, you’re making a status grab against me for putting me on the spot by demanding the experiment so fuck you and fuck your experiment.”
I don’t know why the person didn’t want to do an experiment, and I’d be willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt, but is there some particular research disproving chakras? So far I’d been going with the non-mystical chakra model that
… and after meditation caused me to have these kinds of persistent sensations on my forehead, I assumed that “oh, I guess that’s what the forehead chakra thing is referring to”. Another post suggested that experiences of “energy” correspond to conscious representations of autonomic nervous system activity, and the chakras to physiological hubs of that activity.
That has seemed sensible enough to me, but the topic hasn’t seemed important enough to explore in detail; should I assume that this model is actually wrong?
The description sounded like both parties were assuming chakras involved some actual mystical energy and were doing the invisible garage dragon dance. The parapsychology angle to this one is simple that even without knowing about a specific rebuttal, chakras are a well-known mystical concept, parapsychology research has been poking at most of the obvious mystical claims, and if parapsychology had verified that some supernatural phenomenon is actually real, we’d have heard of it.
If they were talking about the non-mystical model, the first person could’ve just said that it’s a possibly helpful visualization shorthand for doing relaxation and biofeedback exercises and there’s no actual supernatural energies involved.
Yeah I don’t know what exactly was said, but given that this was the CFAR alumni reunion, I would be willing to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and assume a non-crazy presentation until I hear more details. Especially since a lot of things which have sounded crazy and mystical have turned out to have reasonable explanations.
My sense of what the person-at-the-reunion was talking about (having chatted with them a bit, although not sure I understand their position well enough to speak for them) was a model where Chakras roughly correspond to “application of Gendlin’s Focusing, directed to particular areas of the body, turns out to yield different information.”
i.e. a thing that I’ve heard reported by several LessWrongers is that focusing directed at your stomach tends to give a set of information about what your subconscious is thinking/feeling/interested-in, than focusing other areas of your body, or without any directed attention at all.
I’ve heard a couple people make the broader, somewhat stronger claim that each of the body-areas associated with a chakra tend to have consistent effects across people when used as introspection targets.
This doesn’t seem particularly mysterious to me, although it seems reasonable to be escalatingly skeptical of:
“introspecting with a focus on particular body parts yields different information about what’s going on with you subconsciously than generic introspection”
“one particular body part tends to be particular useful for this”
“seven body parts tend to be particularly useful for this in a way that corresponds to traditional chakras, and there’s a model of how those areas relate with particular introspective techniques that tend to cause particular effects, across people”