Well… yes, but not for deep reasons. Just an impression. The cases where I’ve made shifts from “that’s woo” to “that’s true” are super salient, as are cases where I try to invite others to make the same update and am accused of fuzzy thinking in response. Or where I’ve been the “This is woo” accuser and later made the update and slapped my forehead.
Also, “woo” as a term is pretty strongly coded to a particular aesthetic. I don’t think you’d ever hear concern about “woo” in, say, Catholicism except to the extent the scientist/atheist/skeptic/etc. cluster is also present. But Catholics still slam into ontology updates that look obviously wrong beforehand and are obviously correct afterwards. Deconversion being an individual-scale example.
(Please don’t read me as saying “Deconversion is correct.” I could just as well have given the inverse example: Rationalists converting to Catholicism is also an ontological update that’s obviously wrong beforehand and obviously correct afterwards. But that update does look like “woo” beforehand, so it’s not an example of what I’m trying to name.)
Do you… have salient non-controversial examples?
I like the examples others have been bringing. I like them better than mine. But I’ll try to give a few anyway.
Speaking to one of your “maybe never woo” examples: if I remember right, the germ theory of disease was incredibly bizarre and largely laughed at when first proposed. “How could living creatures possibly be that small? And if they’re so small, how could they possibly create that much illness?” Prevailing theories for illness were things like bad air and demons. I totally expect lots of people thought the microbes theory was basically woo. So that’s maybe an example.
Another example is quantum mechanics. The whole issue Einstein took with it was how absurd it made reality. And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy. This is actually an incomplete ontology update in that we have the mathematical models but people still don’t know what it means — and in physics at least they seem to deal with it by refusing to think about it. “If you do the math, you get the right results.” Things like the Copenhagen Interpretation or Many Worlds are mostly ways of talking about how to set up experiments. The LW-rationalist thing of taking Many Worlds deeply morally seriously is, as far as I can tell, pretty fringe and arguably woo.
You might recall that Bishop Berkeley had some very colorful things to say about Newton’s infinitesimals. “Are they the ghosts of departed quantities?” If he’d had the word “woo” I’m sure he would have used it. (Although this is an odd example because now mathematicians do a forgivable motte-and-bailey where they say infinitesimal thinking is shorthand for limits when asked. Meaning many of them are using an ontology that includes infinitesimals but quickly hide it when challenged. It’s okay because they can still do their formal proofs with limits, but I think most of them are unaware of the variousways to formalize infinitesimals as mathematical objects. So this is a case where many mathematicians are intentionally using an arguably woo fake framework and translating their conclusions afterwards instead of making the full available ontology update.)
Given that I’m basically naming the Semmelweis reflex, I think Semmelweis’s example is a pretty good one. “What?! You’re accusing me, an educated professional gentleman, of carrying filth on my hands?! Preposterous! How dare you?!” Obviously absurd and wrong at the time, but later vindicated as obviously correct.
Your examples seem plausible, altho I’d still be interested in more details on each one. Further notes:
“And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy.”—do you mean Bohr, or is this a story/take I don’t know about?
Re: Semmelweis reflex, I think there’s a pretty big distinction between the “woo” taste and the “absurd” taste. For example, “all plants are conscious and radiate love all the time” sounds like woo to me. “The only reason anybody gets higher education is to find people to have kids with” and “there’s a small organ in the centre of the brain that regulates the temperature of the blood that nobody has found yet” sound absurd to me, but not like woo.
I like this inquiry. Upvoted.
Well… yes, but not for deep reasons. Just an impression. The cases where I’ve made shifts from “that’s woo” to “that’s true” are super salient, as are cases where I try to invite others to make the same update and am accused of fuzzy thinking in response. Or where I’ve been the “This is woo” accuser and later made the update and slapped my forehead.
Also, “woo” as a term is pretty strongly coded to a particular aesthetic. I don’t think you’d ever hear concern about “woo” in, say, Catholicism except to the extent the scientist/atheist/skeptic/etc. cluster is also present. But Catholics still slam into ontology updates that look obviously wrong beforehand and are obviously correct afterwards. Deconversion being an individual-scale example.
(Please don’t read me as saying “Deconversion is correct.” I could just as well have given the inverse example: Rationalists converting to Catholicism is also an ontological update that’s obviously wrong beforehand and obviously correct afterwards. But that update does look like “woo” beforehand, so it’s not an example of what I’m trying to name.)
I like the examples others have been bringing. I like them better than mine. But I’ll try to give a few anyway.
Speaking to one of your “maybe never woo” examples: if I remember right, the germ theory of disease was incredibly bizarre and largely laughed at when first proposed. “How could living creatures possibly be that small? And if they’re so small, how could they possibly create that much illness?” Prevailing theories for illness were things like bad air and demons. I totally expect lots of people thought the microbes theory was basically woo. So that’s maybe an example.
Another example is quantum mechanics. The whole issue Einstein took with it was how absurd it made reality. And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy. This is actually an incomplete ontology update in that we have the mathematical models but people still don’t know what it means — and in physics at least they seem to deal with it by refusing to think about it. “If you do the math, you get the right results.” Things like the Copenhagen Interpretation or Many Worlds are mostly ways of talking about how to set up experiments. The LW-rationalist thing of taking Many Worlds deeply morally seriously is, as far as I can tell, pretty fringe and arguably woo.
You might recall that Bishop Berkeley had some very colorful things to say about Newton’s infinitesimals. “Are they the ghosts of departed quantities?” If he’d had the word “woo” I’m sure he would have used it. (Although this is an odd example because now mathematicians do a forgivable motte-and-bailey where they say infinitesimal thinking is shorthand for limits when asked. Meaning many of them are using an ontology that includes infinitesimals but quickly hide it when challenged. It’s okay because they can still do their formal proofs with limits, but I think most of them are unaware of the various ways to formalize infinitesimals as mathematical objects. So this is a case where many mathematicians are intentionally using an arguably woo fake framework and translating their conclusions afterwards instead of making the full available ontology update.)
Given that I’m basically naming the Semmelweis reflex, I think Semmelweis’s example is a pretty good one. “What?! You’re accusing me, an educated professional gentleman, of carrying filth on my hands?! Preposterous! How dare you?!” Obviously absurd and wrong at the time, but later vindicated as obviously correct.
Your examples seem plausible, altho I’d still be interested in more details on each one. Further notes:
“And it did in fact send people like Bohm into spiritual frenzy.”—do you mean Bohr, or is this a story/take I don’t know about?
Re: Semmelweis reflex, I think there’s a pretty big distinction between the “woo” taste and the “absurd” taste. For example, “all plants are conscious and radiate love all the time” sounds like woo to me. “The only reason anybody gets higher education is to find people to have kids with” and “there’s a small organ in the centre of the brain that regulates the temperature of the blood that nobody has found yet” sound absurd to me, but not like woo.