User:Ihcoyc/The problem of anti-supernatural bias

I believe that anti-supernatural bias has become a problem on Wikipedia. Like most biases in Wikipedia, it fits the pattern: the community of active editors on Wikipedia differs from the world at large in a significant way, and that demographic difference makes a difference in Wikipedia content.

"Scientific skepticism" is a fringe position

Alchemists developed a rich corpus of hermetic lore, combining chemical and magical ideas. To what extent is this literature available to describe what alchemists thought and did?

What we need to remember first is that the "scientific skepticism" of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and similar institutions is itself a fringe position. Adherence to the tenets of scientific skepticism seems also to be positively related to ideas such as materialism, positivism, trust in scientific progress, and, of course, the ultimate fringe position. As the content guideline on "fringe theories" says, "We use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field." And yes, it does seem to me that believers in these fringe theories are strongly represented in the community of Wikipedia editors. I can't think of any other explanation why mention of His Holiness Richard Dawkins's appearance on South Park is treated like it was a cartoon of Muhammad.

The wider world accepts the supernatural. Specifically, the wider world knows that there is a God, or at least a world of spirits. A variety of hypotheses have been proposed to explain why this is so. The simplest one is that people simply apprehend natively that there is a God; but other important philosophers have proposed more complicated explanations. I'm not claiming that we should "teach the controversy" here, but on the other hand the existence or not of a god, or a soul, or a spiritual world, are by most people's estimations, including the logical positivist's, formally unknowable. Most of your neighbors go on believing no matter how vehemently anyone claims that supernatural belief requires extraordinary proof.

Ideas like sympathetic magic, the law of contagion, and the gambler's fallacy are things that, like it or not, the human race is stuck with. Magical thinking isn't going away any time soon either. The belief systems that human societies have founded on these flimsy foundations are nevertheless fascinating, and to the extent they have a documented literature, potential subjects for the encyclopedia. The various bodies of lore that people have founded on these ideas include most forms of occult magic, protosciences or pseudosciences like astrology, alchemy, and homeopathy, and a variety of persistent beliefs such as the evil eye. What's at stake is the depth of coverage we are allowed into the content of these systems, and the acceptability of works by believers explaining their teachings as sources for those teachings.

Quite simply, the doctrine that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is not Wikipedia policy. It couldn't be. Wikipedia already bristles with articles about supernatural wonders, referenced as fact only to the accounts of believers. Popular superstitions are not less notable because they are superstitions. And when we write about these subjects, we make the necessary assumptions.

Verifiability: why belief systems are not works of fiction

Some editors have taken to describing the works of prescientific disciplines like astrology or alchemy as "in universe". That, of course, is a Wikipedia term of art that relates entirely and only to fiction. As such, in this context it is dismissive to the point of impertinence, and a manifestation of blatant bias. Belief systems are not works of fiction, and the substance of their beliefs can and should be referenced to respected writers in their fields. The underlying assumption is that the substance of these bodies of human lore is incoherent. No astrologer knows what they're talking about when they discuss astrology; no magician knows anything about magic; no alchemist knows alchemy. They are not allowed to explain their belief systems to us. No text, for an example, by an astrologer explaining the substance of astrology can be cited as an authoritative reference; since astrology is not science, each astrologer makes it up anew again. This is not how it works.

Ask an astrologer, "What element is Gemini?" With almost unanimous voice they answer Air! There might be one out there who disagrees. Nobody's going to prove him wrong; astrology is still not science. Yep: from the perception of current science, the question is gibberish. It was the scholarly consensus six hundred years ago that the question was meaningful, and that there was a right answer, wrong answers, and not even wrong answers, (like, Nitrogen!). As such, it meets our policy of verifiability. It remains the case that astrology, like any other body of human lore, can be defined by the consensus of its practitioners.

Astrology, here, is just an example. Our pages on the zodiac signs are still woefully inadequate, most conspicuously because they do not present the platitudes that mainstream astrologers consistently use to describe the several sun signs. This is something that I think our readers would expect to see covered in a page bearing the title "Gemini (astrology)". Most of the pages now have, or have had, identical rants proclaiming the worthlessness of astrology. My God, that page is pathetic. Our readers ought to be able to learn that mainstream astrologers say that Gemini is an Air sign, and that they tend to talk too much. This page is scientific proof confirming the hypothesis that it's true. You might think it's nonsense. It may well be nonsense. But it is nonsense with a vast literature, and our standard for inclusion is verifiability, not truth.

It may well be that astrologers talk mostly to other astrologers and occultists, and that just about all works devoted to explaining the beliefs and methods of astrology come from people who assume that astrology works, explains people and events, and is worth studying. Contemporary science, of course, rejects astrology, and therefore rejects astrological explanations. It might be more accurate to say that contemporary astrology would be a bit of a walled garden. But our writ does not extend to sitting in judgment over walled gardens that exist outside the wiki. We knew already that astrology is not science (and for the most part no longer pretends to be) and does not operate under the scientific method. All of these banal observations are utterly irrelevant to Wikipedia verification policy. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia only of science, and the scientific viewpoint holds no special privilege here. Bodies of human lore with extensive literatures are verifiable even if science judges them rubbish.

