In Defence of Woo

A discussion with myself across time

I’m fed up of hiding. I’m done with shame. It’s time to embrace the unembraceable. I think there’s nothing wrong with being a bit woo, and today I’m going to offer a defence of woo in the workplace.

As time moves on, I increasingly find myself self-censoring from sharing what I want to share because I’m worried that it will come across as ‘too woo’. So instead of trying to explain how the tools and ideas are, in fact, NOT WOO! I’m going to go in the other direction and make the case that if we embrace more woo, it could open up paths to happier teams, better decisions and more intelligent teams.

I think it’s worth stating up front that the Daniel of a decade ago would probably be appalled at this opening salvo. I (and he?) have a Masters degree from University College London in Natural Sciences, and I consider myself a scientifically literate and knowledgeable person. I values the scientific tradition as a powerful set of tools for understanding ourselves and the world around us.

I don’t want what I’m saying in this article to come across as being ‘anti scientific’ or anything like that. So I’m going to present this topic is as a conversation between the me of 10 years ago, recently graduated from university and who would be appalled at the idea of defending woo, and the me of now who finds himself reluctantly doing so.

Current 35 year old Daniel has a number of advantages over 25 year old Daniel so I’ll try not to give him too hard of a time. Also the arguments that I’ll make are part of what turned 25 year old Daniel’s opinions into 35 year old Daniel’s opinions so if 25 year old Daniel gets convinced by the end of the discussion (I hope I can convince him), that’s because 25 year old Daniel really was convinced by these arguments. This is a new format for me, I hope you like it.

Old Me: Jesus Christ I didn’t realise it was possible for me to get more bald

Current Me: and now we’re starting to go grey!

Old Me: Depressing. I love to go first normally, but why don’t you start us off with whatever weird beliefs you’re putting forward, old man.

Current Me: Very generous of you, twerp. I’ll use Merriam Webster’s definition of woo-woo; ‘dubiously or outlandishly mystical, supernatural, or unscientific’. There are many practices and ways of seeing the world which sit outside of the scientific tradition. I’m not going to claim that all of them are useful or worth paying attention to. There’s definitely some nonsense out there.

However, there is a wide range of things that either:

a) definitely, have been proven to be useful even by scientific standards in medical terms (e.g. yoga, breathing practices) which would have been considered woo once

b) methods which contain potentially useful ways of seeing the world but are - rightly - non scientific and also could easily blend into nonsense (e.g. visualisations, different types of somatic work, chakras, astrology, Tarot)

If we dismiss anything that might be considered woo we might throw out lots of babies with bathwater. And there are some really good babies in there. Yoga as an example has undergone a tonne of scientific research and has clinically significant effects such that you can find yoga guides on the NHS website. If we were worried about dismissing all things woo, we would have ignored this supremely useful set of practices.

People can do what they want in their own time, but when people come to work I feel an expectation to keep things ‘professional’ and ‘serious’, which means that the default mode is to be very risk averse with the kinds of practices and methods that people bring to their teams. I’m trying to make the case that we should find ways of loosening up what we’re prepared to talk about and use at work. If we do that, we may be able to have more human and therefore more effective workplaces.

Old Me: There’s lots there that I take issue with. First of all - astrology? tarot? chakras? Wtf?! I can’t believe what I’m hearing here. Let me explain my incredulity.

There’s a big complicated world out there and modern science is the best way to know about it. Science is a method of generating falsifiable hypotheses about the world and trying to break them. If we can’t break a hypothesis experimentally, if means the hypothesis is likely to be true and we can accept it.

The falsifiable bit is important - if someone makes a claim that can’t be falsified or proven wrong, according to philosopher of Science Karl Popper that isn’t useful knowledge.

Even if science gets something wrong, it contains within itself and its methods a way of self correcting and approximating a better model. My problem with the woo practices of which you speak is that they deal in non scientific and unfalsifiable claims. That essentially makes them meaningless at best and dangerous at worst! If yoga or breathing practices are really useful and deliver benefit to people, that will be demonstrable in scientific studies, at which point they are no longer woo, they are science and science owes the traditions from which those practices came a debt of gratitude.

