"The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in 'The Hunting of the Snark': 'What I tell you three times is true.'"

   -- Norbert Weiner, from Cybernetics

Ask for a high-profile rationalist, and you'll hear about Richard Dawkins or James Randi or maybe Peter Thiel. Not a lot of people would immediately name Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. But as readers of his blog know, he's got a deep interest in rationality, and sometimes it shows up in his comics: for example, this one from last week. How many people can expose several million people to the phrase "Boltzmann brain hypothesis" and have them enjoy it?

So I was very surprised to find Adams was a believer in and evangelist of something that sounded a lot like pseudoscience. "Affirmations" are positive statements made with the belief that saying the statement loud enough and long enough will help it come true. For example, you might say "I will become a syndicated cartoonist" fifteen times before bed every night, thinking that this will in fact make you a syndicated cartoonist. Adams partially credits his success as a cartoonist to doing exactly this.

He admits "it sounds as if I believe in some sort of voodoo or magic", and acknowledges that "skeptics have suggested, and reasonably so, that this is a classic case of selective memory" but still swears that it works. He also has "received thousands of e-mails from people recounting their own experiences with affirmations. Most people seem to be amazed at how well they worked."

None of this should be taken too seriously without a controlled scientific study investigating it, of course. But is it worth the effort of a study, or should it be filed under "so stupid that it's not worth anyone's time to investigate further"?

I think there's a good case to be made from within a rationalist/scientific worldview that affirmations may in fact be effective for certain goals. Not miraculously effective, but not totally useless either.