With the board, you do this set of rituals and it produces a string of characters as output, and then you are supposed to read those characters and believe what they say.
So too with science. Weird rituals, check. String of characters as output, check. Supposed to believe what they say, check.
With the board, the point of the rituals is to make it so that you aren’t writing the output, something else is—namely, spirits. You are supposed to be light and open-minded and ‘let the spirit move you’ rather than deliberately try to steer things towards any particular outputs.
With science, the point of the rituals is to make it so that you aren’t writing the output, something else is—namely, reality. You are supposed to be light and open-minded and ‘let the results speak for themselves’ rather than deliberately try to steer things towards any particular outputs.
With the board, unfortunately, it turns out that humans are quite capable of biasing results even when they don’t think that’s what they are doing. Since spirits don’t actually exist, if you truly were light and open-minded and letting the spirits move you, the result would be gibberish. Instead the result is almost always coherent and relevant English text.
So. Reality is real, and science can work, if done correctly. But the lesson of the Ouija board is that doing it correctly is nontrivial and that it’s entirely possible for well-meaning humans to do it incorrectly and think they are doing it correctly.
Science as a kind of Ouija board:
With the board, you do this set of rituals and it produces a string of characters as output, and then you are supposed to read those characters and believe what they say.
So too with science. Weird rituals, check. String of characters as output, check. Supposed to believe what they say, check.
With the board, the point of the rituals is to make it so that you aren’t writing the output, something else is—namely, spirits. You are supposed to be light and open-minded and ‘let the spirit move you’ rather than deliberately try to steer things towards any particular outputs.
With science, the point of the rituals is to make it so that you aren’t writing the output, something else is—namely, reality. You are supposed to be light and open-minded and ‘let the results speak for themselves’ rather than deliberately try to steer things towards any particular outputs.
With the board, unfortunately, it turns out that humans are quite capable of biasing results even when they don’t think that’s what they are doing. Since spirits don’t actually exist, if you truly were light and open-minded and letting the spirits move you, the result would be gibberish. Instead the result is almost always coherent and relevant English text.
So too with science. Despite using all the latest and greatest techniques, Bem was able to prove multiple times that ESP was real, even though it isn’t. This is just one example of literally thousands. For relevant statistics, see “Replication crisis” and related issues.
So. Reality is real, and science can work, if done correctly. But the lesson of the Ouija board is that doing it correctly is nontrivial and that it’s entirely possible for well-meaning humans to do it incorrectly and think they are doing it correctly.