Tarot, astrology and energy healers make unfounded and unfalsifiable claims about the world. What on earth does the month that I’m born have to do with my character, it’s total nonsense to imagine that anything useful could be found in that worldview other than pure luck and randomness. Either the claims made in those systems are so vague that they don’t contribute any knowledge at all, or they are so specific that they will be mostly wrong or occasionally lucky. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and a claim that your star sign will somehow align with your experience might be right once but that doesn’t give validity to the system. You might as well spin a random wheel.

You’d have to work extremely hard and show me some impeccably well-controlled statistics to demonstrate a connection between someone’s star sign or tarot reading and anything meaningful or interesting that happens in the real world. I’m a scientist, so I’m open in principle to there being something there, but I would need a heck of a lot of convincing on my own terms that it’s useful or predictive at all. Until proven otherwise (using scientific tools and methodologies by actual bona fine scientists), I’m going to assume that those practices in what you call category b are nonsense.

As an extension of that - yes, it’s totally appropriate to exclude nonsense from the workplace if you want to be taken seriously, just like we should exclude outright liars and charlatans and agents of corporate espionage from organisations that want to get something done. Adding nonsense won’t make an organisation more effective, it will make it more nonsensical. Sense is important.

Current Me: I know for a fact that you haven’t read Karl Popper. Nonetheless I agree with you about the scientific method, that hasn’t changed. If I want to know about the world, the scientific method is an incredibly powerful way of deriving knowledge.

As an aside - you run the risk of being overly western-science-centric here. ‘Western Science’ (and I’m putting it in inverted commas because we’re talking about a method developed mostly in what some call The West’) has its own conventions and lineage and bodies of knowledge which are incredibly powerful and making use of the world and have driven many of the advances in medicine, technology and engineering that make up modern life.

However there are ways of knowing that are no less useful or effective than Western Science that didn’t derive from that lineage. Take indigenous knowledge as an example. I wrote recently about etak navigation; the indigenous sailing practice from Micronesia. Stranded on a canoe between the islands of Puluwat and Guam, I’d much rather have a local guide than a western sailor without their fancy tools. Technologies built on non-Western ways of knowing can be just as powerful and useful as Western ones.

It’s likely that local sailor’s language and mythology that explains the observable phenomena on our voyage would be impenetrable and irrelevant-feeling to me, just as my insistence on using bird’s-eye maps and earth moving around the sun would be impenetrable and irrelevant feeling to him or her. Whichever mythologies and simplifications we spin around observable phenomena, the test is whether these methods are useful.

Old Me: I’ll grant you that there is sophisticated non-Western knowledge. That’s obviously true otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to survive as a species for so long. Science isn’t a mythology though - it’s our best possible description of reality as it is. It’s not a useful story, it’s our best attempt to understand the world plainly and dispassionately with no fluff. It can’t be compared to the belief in Greek gods or other mythological stories.

Where those stories have been useful, it’s through sheer luck, not rationality. If I tell an elaborate story about a spirit god who told humankind that most red berries are poisonous, that’s an adaptive belief. People who follow that story will avoid poison more, survive, and keep telling similar stories. Cultures who develop a mythology that you should eat all red berries won’t survive to tell the story to the next generation and that myth will die with them. Eventually you gain knowledge like that but lots of upset stomachs occur along the way. Science is a much more efficient method for getting to the same conclusions.

Also - and most importantly - I don’t see how tarot, astrology and chakras provide anything that can constitute knowledge or be useful at all. You can’t compare tarot to etak navigation just because they both are outside of the western scientific tradition.

Current Me: Isn’t science a kind of mythology? Atoms don’t exist the way we draw them, they are useful fictions. Models that work to a certain point and then stop working. Classical physics breaks down when you go big or small enough. Using other mythologies or stories to explain how the world works may offer us useful shortcuts that aren’t available in scientific explanations.

We know that the earth moves around the sun, yet when I’m trying to tell whether it’s morning noon or night I say ‘where is the sun in the sky’, imagining that I’m static and the sun is moving. Some of the non western mythological systems may act similarly with regards to our bodies and consciousness. I’ll explain more shortly.

I think it’s on me to show how these tools could be used in a way that isn’t a nonsense generator.

I think the moment that changed it for me was realising that whereas science brings a rich and sophisticated toolkit for understanding what happens ‘out there’ in the world of objects, the same lab coats and cold rationality don’t help us understand what happens ‘in here’ in the world of subjects. Your bog standard scientific stance gets in the way when we’re trying to understand subjective experience.

