Hi Veeky Forums. I've recently become bored with belief as a concept. I'm not sure why it exists or why we care what beliefs other people hold, but I do know that we're nowhere near to studying it in a scientific capacity, which is how I'd want it to be studied if I were to take is seriously.
I also want to do away with the stigma surrounding spiritual "woo" such as prayer. Yes, placebo and random chance are enough to explain the discrepancies reported by people who believe in it, but this anecdotal evidence and subsequent dismissal is not enough. There are no control variables in an anecdote and even less in a vague memory of the founding of a belief system. Before we can even start making hypotheses about how personal beliefs affect prayer, we need to know if it works in any capacity.
A lot of things currently considered "unstudyable" or beyond the realm of science really aren't, they just need a good hypothesis to test. For prayer, this is actually really easy. Before making any prayer or recording how long it takes it to be granted, simply add some kind of meta-prayer like, "It it my hope that no entity grants the following prayer."
The key here is not what we expect to happen, but that we actually test those expectations.
I have my own expectations and beliefs, but it's not important to test those. They're derived from my experiences and I did nothing to record my personal results in any detail. I do expect that many of you will report results of prayers getting granted beyond the margin of pure chance, but that's not the relevant data. The relevant data is how many of the people that bother to report back end up reporting back with results that show prayer granting beyond the margin of chance. If that number is beyond the margin of chance, we have an interesting result. If not, All participants can and should treat is as random chance double sampled.
TL;DR: We can test supernatural hypotheses by introducing relevant control variables.
People have done controlled tests of prayer and it hasn't worked. You're not the first person to think of this.
Adam Johnson
There's nothing to gain in trying to convince religious people about their irrationality. Effort would be better spent passing laws prohibiting brainwashing people before adulthood.
Regardless, the term you're looking for is "unfalsifiable".
Jayden Torres
>Nothing is beyond science.
You don't understand science.
Prayers aren't deterministic.
There's nothing inherently irrational in religion.
>unfalsifiable" Popper is not and will never be a scientist. Don't look towards a guy who has never studied science to tell you what science is.
Ryan Reed
I'd ask if anyone's interested and might start recording their preludes and grant times, but that would introduce a powerful selection bias. I have to ask that many of you participate even if you're not interested, for science.
For the sake of minimizing potential alternative control variables, I recommend keeping the recorded data clean. Recite the prayer mentally without recording it, make a note of the any prelude/meta-prayer used for that prayer, the time it's made, and later, if it's granted, the form it took.
Also don't record your beliefs. To control for prayer itself, we need to ensure that no belief based bias can enter into the equation. You can record your hypothesis, obviously, and your preludes don't necessarily have to be consistent for the sake of the study, but recording either the content of the prayer or your (seemingly) relevant beliefs can only introduce unnecessary bias and discrimination from potential prayer granting entities. (Random chance, for example, isn't an entity-type granter.)
If you want to link them I'd appreciate it, but I don't think anything significant or properly controlled has even been done on the scale that a well motivated Veeky Forums could test for. It can be really hard to be double-blind about this kind of stuff because there are so many belief-manipulating movements out there corrupting peoples epistemology.
The best part is, if even one user doesn't report back that their prayers were granted beyond the margin of chance, we can safely discard the prayer hypothesis entirely. For prayer to mean anything, it has to be ubiquitously reliable. But don't think in terms of how this will affect people's beliefs. That'd just invoke the bias of "anti-bias" and remove the capacity for the resulting data to be plausibly double-blind.
Science has come a long way, and changed many peoples beliefs. But I like to think that science was more than that, and that we can put even belief itself to the test.
Jordan Miller
>Effort would be better spent passing laws prohibiting brainwashing people before adulthood.
Yes, and the only reason people believe in the Holocaust is because they are indoctrinate in childhood. We need to outlaw wrongthink schooling!
>t. brainlet ideologue
Zachary Williams
>we can safely discard the prayer hypothesis entirely. For prayer to mean anything, it has to be ubiquitously reliable.
