Previously in series:  Schools Proliferating Without Evidence
Followup to:  A Sense That More Is Possible

I strongly suspect that there is a possible art of rationality (attaining the map that reflects the territory, choosing so as to direct reality into regions high in your preference ordering) which goes beyond the skills that are standard, and beyond what any single practitioner singly knows.  I have a sense that more is possible.

The degree to which a group of people can do anything useful about this, will depend overwhelmingly on what methods we can devise to verify our many amazing good ideas.

I suggest stratifying verification methods into 3 levels of usefulness:

• Reputational
• Experimental
• Organizational

If your martial arts master occasionally fights realistic duels (ideally, real duels) against the masters of other schools, and wins or at least doesn't lose too often, then you know that the master's reputation is grounded in reality; you know that your master is not a complete poseur.  The same would go if your school regularly competed against other schools.  You'd be keepin' it real.

Some martial arts fail to compete realistically enough, and their students go down in seconds against real streetfighters.  Other martial arts schools fail to compete at all—except based on charisma and good stories—and their masters decide they have chi powers.  In this latter class we can also place the splintered schools of psychoanalysis.

So even just the basic step of trying to ground reputations in some realistic trial other than charisma and good stories, has tremendous positive effects on a whole field of endeavor.

But that doesn't yet get you a science.  A science requires that you be able to test 100 applications of method A against 100 applications of method B and run statistics on the results.  Experiments have to be replicable and replicated.  This requires standard measurements that can be run on students who've been taught using randomly-assigned alternative methods, not just realistic duels fought between masters using all of their accumulated techniques and strength.