Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

I've read a small fraction of the comments here and just want to add my thoughts. Please bear in mind that I am ill educated, but well read, so have patchy knowledge at best.

The article stated that Reiki can have beneficial effects and has no harmful side effects, meaning that it can be useful as a supplement to conventional medicine. This seems reasonable to me.

Beyond that, we have all sorts of people making all sorts of claims about it in the comments here. The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is if you make a claim without a shred of evidence to back it up then you are practising religion, not science.

As far as I can tell, the best anyone can offer so far are flimsy hypotheses, with very few suggestions as to how to test them. And then they try to claim this as some actual truth.

Subtle energy? It may very well be, but you can't really offer a hypothesis and then claim it as fact.

I think people would be a little more open to these ideas if those proposing them were to be more honest and say "we have no actual idea how this works, but I'm working under the hypothesis that [x] and hope that someone can come up with some way to test if this is true at some point in the future".

There are some strong claims that patients that are given more "care" recover better than those who aren't. For example, I watched a really interesting program a while ago about using the placebo effect to help people with back problems. They took a large group of people who had ongoing back troubles and told them they were giving them a new medicine to help with back pain. Half were given the medicine and half were given the placebo, except they were all given the placebo because there was no new medicine. On top of that half out of each group were given very short, brusque, medical appointments (as we are normally used to these days) and half were given longer appointments with doctors that spent time talking to them and listening to them.

Despite everyone being given a placebo, some made really dramatic recoveries, and many made at least minor improvements. And those who were cared for more seemed to make better recoveries than those who were given short appointments.

There is so much about the placebo effect and how we can heal ourselves that we do not understand even in the slightest yet.

I could give you carrots mashed in rabbit urine and swear blind that it has been proven to cure headaches. If you reluctantly took it and your headache was gone half an hour later, well maybe it would have gone anyway, maybe it went because you believed me, and maybe I got lucky and carrots mashed in rabbit urine really does cure a headache. I know where my bet would be though. (Please don't try carrots mashed in rabbits urine, I'm not even sure it would be safe for human consumption.)

Number of pieces isn't strictly the source of complexity. The complexity of the pieces matters too.

It's definitely not bad faith. But I get to choose how to spend my time. I've looked into a bunch of fringe stuff over the years. I've got better things to do now. I am interested in changing my mind, but I have reasonable confidence that slight variations on old shticks aren't going to do it. There are more interesting things for me to explore.

I'm sure the same is true for you. Are you busily looking into each of the latest QAnon theories? Are you carefully investigating every alternative remedy somebody is selling? Have you carefully listened to somebody from every sect of every religion? Nah. It's not even possible to be as open-minded to everything as you want me to be to your personal pet thing.

I'll note that you aren't willing to put in any work learning enough about past paranormal fads to explain why your personal fave is any different than previous ones. It seems odd that you expect me to do a bunch more work than you're willing to do yourself.

That you don't understand how to test something isn't evidence of anything at all.

> Some of the phenomena won't happen if there is too much disbelief in it. Do you have any ideas on how to experiment with stuff like this?

That right there is a testable proposition. Put somebody in a soundproof, lightproof room who can reliably experience the phenomenon. Randomly surround them with groups of believers, disbelievers, or nobody at all. Repeat until you have a large N. If the phenomenon happening is truly sensitive to disbelievers, you should see clear correlations.

More broadly, there's a long, long history of people making claims of mental phenomena and constructing tests of those claims. So it's not me you should be asking. It's the broader literature. And the rise of things like EKGs, fMRIs,and TMS means we're opening up all sorts of new ways to test claims about mind.

If you're serious about claiming these are objective phenomena and that your model for them has more explanatory power, then you should jump in and start doing that work. And if not, maybe just stick to being honest by using phrases like "I once experienced" and "I believe".

> When capitalism produces spectacular exaggerations of human cruelty, it has been corrupted. When a socialist system produces it, it is intrinsic.

Nobody blame socialism for cruelty in good faith. Cruelty has nothing to do with economic system.

What socialism (or any government trying to replace or severely restrict private sector) really does way more worse is empty shelves, deficit and terrible recourse misallocation.

There are more fundamental questions than the leisure ones like "who ownes what". Such as how come my parents lived in the second largest economy in terms of GDP and only few years later the whole country had nothing to eat, and we had a humanitarian crisis without any war or natural calamity.