And we can safely discard the protesting hypothesis entirely. For protesting to mean anything, it has to be ubiquitously reliable.
William Perry
Yeah so a quick Google and: (from ) >Does the effect increase or decrease if the Christian prays inside a Buddhist temple? What about a Buddhist praying in a church? Do prayers during Christmas have more or less effect than at other times of the year? And the distance between the beneficiary and the location of the prayer has not been clarified in the studies, e.g., does prayer for a person who is a continent away have the same effect as prayers for a person who is inches away? Does the "skill level" of the person praying have an effect on the outcome as stipulated by Wisneski and Anderson in their book The Scientific Basis of Integrative Medicine?
Nobody's controlled for prayer itself. It seems that most of them focused on Christian reasoning, and that's not what I aim to test. I'm controlling for prayer itself, and if we can establish there's anything to the basic phenomenon, THEN we could go on to test things like "Does Buddhist prayer work better than Christian prayer?" But until we have the baseline data, there's no point trying to test advanced forms of prayer. Random chance can obviously grant prayers so we already have a plausible mechanism for at least one type of prayer-granting force.
Also earlier in the article is said a lot of the focus of these studies was on medical effects (basically testing the "strength" of the placebo effect). This is people testing what they want to be true, not testing for the presence of a basic prayer mechanism.
There are a lot of ways to get the epistemology wrong here. I'm only even contemplating this experiment because I trust Veeky Forums to make decent prayers that really test what's possible.
Nolan Clark
I really cannot express how much I don't care about belief anymore. I literally made this thread so we could discuss how to put beliefs to the test and then actually go test the resulting hypotheses. Debating the efficacy of various types of belief or belief systems just seems completely counterproductive to me given that we're able to study it directly by creating proper controls. Yes, but that's already been tested. So many have tried and so many have failed that we can safely conclude that protest does nothing. My father learned that anecdotally 40 years ago when mass protests failed to stop the Vietnam war. There's no new data there that I can see us being able to test or control for.
If prayer fails for the same reason, then we can safely conclude that any potential spiritual forces or entities are as bad at organizing and processing feedback as human governments are. That is data.
Hunter Baker
>If prayer fails for the same reason, then we can safely conclude that any potential spiritual forces or entities are as bad at organizing and processing feedback as human governments are. That is data.
This is so autistic, I don't even... Can you think of another reason why politicians wouldn't listen to protesters.
Colton Nguyen
It's not relevant what I think or believe. What's relevant is how we use our capacity to think to reason out relevant control variables to test for.
The existing studies controlled for various beliefs. That was good and cool for that time, but now we have Veeky Forums and the internet, and we can put this stuff to the test on greater scales with levels of detail previously unimagined. Controlling for all the millions of beliefs out there would be untenable and produce incoherent data. We need to control for something else, something irrelevant to beliefs.
Until we have a better understanding of belief and how it comes about, controlling for beliefs will only exacerbate biases and create more metabeliefs.
Caleb Thompson
Protest doesn't work by making lawmakers change their policy. It works by making the opinion highly visible to the public, and making it more socially acceptable to express that opinion to others instead of staying "in the closet" about your opinions. That can then result in different people getting elected in the next election cycle, or for people up for election to make different promises.
The truth is that we DID eventually leave Vietnam without winning, half done. The protesting worked, it just was extremely slow acting.
Henry Adams
Right, that reminds me.
I'd give any prayer a week to be granted, but try to wait a full month before publishing your prayer journals.
Also, do yourself a favor and journal this stuff on paper. We don't need /b/tards complaining about Siri updates learning to grant prayers because you kept your journal on an electronic device.
Christian Bennett
>>unfalsifiable" >Popper is not and will never be a scientist. Don't look towards a guy who has never studied science to tell you what science is. Elaborate on this. Who would you study to understand modern science and the philosophy of science? Do you meant to say that the actual practice is removed, and just messy, random shit?