Human minds construct our realities around us. We assign meaning to things, we actively delineate what is important and what is unimportant in our environment. What to pay attention to and what to ignore. What to worry about and what to be relaxed about. In the terminology of Andy Clark we generate predictions about what we expect to experience, and then our experience is rooted in those predictions or in the errors.

We don’t experience the world in rational, linear, mathematical terms. We work in metaphors, stories and abstractions. Stories and abstractions are rich in information. I’ll be the first to admit that chakras and astrology are not a native language for me and I don’t know my Gemini from my Aries. However if someone finds these stories and metaphors useful as a way of explaining who they are and what their experience is, it might be worth trying to understand what they are trying to say.

If a child is brought up being told that they are a Gemini and every time that they are showing contrasting sides of their personality (apparently a property of a Gemini) someone says ‘ah, such a Gemini’, that child will construct a reality in which ‘being a Gemini’ describes a pattern in the world. It may also influences who they become in some way. Does that make astrology a science? No. Does it give it predictive power? Also no. Could using the inner symbolic world of astrology help two people describe something to each other? Yes, I think so. At least as much as a quiz asking which Harry Potter character you’re identifying with at the moment, or which Hogwarts house you’d be in.

I’m picking astrology because it’s probably the woo-est example - and no I’m not planning on incorporating astrology into my work any time soon. And if someone invited me to a meeting where I was asked to share my star sign and whether I resonate with it or not and what that means about what it’s like to work with me I’d probably roll my eyes pretty hard. I’m arguing that me choosing to roll my eyes makes me the arsehole, not the person running the meeting.

Our workplaces are full of humans who reason and construct meaning as humans, and that is through stories and metaphors and icons and symbols. My friend Lianne recently wrote about playing with Tarot at work and that’s the kind of things I’m talking about. If you could get everyone on board that it’s not a waste of time it could become not a waste of time.

Our minds and expectations construct our physical experience too. The placebo effect is perhaps the most stark example of this. A patient expects a drug to have a clinical effect, so it does (even if the patient knows it’s a placebo). Thats because we construct our conscious experience, we aren’t just a recipient of it. For a patient who is used to taking a white pill filled with actual drugs, given by a doctor in a clinical setting and then feeling better, when they take a placebo they will continue to expect to feel better. Their prediction of feeling better results in the reality of feeling better.

As a thought experiment, imagine my friend Bob, who through some fluke of life has never been to a doctor, never encountered a hospital and never heard of or seen a white pill or a white coat. Would the same placebo work for Bob? I’d argue not, not if the meaning of white pill and stern person in a white coat isn’t associated with healing. It doesn’t let Bob’s mind and body predict and construct a placebo effect.

If we combine our minds’ ability to use metaphors and iconic abstractions to construct reality with our mind’s abilities to influence our physical experience like in the placebo effect, you could easily see how someone might use chakras - conceptual ‘energy centres’ that run throughout the human body in eastern medicine - as a useful tool to help them manage their own internal physical state and have real physiological effect.

If - like me - chakras are not something that you consider meaningful, then talking about them and trying to use them would be like Bob taking a western placebo. But for someone who interprets and labels their physical experiences in relation to energy lines or centres scattered throughout their bodies, this could be a potent tool. Perhaps there’s something that people who use the idea of chakras are able to do to live a good life that I can’t do. In which case being narrow minded to elements of their approach only deprives me of an opportunity to feel good.

Why deprive myself of a perfectly good placebo? Why not teach people responsibly to access a new potent placebo?

If could we teach people to use their bodies to regulate their conscious experience in a way that helps them show up better for work, we should let fear of being seen as woo get in the way of that. In fact the woo-ness and newness of it could be exactly what people need. Especially in workplaces which are full of relationships, emotions, passion and frustration. All places where it is helpful to have the best tools available.

Old Me: Gosh that was lots of words.

Current Me: Yeah sorry I can get carried away.

Old Me: Why don’t we leave it there and see if anyone wants to hear us carry on on the topic.

Current Me: Good idea old me. If you got this far and you want this discussion to carry on, leave a like or a comment or get in touch.