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Would anyone be interested in testing their magic scientifically?

  
 
Chuckling Duck
18:27 / 28.03.02
I’ve heard that many of the people on the board practice Chaos Magic, which I understand is ultimately concerned with results over ritual. You try something, and if it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, try something else.

It must be hard to gather data on whether or not something is working. To use a famous (for this board) example, GM can’t be sure that sales of his comic wouldn’t have gone up even if he hadn’t asked his readers to wank over a sigil.

Would any of you be interested in testing the outcome of your magic in controlled, double-blind experiments?

If not, why not?

If so, what aspect of your magic do you think lends itself well to testing?

Assume, for the sake of arguement, that the test would be a fair one.
 
 
Saint Keggers
18:43 / 28.03.02
I for one would have to say not. Simply because I've never had a spell/ritual/sigil give me what I wanted. For example I do a ritual for money and I dont get money but I do get most of the things I wanted the money for given to me...Now whether that had anything to do with the ritual or not I cant say. I'd like to think so...but there not a shred of proof. If that is the case then that means that whatever 'force'is out there working works not on the suplication buyt rather on the intent..hmmm..Rolling Stones had it right all along..You cant always get what you want but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need. Then again maybe this is just me and others have receive exactly what they asked for...
 
 
Ierne
18:55 / 28.03.02
Would any of you be interested in testing the outcome of your magic in controlled, double-blind experiments? – Chuckling Duck

I would actually. Not because I'm so over-confident of my magickal abilites (I'm not under-confident either, mind you! ), but because it would be interesting to see how such a series of tests would be conducted, and what the results would be. As for which abilities do I think lend themselves to testing – I don't know. I'll have to think about that tonight...

I hope Lurid Archive participates in this thread! This sounds right up his alley...
 
 
Mystery Gypt
19:21 / 28.03.02
you could always create a sigil with the intent of gaining objective proof in the validity of chaos magick...
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
23:06 / 28.03.02
I would, I think. Like Ierne, I'm not saying I have so much faith in my abilities that I can make it apparent to even electronic eyes, but I'd like to see what it would do to my magick, and what methods of testing worked better for whatever.

I mean, how would you test anything? I'd recommend taking a random passerby to a voudou ritual and try to get them possessed. That'd be kind of fun.
 
 
Lurid Archive
23:30 / 28.03.02
I thought about starting a thread on exactly this topic when I first got here, but I wasn't sure if it would go down well. Anyway, I'm older and wiser now and I think the whole idea is pretty interesting.

I'm happy to contribute my two cents worth, but despite impressions to the contrary I'm not really a scientist. There are vast tracts of ignorance in my knowledge and really there are lots of other people who know more than me. Mordant Carnival is at least my equal in general scientific knowledge.

Having said that, how hard can it be to construct an experiment? A couple of thoughts spring to mind.

Ideally, you want to do an experiment with as many people as possible to ensure a representative result. However, the idiosyncratic nature of magick that people describe suggests that this would be unlikely to produce a positive result.

I suppose that the alternative would be to pick a single person and get them to choose a spell that they feel they can perform successfully in a relatively reliable way. Then get them to do the spell over and over and see how often it works. I'm thinking that the person doing the spell would set the parameters for a success or failure in advance. There are lots of problems with that sort of design, but it should be practically feasible.

Trying to design a double blind experiment would be too difficult in terms of resources and organisation and I'm not sure how appropriate it would be. I need to think about that a little more though.
 
 
Mystery Gypt
02:42 / 29.03.02
there was plenty of systematic para-psychological scientific studies in the 70s, right? we're all familiar with the opening scenes in Ghostbusters... there's probably a vast, forgotten literature detailing exactly how to set up these sorts of experiments; those tested for claivoyance, etc, but i'd bet if you really want to follow in scientific footsteps, that'd be a good place to start.
 
 
bastl b
11:49 / 29.03.02
maybe less scientifically "objective"(HAH!!) but a much richer method would be to get barbelithers to keep a diary on their experiences with magick. 20 - 40 participants meets any criteria for that sort of qualitative study which i´m about to describe. this doesn´t give you a clear cut measure of statistical significance if magick works or not but it would give you a deeper insight into what it means to pratcise it.

if it makes sense you could pre-structure the diary a bit so people would be required to always describe some given aspects which are of interest to you, other than that they can write anything they want..this way participants would use a standardized diary. you could also instruct them when to make entries, for example: daily, whenever they practise magick, say, right after it, or whenever you feel is a crucial time..all this depends on what you want to find out. I´d participate because I´m too lazy to keep a diary eventhough I know I´d profit enormously from this.