Adam Lewis
Science is only another form of belief.
It gets twisted and misused by people, just like religion.
As for prayers, they're just wishful thinking out loud. Nothing wrong with that. As for supernatural hypothesis, well. It's fairly well established that most of them are bullshit, so you're no big genius for pointing that out.
Aiden Ross
>You don't understand science. I understand science, modern science, and the philosophy of science.
You don't understand control variables, modern science doesn't understand the relevance of recording your observation and the role intuition plays in skewing the interpretation of the recorded data, and the philosophy of science has no reach as a concept.
>Prayers aren't deterministic. Anecdotal experiments by other boards have shown prayer to be highly deterministic, to the point where there were once actual infographics floating about how to test the "Law of Attraction." This is the epistemic/scientific form of that.
>There's nothing inherently irrational in religion. The one universal trait of all religions that can be considered irrational is the notion that knowledge is bonded to particular entities and polities rather than being viral within a given population.
>the actual practice is removed, and just messy, random shit? I would say that about controlling for belief at this point, yes. 20 years ago it made some level of sense, but we can do better now.
Mason James
>Who would you study to understand modern science
Actual science textbooks first and foremost.
Ian Ortiz
Mass produced textbooks have null epistemic quality and marginal gain at teaching the history and philosophy of science. The recite previously discovered facts as if they're supposed to be believed without being tested, while also providing some measure of how the experiments from which those results were derived were constructed.
Science is a process, not a body of work.
Noah Thomas
Why the fuck are you here? You don't care about science, just appearing science-y. Fuck off to
Nathaniel Flores
Because I trust Veeky Forums to figure out how to test things like the law of attraction in greater depth than literally any other board could.
You're the only board capable of controlling for relevant data. Other boards would pray for stupid shit that gets granted at a rate far in excess of the margin of chance on a daily basis merely because people deign to live together in groups (droves).
Evan Parker
Because you don't know any real science, you're imagining science as something far grander than it actually is. Seriously, go study it. It's the best way to clear your misconceptions.
Jacob Rivera
>A lot of things currently considered "unstudyable" or beyond the realm of science really aren't, >TL;DR: We can test supernatural hypotheses by introducing relevant control variables. These things are not considered unstudyable. They have been studied extensively and found false.
>Before we can even start making hypotheses about how personal beliefs affect prayer, we need to know if it works in any capacity. We do. It has been studied, in the ways you suggested and more, and the result was "it does not work in any capacity".
>I also want to do away with the stigma surrounding spiritual "woo" such as prayer. If you are seriously trying to study something, you should not be aiming for any particular answer.
William Turner
>They have been studied extensively and found false. [citation needed]
Brody Gray
If you are seriously interested in the subject, I am sure you can find your own literature. If you just want to find support for your own preferred answer, you will reject whatever I throw at you. So I'm afraid you're on your own here.
Isaac Clark
>We do. It has been studied, in the ways you suggested and more, and the result was "it does not work in any capacity".
>Meta-studies of the literature in the field have been performed showing evidence only for no effect or a potentially small effect. For instance, a 2006 meta analysis on 14 studies concluded that there is "no discernable effect" while a 2007 systemic review of intercessory prayer reported inconclusive results, noting that 7 of 17 studies had "small, but significant, effect sizes"
Just because the majority of prayers are rejected, doesn't imply they all go unanswered. Individual miracles have been thoroughly studied and document.
Lucas Fisher
>If you are seriously interested in the subject, I am sure you can find your own literature Making claims without proof, so scientific you are. >If you just want to find support for your own preferred answer, you will reject whatever I throw at you. Funny, I can say the same thing about you.
Carson James
No, I'm using science at is was originally formulated. The entire method, not just that parts that "still seem relevant" today. Many of the problems with anecdotal evidence are done away with merely by recording your observations. This is one component of science. It doesn't bear full reflecting in modern science because modern science is optimized primarily for publication, whereby the act of recording seems merely as an obvious step in the later process of publication. Really, that step of the scientific method has its own separate epistemic quality separate from all notion of peer review. That's the kind of science you need to be aware of to make relevant, testable hypotheses in a supernatural or otherwise undiscovered or alien space.
