Mutt (she/her)

I accidentally hyper fixated all day and wrote about negotiating CNC...

Yep. Life be like...

We just shouldn't limit ourselves as much as professional scientists since we are just having recreational fun here

I think often our experiences might lead us astray and it's useful when the scientists go "hey uh so it turns out the hypnosis still works when you don't do any of the things you said make it work?" And then we can learn more about what we are doing in that way

Science is very helpful, just limited, which in many ways an asset of science. It limits itself to making claims that can be supported through very dependable methods. Just not everything can be consistently reproduced in ideal environments.

Adding Zotero as a fetish on fetlife

We need a dialectical approach

Some de-jargonibg

Knowledge production: Discovering new things! :) figuring out how stuff works :)

Know reproduction: Telling other people about your discovery. Sharing what you learned. Teaching other people your knowledge

Yes agreed. Most of the best work is actually about phenomenological control, the psychology that's happening, because at a certain point studying Hypnosis is actually anthropology and not psychology

I noticed while trying to research hypnosis is that anyone credibly researching quickly drops the terminology of hypnosis, because it's overly broad and non-falsifiable. I personally believe that insisting on "hypnosis" as a term is mostly about preserving the just-so authority of hypnotists.

If people come away agreeing with every single thing I say then I did a bad job as an educator, haha. I want them thinking critically and creatively and forming their own opinions (and to hopefully do so in a way where disagreement with me doesn't have to mean they believe I'm Totally Evil)

Also maybe I just wish our community had more writers of nonfiction haha.

And the shit they're saying isn't necessarily wrong... their original claims might even be right... but how do we know? I wish we'd think more critically about ourselves

The norm we have now is most instructors just say shit and everything they say is supposedly true because they said so and are YOU the one up on stage presenting? I didn't think so. Clearly I'm the authority since I'm up on stage (except there's almost no quality control on who can present)

And then people would have to actually identify when they are making an original claim. And they would say "here is my original claim, based on all the experiences I've had, and the information I've engaged with, I believe that..." and we'd assess if we believed them or not.

Like, if our community was better at citing each other's workshops and writings and such, it would be easier for us to make the case for Why one idea is stronger than another besides "this hypno 101 said this and that 101 said that." We could actually see the trails of information dissemination

Appeals to Science alone also are not what get us towards truth. They are producing knowledge that is very strong and worth engaging with and considering. We also produce knowledge, but our systems of reproduction of that knowledge are so frustrating to me. Because we never create those breadcrumbs.

Yes I think that in the recreational/kink community there ARE things we know and understand and transmit orally that the scientific community is not aware of and/or cannot replicate in controlled conditions because an intimate interpersonal interaction can only be so controlled for and so ethically

YES EXACTLY

It works ≠ this reveals a fundamental truth about the world or human brains.

I can tell you a ghost is possessing your body and that'll make your arm rise too but it working doesn't mean ghosts are real

At a certain point we need to start looking at evidence outside of that which is produced by people who themselves practice and sell hypnosis for profit...

Sure, Wiseguy was a hypnotherapist for decades. So was my mom, who also claimed to be a spiritual channeler who can NLP you into altering material reality. I'm just not inclined to believe competence at changework = understanding of psychology.

When I appeal to psychological research which is not directly about hypnosis or which does not show evidence for the state hypothesis, I am criticized for "going against commonly understood norms in the community" or going against charismatic supposed authorities with barely nay credentials.

Appeals to Erickson might as well be appeals to Mesmer. It's all appeals to charismatic figures living or dead. So having stronger charisma, sex appeal, willingness to teach a lot, passion and heat, becomes how we assert truth.

James Braid did actual science... kind of... sort-of... but that was over a hundred years ago. It's bizarre of us to assume nobody has made any advancements in understanding hypnosis scientifically since James Braid.

Appeals to authority can only get us so far. After all, the entire practice of mesmerism originates from a man who simply asserted "Exorcists are wrong, it's magnetism actually" based on nothing but his force of will and passion. When the Franklin commission challenged him, he just went on anyway.

You can appeal to the authority of Wiseguy and Mindplay, given that he's a retired hypnotherapist, but what if I think his assertions are outdated? What if I disagree with the marketing claims of hypnotherapy? Or the assertions of Mike Mandel? What if I think Bandler was full of bullshit?

So what happens when we disagree on things in the hypnosis community? It quickly escalates to VERY heated conflict. The only way to argue your position is to assert truth, rather than assess truth. Who is most passionate, most bold. Who says "this is how it is. Because it simply is that way."

Often out classes take from each other freely without attribution. While it's nice that we aren't sticklers about copyright exactly, it does mean there's no sense of where truth or knowledge comes from. Truth exists because we say so from a position of shallow social authority that is easy to accrue

What would you say? "I took notes on a class at a conference three years ago taught by this person and you weren't there but this is what they said" "and why is that person right?" "well... they were very convincing" "in the community where we practice influencing each other with speech?"

we have a culture of mostly only oral transmission with very few citations, and an odd insistence on only engaging with knowledge produced intra-communally, so there is no way to make a case for a position based on an assessment of evidence, since nearly all transmission of knowledge is time-bound