Austrian economic psychologists use this method to investigate how couples make purchase decisions (who buys what sort of products and is there a joint decision or not..; if you ask people directly they usually don´t really know) or if they wanna know how people without a job manage to spend their days and how they expereince the time on th dole and how their percaptions change over time (it usually ends in despair!). the goal is always to look for any systematically recurring patterns that pop up in most participants diaries. of course absolute anonymity is a must otherwise people don´t write honestly. the nice thing about this approach ("structured experience-diary") is that the subjects themselves become the observers. you have to know how to analyze such a massive load of verbal data which is an art in itself and it´s a shitload of work, for sure.

my only complaint is that the fact that writing in a diary makes people think about why they do things in this or that manner and that of course changes the way they go about things. so the fact that they have to keep a diary makes them more self-observant and influences them strongly so that creates a special situation which might not have arisen in a natural setting (where an outside observer whatches what happens and the subjects are unaware of being observed and behave naturally). on the other hand you could argue that people that practise magick are a pretty aware and observant bunch of people anyway, so it makes no difference....
 
 
Chuckling Duck
14:20 / 29.03.02
Your ideas for non-controlled experiments--repeating a spell to see how often it works, having the board keep diaries--are interesting, and I hope that they bear fruit for you. But I was interested in talking about how a rigorously controlled, double-blind test of your magical practices might be constructed.

Gypt is right that it’s very hard to run such an experiment, but devising one should be an interesting intellectual exercise.

Maybe if we were to start by cataloguing general magical effects that seem to work reliably, we could come up with a specific, perceptable result that could be objectively measured. For example, if the people on the board find that their performance in tasks can be boosted by charging glyphs, perhaps we could set out to measure the effect that studying a charged glyph has on playing video games.

Here’s a rough idea of how such a study might be conducted. No doubt my notions of how magic works will strike some of the members of the board as naive. In light of your greater experience in the field, could you please suggest how the experiment might be improved without compromising the objectivity of the study?

An competent magician would construct a large number of glyphs for the purpose of improving video game skills and charge them. These glyphs and a number of uncharged, meaningless symbols on paper would be passed to a disinterested third party, who would put them into a random numerical order, noting which are glyphs and which are placebos. The numbered symbols would then be passed on to the researcher, who would not know which are which. The researcher would have subjects study a symbol after playing a game, then play again, and measure their improvement. After accumulating a significant amount of data, the researcher would find out from the third party which symbols are which, then analyze the results statistically to determine if the glyphs really did boost the subjects’ performance more than the placebos did.
 
 
Lothar Tuppan
22:18 / 29.03.02
I'm interested. It would be curious to see if thaumaturgical effects could be detected within a scientific ontology like this.

Does anyone have any info on different parapsychological testing techniques used by either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R.? Beyond the clairvoyance and telepathy tests there may be some stuff that could be modified for this.

We may not need to reinvent the wheel.
 
 
Ierne
19:18 / 30.03.02
I wonder if divination skills could be tested in a scientific manner, for example running a test whereby someone could do a Tarot spread or Rune reading for two people. Person one would have a specific question with a time frame ("What will happen in the next three months?") while person two would not have a question. The diviner would do the reading without asking persons one and two what their questions were. The reading would be noted and recorded, then three months later persons one and two would be interviewed as to what happened to them during those three months. The contents of the interview would be compared and contrasted with the readings done three months before.

It might also be interesting to have persons three and four, who would shuffle the cards or throw the Runes, but not be present when the diviner does the reading. Same question, same situation with one person concentrating on a question while the other has no question, same interviews three months later to compare with the readings.
 
 
Gek
20:26 / 30.03.02
<: HOOK ME UP, COUNT ME IN :>
 
 
grant
16:36 / 01.04.02
Hmm. Much of magick seems to me to be an interpretive process, rather than one that's strictly causative. I suppose there's a way to test for that, but it'd have to be fairly, what, subjective, I suppose.
 
 
Lothar Tuppan
16:05 / 18.04.02
I'm not sure I'm interested in participating any more.

For the reasons why go here.
 
 
Lionheart
18:56 / 18.04.02
The experiment is easy. At a certain time a person in New York looks at a certain picture and tries to send the image mentally to Myste... uh.. some guy in Los Angeles. Myste.. uh.. i mean, some guy in loss Angeles writes/draws down his impressions of his image and a non-involved third party has to match Mystery Gypt's sketch to one of ten or 15 images.
 
  
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