To the extent that Wikipedia excludes astrology on the grounds that its teachings are pseudoscientific, it is excluding a substantial chunk of the intellectual history of the human race. This is wrong. Historian of science Ann Geneva writes:

Astrology in seventeenth century England was not a science. It was not a Religion. It was not magic. Nor was it astronomy, mathematics, puritanism, neo Platism, psychology, meteorology, alchemy or witchcraft. It used some of these as tools; it held tenets in common with others; and some people were adept at several of these skills. But in the final analysis it was only itself: a unique divinatory and prognostic art embodying centuries of accreted methodology and tradition.

That method and tradition, and the belief systems that underpinned them, are encyclopedia subjects with a referenceable literature. This stuff needs to be covered somewhere.

Reliable sources, and the open secrets of magic

Besides, learning how to summon a magical guardian for your sheep is quite handy.

Gareth Knight is a fairly well respected and published occultist. He wrote a book called A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism. (I pity the fool who got stuck with an impractical guide to Qabalistic symbolism.) In his text, he associates the sephirah Chesed, which represents the mercy and steadfast love of God, with the number 4. Holy Sesame Street, Batman!

I am uncertain how exactly the mercy of God is related to the number four, or what the reasoning was that resulted in this conclusion. What I am much more certain of is that Knight is not alone in this attribution. I know so because the claim is confirmed by multiple sources considered to be reliable authorities on this kind of magic. I checked Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabalah. For Dion Fortune, Chesed goes with four as well. I checked Aleister Crowley's 777. Chesed equals four for Crowley too.

This agreement among reliable sources gives the lie to the "in universe" line. There is a mainstream body of opinion among practitioners of the sort of Western qabalistic magic followed broadly by Knight, Fortune, and Crowley, and among the bits of knowledge you pick up if you study the field is that Chesed equals four. I doubt this is a testable proposition in any scientific sense. It doesn't make any difference. Multiple reliable sources reveal that not only is Chesed associated with 4, but also with the planet Jupiter (astrological symbol: ♃) and the archangel Zadkiel. Fortune also reports that the fours among the pip cards of the Tarot deck also fall under the presidency of Chesed. (I think I'm beginning to see a pattern here.) Nope, it's not science. These claims are still covered by sources whose authority is acknowledged in the field, and as such factual enough to get into an appropriate encyclopedia article.

Now, I'm not saying that this information belongs in our article about the planet Jupiter; there, a link in the 'mythology' section to the article on Jupiter in astrology (which is easily a large enough subject to support an extensive article) is enough. Does it belong in the article on the angel Zadkiel? I think so. And it also belongs in the article on Chesed.

The "in universe" argument is especially galling, and contrary to Wikipedia's actual verification policies, largely because it adopts a blinkered stance to the actual methods of transmission of traditional belief systems like this one. Because the body of lore in the tradition is not empirically tested, it is assumed to be incoherent. Because the body of lore in the tradition is not empirically tested, every authority that repeats the tradition becomes a primary source without regard to the age of the tradition or its continuity of transmission. Every author is imagined to be free to make it up as she goes along. If we report what one source says, that isn't good enough; there's no proof. If we report that several sources agree, that's original synthesis. These beliefs are all fictional ideas in the heads of believers anyways. What we have here is a colossal failure to make necessary assumptions, born of contempt for the underlying subjects.

These arguments, I think, fall squarely within the definition of gaming the system. They are "deliberately using Wikipedia policies and guidelines in bad faith to thwart the aims of Wikipedia". And the pitiful state of our articles on the zodiac signs in astrology, among other things, are chiefly monuments to the fact that the aims of Wikipedia have been thwarted in this instance.

Notability: a tour of the Miskatonic University library

John Wiley & Sons publishes a book in its For Dummies series called Astrology for Dummies. Astrology is coherent enough that this technical and academic publisher can distribute a popular textbook, essentially a glorified crib sheet (they even have one online!) for people who want to appear knowledgeable in discussions about astrology. Other texts in the series include Wicca and Witchcraft for Dummies, Tarot for Dummies, about tarot card reading, and Dream Dictionary for Dummies, about dream interpretation.

The presence of these texts ought to make any rational skeptic reach a simple conclusion: the "in universe" hypothesis has been conclusively falsified. Astrology, tarot card reading, and similar bodies of wonderlore have a mainstream body of teaching that is recognized by respected academic publishers as a teachable subject. They offer home study texts for people who wish to become literate in these disciplines, whether there is any merit to them or not. They could not do so if astrology were fiction, so that all astrologers pulled their astrology out of their imaginations every time.

