The Hypnonaut Uncertainty Principle
Philosophically speaking, we are committed to making sure you know how sure we are of the things we tell you. We’re serious about not telling you bullshit, without telling you it’s bullshit..., and there’s gonna be a lot of bullshit. Just because we read it in a book, doesn’t mean it’s true. Even just because we read it in a peer reviewed scientific paper doesn’t mean it’s true, but it’s a lot more likely to be true.
We started writing some of our initial posts and quickly realized that we were qualifying every sentence and decided a post that establishes our baseline and outlines our commitment to identifying fact versus inference versus anecdotal evidence whenever we’re straying from that baseline. Understanding our philosophy is a great place to start.
One reason why we’re pretty wary of “science” here is that the way the erotic hypnosis community and the scientific community practice hypnosis can be quite different. We believe there’s some really fundamental differences in the practices of erotic hypnosis and clinical hypnosis: different goals, different buy in, different power exchange, different cultures and fundamental paradigms. Almost all of the science that exists is referring to practices and research in clinical hypnosis. We see it as tangential research to our community and practices. There’s much to be learned and much that is likely to translate to what we do, but our practices might reproduce similar outcomes, or they might not. Conversely, their methods translated to our community might or might not reproduce similar outcomes.
This is our opinion. Of course, don’t just take us at our word! Just because we saw it and we think it works doesn’t mean it does, or that it it does in a reproducible way. But it is part of our default level of truth.
Default level of truth
So instead of using the 47 “of course this is just our opinion’s” we had in our first post, we decided we’d just let you know what we’re considering a baseline level of truth for our methodology with this project. The erotic hypnosis community has a long and rich history of translating, transforming, and terraforming together that is the resulting blend of semi-pseudo science pilferings, creativity, and outright horniness. Most of what we are going to tell you as factual is the things that are generally agreed upon as true by the community at large and are not contradicted by our own experiences.
When we say X is true, we mean that if you repeat X in the erotic hypnosis community:
people will generally agree it works in most instances,
that X matches anecdotal evidence either in our practice or in the practice of people we know, or that we encountered in the making of this project, and,
that we have no reason to believe that X is not true.
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Now we know what you might be thinking. We’ve told you repeatedly how little is known factually about hypnosis and also that our opinions often diverge from the sentiment in the erotic hypnosis community.
So here’s what we pledge to do when we’re talkin’ non-facts:
When that is not the level of truth we are giving you, we are committed to be explicit about it.
Sometimes there will be published research about a thing, and we’ll tell you about the impact factors of journals in which that research was published.
Sometimes we will say things that match our experience but that is probably going to call a lot of debate if you repeat it. We will warn you of that too.
Sometimes, we will stumble into one of the Great Debates of our community, and we will strive to give you perspective on each side.
And sometimes we will not resist the temptation to give you total bullshit we just made up because it sounds cool or coherent to us. You’ll get the bullshit. But you’ll know when.
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