Why do we so eagerly take to woo?

[DirkGently]

164. Because people inherently sense we are missing information.

I dislike irrationality as much as the next person, but a lot of what militant skeptics arrogantly dismiss as "woo" is a reflection of a very correct sense the mainstream world in general grasps only a fraction of reality.

The wise know that they do not know.

A lot of people have bad experiences with doctors who run a couple of tests for basic, well-understood maladies, then appear to lose interst when there's not a simple drug to prescribe or procedure to run. There's very little time, money, or interest in exploring ways to help people that don't fit into convenient packages.

And there is a smugness, an almost irrational-in-itself resistance by those who know some, against the suggestion they might be missing something. Sometimes the problem is the old one -- if there is no money to be made, no drug to be patented, no costly surgery to perform, the motivation to explore is weak. Institutions and their inhabitants develop inertia -- resistance to new or different thinking -- that can wind up suppressing valid ideas. Scientific "revolutions" rarely occur until there is a heavy accumulation of evidence, before the paradigm will shift.

Acupuncture, for example works for some types of pain. It's fraught with what you call "woo," mysterious explanations involving "chi" and burning incense, but, hey, look, closer examination has demonstrated it can work, by processes we could not analyze before. Something with all the hallmarks of "magical thinking" is in fact not magic, but reality.

People are vulnerable to irrational thought, yes. But the impulse to grasp something new or not yet accepted is not a wholly irrational one in itself.

Sometimes "woo" turns out to be "troo."