If it helps, you can imagine creating autonomous robotic probes to send to distant planets. We can't control them manually because they're too distant, so we'll need them to be able to reason on their own. But we can't waste too much time and energy and resources on something that would fail to learn to walk when it hit the ground. So we need to arm ourselves with enough knowledge of every possible type of hypothesis we may wish to test so the robots can send back data that we can understand rather than creating their own language based on alien precepts we have no context to predict.
See how this works? When we abstract beyond society and human consensus, we have to use all the tools science arms us with, not just the ones that fit into our modern infrastructure.
If anything exists beyond the reach of science, it's because you're talking about modern science as a separate precept to science in its original conception.
>in the ways you suggested and more Link me up, because I didn't see any studies that controlled for the same variables my supplied experimental procedure controls for: I'm not aiming for an answer here. I'm giving only the method and being careful not to expose my beliefs. They don't matter.
Liam Phillips
>science at is was originally formulated
Jose Rodriguez
Oh shit I misread as part of 's reply. Lemme reply properly.
>They have been studied extensively You'll need to be a lot more clear about what has been studied and what hasn't. Supernatural phenomena are an expansive category and many of the types of things that have been tested under that umbrella term have come up inconclusive. Not falsified, not proven to not exist, but inconclusive. In other words, the testing methods weren't sufficient to test the hypothesis. The wrong set of control variables were used. That's a reason to change not the hypothesis, but the experimental procedure.
>in the ways you suggested Again, I'll need links to specific studied, because this topic is utter hell to Google for. I've already supplied what I think to be a novel procedure, but if it's been tested this way before, I haven't found that study.
I'm not asking anyone to duplicate existing work, so if this exact method has been supplied and utilized before, please let me know.
And again, I'm not aiming for an answer. I'm just giving an example of how you have to apply the logic of a potential phenomenon well to study it in a scientific context. Blindly controlling for random beliefs will generate random data. Controlling for "I don't want anyone or anything to grant my prayer that ..." prefixed prayers allows us to control for prayer with higher clarity than aiming at random gods or concepts we've imagined.
We can make it epistemic, we just have to be clever about it. The class of subjects considered as supernatural are only consider as such because they defy intuition. A little bit of logic goes a long way.
Oliver Morgan
I wasn't , but I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not searching for an answer here. I've spent a significant portion of my life chasing beliefs and interesting concepts and they all ate more time than each individual precept deserved. I need a higher granularity of data than I can achieve under my own sample.
I've been careful not to share my beliefs because they are excessively precise and may or may not actually get to the heart of any real issue. Nuance and refinement aren't enough at this point. I've thrown out the concept of belief entirely and no longer wish to control for it. To do that, I need people to think in terms of the scientific method and collect data because they value the knowledge that would be afforded by that study. If everyone else is content to have their beliefs and never wants to find novel ways to test them, I'm fucked. It's that simple.
I'm neither unwilling to search for my own literature or searching for a preferred answer. I've searched and found the existing level of procedures lacking. This isn't something I can do on my own because it requires experimentation on a level beyond individual research. Again, concepting such shenanigans as being "rejected" by some conscious entity-type granter is not what I'm trying to help you guys understand how to control for here. The prefix I supplied is designed specifically to factor out conscious prayer granters that would decide on a prayer-by-prayer basis whether or not they want to respond. The purpose of recording the meta-prayer instead of the actual prayer and the form the prayer takes when granted is to divide out sapient responses to prayed intent.
Nothing but the total eradication of belief from the equation can hold any further epistemic content for me. No you can't. Nothing said suggested that they were terminally unwilling to use novel methods to test interesting hypotheses. It's so much more than a belief generator.