On a somewhat more exalted level, according to Joseph H. Peterson's critical edition of the Key of Solomon, a magical grimoire, the text is extant in Greek, Latin, Italian, English, French, and Hebrew. The manuscript record extends from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century; the printed record from the eighteenth to the twenty-first. Obviously, this is a notable book; and notable books contain notable ideas that people wish to study. The Key of Solomon's affirmation that certain talismans are useful "for the purpose of striking terror into the spirits and reducing them to obedience" is therefore a notable fact that can be confirmed by its presence in significant reliable sources independent of the subject. (And if that's a single source, there are plenty of other grimoires out there that share its methods and assumptions.) It goes beyond mere technical compliance with the notability guideline: it's a subject with genuine historical depth.

There is no way that anybody can make a credible case that the supernatural lore contained in these works is too fringe to sustain encyclopedia articles. This claim ignores both history and current literature, and is again a manifestation of anti-supernatural bias. The greater part of humanity, and more importantly, the voice of history does not share your opinion of "woo".

Wikipedia cannot write off branches of human learning with vast literatures as "woo": not even if the judgment of the present is that these branches of learning are specious, untestable, or wrong. No policy requires this. Those who make these claims are merely wielding policy-sounding labels with an agenda other than building the encyclopedia. That's magical thinking right there. There is an odd concern with Wikipedia's "voice": as if Wikipedia was endorsing supernatural belief systems like astrology by informing readers of what astrology had to say. Wikipedia has a lot of detailed information on Roman Catholicism; does this make Wikipedia Catholic? Wikipeda presents the teaching of all sorts of belief systems from Santeria to non-Euclidean geometry, without endorsing them. [I think non-Euclidean geometry is witchcraft.]

An electro magnetic bath might do you a world of good.

Specific problems

You're opening the door for non-notable beliefs, commercial promotion of quackery, and original research

No, I'm not. All I am saying is that we should distinguish notable "woo" from non-notable "woo" by the same methods we use to distinguish any other notable subject: long term historical notability. Notable "woo" will have an extensive literature going back generations, even centuries.

There are few editors who take a harder line on self-promotion and non-neutral text than I do. My longstanding belief is that the key to neutrality is concrete plain English. I also tend to be of the opinion that when you describe the practices and their intended results in plain English, their non-scientific and magical nature tends to become apparent without editorializing.

What I am saying is that texts in these traditions should not be written off as "unreliable" or "primary sources" simply because they are made by believers for the use of believers. It may come as a surprise to people whose chief acquaintance with the occult is through Llewellyn Books, but scholarly standards among occultists have been rising. Joseph H. Peterson has produced some valuable critical and variorum editions of magical texts. Astrologers, likewise, have been busily producing annotated versions of astrological classics, and new manuals based on them. Because, again, astrology is not science, astrologers think that they can still learn from Ptolemy, Guido Bonatti, and William Lilly. These sources should not be written off merely because they are made by astrologers for other astrologers to study. Because there is a tradition involved, these texts are neither original research nor primary sources.

This homo signorum from 1580 is handily labelled (in German) to identify which signs are favorable or unfavorable for bloodletting.

Medical claims

Our sourcing policy on medical claims is an exception to the usual rules of editing Wikipedia, and as such needs to be construed very strictly so that it applies only to claims that it fairly and indisputably covers.

I believe it has a very limited application, if at all, to writing about medical folklore, folk medicine, or for that matter the history of medicine, which contains a healthy dose of the several species of magical thinking. Astrology was a core part of the medical curriculum until the eighteenth century. It has always amused me that, while lawyers were drafting the U.S. constitution, medical men were bleeding George Washington for fever in accordance with the moon signs. These physicians and surgeons were probably acutely aware of the shortcomings of their methods. But patients wanted treatments, so they went with what they had.

Medical sources are not needed, for instance, for Mark Twain's discussion of the use of spunkwater and dead cats to cure warts, as set forth in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I frankly don't think this is "biomedical information" or that there is a reasonable risk that people will use Tom Sawyer as a source of health information. WP:MEDRS does not apply to matters such as these.

We have many unmined sources of historical data that our users might be interested in; adding information from Nicholas Culpeper's Compleat Herbal and English Physician (1652) to the articles on the many plants discussed in it would be a start. The book has remained in print continuously from its appearance to the present. No, it does not reflect contemporary scientific consensus. Culpeper wanted to reveal the secrets of the physicians of his era to the common people, and made enemies because of that purpose. So he translated their pharmacopoeia from Latin to English, and wrote a reference book to make it accessible. It remains historically important information that belongs in the encyclopedia, even if its chief interest is historic at the time.

Current quackery is much likelier to be masquerading as science, far less likely to be notable, and most importantly, will try to palm itself off as contemporary medical information. It is not history nor folklore. We will be able to tell the two apart easily. WP:MEDRS applies to that stuff.