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kokotajlod comments on Rebutting radical scientific skepticism - Less Wrong
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I didn't mean to imply that the placebo effect is a complete mystery. As you say, perhaps it is pretty well understood. But that doesn't touch my overall point which is that before modern medicine (and modern explanations for the placebo effect) people would have had plenty of evidence that e.g. faith healing worked, and that therefore spirits/gods/etc. existed.
Yes, but they would have been dead wrong about everything they thought about the supernatural, not just the placebo effect. Thus if anyone were to suggest
The example of the placebo effect would work against this theory: "people were completely and totally wrong about beliefs affecting reality before and it turned out to be some artifacts of selection bias / regression to the mean / relaxation / evolutionarily-based allocation of bodily resources, and so I disbelieve in your suggestion even more than I would just on its merits because clearly people are not good at this sort of thinking".
No, the analogy I had in mind was this:
What People Saw: Acupuncture* being correlated with health, and [building things according to theories developed using the scientific method] being correlated with [having things that work very well]
What People Thought Happened: Acupuncture causing health and [building things according to theories developed using the scientific method] causing [having things that work very well]
What Actually Happened: Placebo effect and Placebo effect (in the former case, involving whatever mechanisms we think cause the placebo effect these days; in the latter case, involving e.g. God.)
Filtering out all the selection bias etc., the relaxation and evolutionarily-based allocation of bodily resources seem to work fine for my purposes. They are analogous to theism-based allocation of technological power.