Nolan Bell
>It's so much more than a belief generator. science as it was "originally formulated" is a bunch of semi-alchemical beliefs that will let you conclude everything is made of water that phrase is meaningless, clarify your ideas
Ayden Morgan
Define "brainwashing". You are treading on an extremely slippery slope.
Joseph Phillips
This got a lot noisier than I'd intended. All I meant to post was the abstract of the OP and the experimental procedure here: If you understood the procedure and how it relates to testing the mechanica of prayer, great. If not, so be it. The rest is background noise that logically should not affect anyone's willingness to conduct the experiment.
Daniel Walker
> a quick Google > Finds one study > notwhatiwastalkingabout.jpg > Concludes proposed study doesn't exist in literature
Sick analysis
Jace Sanders
>almost google "prayer studies" but realize that the natural context of the world has already alienated that concept's natural terminology from a scientific context to a bullshit Christian practice >instantly realize that googling for actual scientific studies of prayer will be hell >know in advance that Veeky Forums is gonna give me shit for not being omniscient and being able to fix google with my mind >google.com/search?q=scientific study of prayer instead of shitposting about it >find wikipedia article almost instantly >ohneat.jpng >somebody's already aggregated this knowledge >find that only a very few select types of studies have been performed >further find that the entire conception of the concept being tested for was Christian in origin >learn that the main outstanding questions from these prayer studies are the exact types of things my experimental procedure was designed to test for > >some Dawkins faggot thinks my beliefs affect my epistemology and posts anyway without reading the thread >probably didn't even realize it was a wikipedia link and posts under the assumption that it was a link to a single study rather than an article talking about the entire concept >wants me to google anyway, not realizing that I fucking despise Christianity and every lie it tells and would rather burn everything to the ground than ever put "prayer studies" in my search bar ever again >fails to properly criticize the given experimental procedure anyway
Elijah Walker
Thank you for your patience and corresponding silence, Veeky Forums. I know it's not easy to be that first guy that's willing to admit it might be worth testing.
Jacob Ortiz
>Popper is not and will never be a scientist. Don't look towards a guy who has never studied science to tell you what science is. Assuming you have ever read him, or know that he is now deceased, I think you might find a little more wisdom about the nature and the practice of science in Popper's work than you will gazing lovingly into your own reflection, you narcissistic dick.
Kayden Moore
Sorry OP it's a bit much to read by now. Apologies if you have already answered this. Are you testing belief or the power of prayer, because it would be possible to pray without believing. Or are you using prayer to test the power of belief, which implies prayers must be answered if a believer prays, but last time I spoke to god he didn't guarantee that.
Dominic Johnson
>it would be possible to pray without believing That's how the experiment is set up. The goal is to test the mechanism itself, regardless of any beliefs. I'm trying to remove belief from the equation entirely.
You don't need to read the whole thread. The OP, , and the supplemental metapost are the relevant parts.
Ryder Sanders
I dunno user, it's an interesting thought but even believers would tell you this won't work. That's the "faith" part of faith, you have to already think it works for it to work.
Brandon Cook
Based on how people have responded to Law of Attraction threads on /x/, I'd say faith isn't the key to making prayer work. I can understand thinking it won't work, I'm just curious if anyone wants to actually put that intuition to the test.
Nolan Murphy
Bump goodnight Veeky Forums. I'm not in any hurry to get people on board, but I'm not gonna remake this thread if nobody expresses even the slightest willingness to start recording data by the end of it.
See for a TL;DR of the thread.
Carson Hughes
bump
Nathaniel Reyes
., anything can be beyond science , there is always a divine infinite unity , a difinity , the difinity , The Difinity , The Delta-Difinity , Θε Δελτα-Διφινιτυ , and remember , humans never started existence , infinite is only part of the whole truth , and unity is forever , the cycles and recur can adjust to more ordinized than humanist perspectives , and that is difinitism , ΘανΧσ βε το Θε Δελτα-Διφινιτυ ,.
