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ChristianKl comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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Ideology is a quite interesting factor.
Hypnosis is a nice example. For a long time there wasn't good academic research about the topic because of idealogical conflict. At the moment we know that it can be used to lower pain but the exact extent of what it can do is still quite unclear.
Hypnosis has also another trait. There's no financial incentive to research it in the way that drugs get researched.
It's also devilishly hard to accurately research. To isolate the effects of hypnosis from the desire of the subject to please the researcher you need to administer a placebo hypnosis. However, this is very difficult as hypnosis by it's very nature creates an immediate experiential effect on the patient that you somehow must replicate in the placebo (so the subjects can't just guess whether they got real hypnosis) without actually performing hypnosis.
Also there really aren't any good precise questions to ask about hypnosis. Does it help people quit smoking. Yes, but so does placebo. Does it help people deal with pain. Yes, but again so does placebo. Before you start damning people for not investigating hypnosis describe what precisely you want them to figure out.
This is an amusing sentence for me because I suspect that the way hypnosis works is by taking advantage of the desire of the subject to please the hypnotist. In other words, I supect that a placebo hypnosis is just a hypnosis.
You aren't looking from the perspective of a patient.
A patient might ask themselves: Should I take Morphine or should I get a hypnosis treatment? What's more likely to help me: A or B? You don't need to isolate anything. For the patient it's irrelevant why A beats B.
Once you add ideology it becomes important why A beats B.
Allows you to test hypnosis against morphine, not hypnosis against celery sticks.