Comment on It's barely a science.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 17 hours agoI believe economics should be a field of magical studies, which should be a field of psychology. Magical studies should also study the placebo effect, memetics, religious studies, somatopsychic and psychosomatic phenomena, faith exercise science, servitorology, paragenetics, and spellcrafting.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 16 hours ago
Magic is just science without the burden of coherent theories that predict reliable experimental outcomes, which covers a lot more than psychology. I’d say it’s more like humanity spitballing science-ish ideas and seeing which ones pan out, than any one branch of science specifically.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 9 hours ago
No, magic is observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real, where “real"ness is a social construct. Thus, magical studies is a field exploring the engineering of social constructs.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 7 hours ago
I’m not sure what realness has to do with it. Magic tends to have some kind of theoretical framework to explain observable phenomena (god(s), the planets, “energies”, etc.) the same way scientific theories do, they even have some experimental frameworks (e.g. my church growing up had a cadre of old ladies who were touted as “good at praying” because they apparently had a good track record with the man upstairs. To my knowledge these claims were never validated in a properly controlled laboratory environment against a random sample of similar parishioners. They also happened to be voracious gossips who wielded private information as a weapon, which is a funny coincidence.) The phenomena that magic explains are “real” insofar as they are experiences that humans have, but the underpinning theories are often unfalsifiable and/or contradictory (“prayer works” and “god’s plan is unknowable and perfect, eternal and unchanging”). That’s what I mean about coherent theories and predictable results. I guess you could say that theories that make accurate predictions are “more real” but I don’t think it makes sense to think about the realness of a scientific theory. It’s either proven false or not proven false so far.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 6 hours ago
Well, the whole point of magic and what makes it different from regular technology is that it straddles the border between consensus reality and the socially unreal. Otherwise, why wouldn’t it just be called technology?
And while I did not do so under laboratory conditions, I do have a case study of using magic to cure sleep apnea.
I would love to perform a replication study of this treatment, but I believe we first need to develop a stronger field of faith exercise science. I believe the patient’s strength of faith is a significant variable in these kinds of treatments, and thus we need a reliable faith measurement system so that we can control for faith. Otherwise our results will appear random and unreliable.
So here is My plan to verify the reproducibility of magical disease treatments: