Because Psions are also manipulating the world through mana, but are deluding themselves by thinking that that are not, and merely using their minds. Since they are placing a self-imposed limitation on their abilities, this should be reflected somehow.

By outside influence, I am refering to the existance of magic and mana. Both Hermetics and Shamans acknowledge that magic and mana exist, though they manipulate it in different ways. Psionics refuse to admit the existance of magic and mana, or if they do accept it, refuse to acknowledge that what they do has any relationship to it. In that way, they are limiting themselves to only what they perceive to be possible using the power of their minds alone.

Shamans do not think that their Totem is doing the actual magic. They may believe that their Totems influence the manner in which their magic operates, but the Shamans are still the ones that are performing the actual magic.

As for being penalized, well they are. Some things are harder for certain Shamans to do, just as some are easier. Some Shamans are even proscribed from using magic, or even performing other activities, in certain ways.

Of course, this depends on each particular Hermetic mage. There are some Hermetics who literally think of magic like numbers (Pythagoreans), and some Hermetics who are like violinists (People who recognize the reproducible scientific principles behind their production of "music", but see their "performance" of magic as a very real and personal artform). The majority of Hermetics will see magic as a science, and there are some who are wrapped up in the trappings of academia (Renewed Hermeticism... compare to the modern lab researcher), some who believe in the traditions and empiric science of old (Classic Hermeticism... compare to Aristotleans and the observational science done by field workers), and some who are more "open-minded" scientists (Unified Magic Theory... compare to Steven Jay Gould, anthropologists, and other philosophy-heavy fields).

As far as shamans, I'm sure there are many that believe that magic is reproducible, that repeated "experiments" will produce the same results, and that science as a whole is valid. Not all shamans are stuck with a "personal relationship with Jesus Chr... erm, I mean, Owl." Many choose religious trappings, some choose an adversarial "Id-Ego-Superego"-type relationship with their totem (the totem is both the angel AND devil on the shoulder), some even think of their totems as simply ineffable nebulous beings that are far away and have somehow granted them powers, and that's as far as their relationship goes.

There's a lot of leeway when determining how magic and the character interrelate, and it is a major part of an Awakened character's development.

Not all uses of the mind are equal. A martial artist uses their mind to control their limbs to hurt people in much more efficient and deadly ways than an average untrained person does--even one who has gotten into a number of fights. Someone who meditates is typically better at calming their mind and body than someone who just takes a deep breath and repeats "everything's okay!" to themselves as fast as they can. The crawl is a more efficient stroke for swimming than the butterfly. Similarly, the psionic moniker doesn't work as well, apparently, for getting the brain to do whatever it needs to do to cause a spell to be cast.

Keep in mind that much of what is "seen" in the sourcebooks is what the average Shadowrunner on the streets see. They don't see the theoretical hermetic mundanes who do groundbreaking work in theory that that they can neither observe nor experiment on. They don't see the academic mages who write papers on "Effects of Sorcery Manipulation on a field of Gravitons: Initial trials using the Hardinger method" or for a more canon title, "On the Relationship between Mana and Nuclear Energy". Also, the Paradigm section in SOTA:2064 deals with all of the factions of Hermeticism that are NOT Renewed Hermeticism... the Aristotleans, the empiric observers, the math whizzes, etc. The whackos, basically (although they are whackos with Big Guns™).

The classic "egghead" mage (not to be confused with Classical Hermeticism) is someone who writes grant proposals to the government or corporation, repeats experiments on some arcane (both meanings) hypothesis, types up an abstract, cites his sources and methods, and then publishes his results, hoping to get a nod from a prominent journal. This is also the hermetic that DOESN'T get a spotlight in Shadowrun, simply because it's so plainly divorced from the style of roleplaying that Shadowrun offers. We don't play roleplaying games to be nuclear physicists... we play roleplaying games to shoot high-powered weapons and drop nukes.

This is actually explicitly stated that way in SOTA:2064, in the form of Renewed Hermeticism (the paradigm that the majority of North America and corporations practice). But the paradigm section shows all of the paths that are NOT Renewed Hermeticism.

Ah, but the ones you describe *are* scientists; they're just not Newton-era, Age of Reason scientists. They follow the "science" of the ancient Greeks--thus why they call themselves "Hermetics" which is derived from the greek god Hermes--which is closer to the first half of the "modern" scientific method. Basically they observe and make hypotheses, but they don't make it to the experiment stage and thus don't try to conclusively prove anything. It's a really strange and disjointed concept to the real scientists of the world, but they honestly believe that the act alone of observing something determines it's validity.

Anyway, I'm not suggesting that "real" magical scientists don't exist. I'm just saying that there is room in the magical community for both kinds of hermetics: the observational kind and the scientific kind. You probably just hear about the observational kind more because they're doing the stupid flashy stuff while the scientific ones are doing all the important research and development of new metamagics/theories.

Heh, and you don't think scientists squabble? Take a look at Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr in the 1920s-30s. They spent over a decade and a half bickering over the "correct" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Bohr championed the famed Copenhagen Interpretation, which you are no doubt familiar with being a scientist, while Einstein detested it and refused to accept the idea, even though he couldn't come up with a counter theory (one of their debates is where his famed quote, "God does not play dice with the universe!" came from.)

So yes, scientists do bicker. Not so much over the facts, but over how those facts are interpreted. (Edit): The problem, essentially, is when scientists leave the realm of readily confirmable facts they start getting into theory, and thus philosophy, and thus Holy Wars. And I'd hazard a guess that it's the same way in SotA '64, though I've not read the book yet. I'd really like to though; those Pythagoreans sound fascinating.

It sounds to me like you're saying that the difference between psionicists and other mages is trainning, that a psion is not as good a spellcaster as a mage in the same way that a random mook on the street is not as good a fighter as a trainned martial artist. That seems to ring hollow to me, because psions have the same access to Magical Skill ranks as other magic characters. Indeed, the only difference between psions and other magic users is that they believe that their powers comes from them excersizing their will on the world, as opposed to, um, their Totem working through them? But that doesn't make sense, because hermetics don't generally acknolage totems either. In fact, if you actually read some of the drivel the modern-day hermetics spew out, you see there are lots of references to "higher consciousness" and philosophies of transcendence.

Urgh. The last thing that would benefit SR's magic system is to introduce a Wizard/Cleric divide between hermetics and shamans, *especially* one where hermetics are automatically the blat spellcasters while shamans have to be healing/protective focussed.

Let's go through all the ways in which this is non-scientific. Firstly, there's no mention of empirical testing and a search for universal truth. Second, it's a method of gaining magical power, not a method of explaining the nature of magic (although it incidentally is supposed to do that). Third, these theories are contradictory and yet still work for the mages who believe them. And fourth, it's all cultural anyway, just like with shamen.

This doesn't look like much of a science to me. Maybe that's what the author thought sciences look like, but if so, I contend that they thought wrong

hahnsoo, the analogy with medicine isn't a bad one. First, I would point out that medicine is not a science, but rather a trade. Medicine uses the results of science, but very often all it does it remember that something works without knowing why. There may be lots of theories about it (all of them probably wrong, since there are many ways to be wrong and not many ways to be correct), but the bottom line is that it works, and that's why it's done. For example, the mechanism by which SSRIs impact depression is a great mystery.

But Hermetics seem to have even less agreement on what causes what than doctors do, and anyway, doctors aren't scientists. So I reiterate that I would like, eventually, to see the supposedly scientific Hermetic mages actually acting scientific. There are people who are researching the long-term changes in the brain as a result of exposure to SSRIs, in order to collapse all the theories into one correct explanation. But if magic works because mages have all these wrong theories, then the scientific thing to do is to study the relationship between belief in a theory and invocation of magic--and come up with a correct explanation that encompasses all of that.

That's what the real goal is, scientifically--understanding. The goal is not to come up with your own little theory to let you use magic better. It's to explain how incorrect theories assist with magical ability, and how connections with totems do, and so on. (As well as exploring the boundaries of what is possible, classifying what effects spells have, and so on.) And I've not seen that adequately addressed in any published SR material--they just say it's science and then demonstrate why it's not.

Healing is the trade. Medicine in the science. You can do Medicine without doing an ounce of healing (think of the Nazi War Crimes... medicine without healing, there). You can practice healing without any Medicine, if you so choose. It's a profession, but it's definitely science. To say otherwise implies a lack of understanding of Modern Medicine and the way medicine is taught in the US.

I hate to say outright "You're wrong," believe me. But read anything on PubMed lately, and you'll see over a billion examples of Medical science. Doctors ARE scientists, some of them primarily academic scientists, some of them purely empirical scientists who work on a case-by-case (in this case, patients) basis, some of them are more healers than scientists but still have been trained in the basic theories of medicine. I will admit, your average family physician doesn't care a lick about the science behind it, but if you give them a journal article on the Framingham study of Heart treatment, they can decipher it and understand the science.

The average Hermetic mage in the context of Shadowrunning is NOT a practicing scientist, this is true, and the material written on them reflects that. But Renewed Hermeticism is science applied to magic, even if a Hermetic Mage who is blasting folks with manaballs isn't exactly applying the scientific method in all that he lives and breathes.

The majority of the people doing this research are doctors. About half of them are neurologists, and the other half are either MD PhD neurologist/neuroscience or other non-medicine fields. And try to tell me that you can get all your information about SSRIs without the help of a pathologist, who is also an MD.

Okay, that second part--exploring boundries--is definately something mages do; in fact the whole process of Severing from SotA '63 comes from just that, studying boundries. But the first one... how do you even start with that? You're basically trying to quantify belief, scientifically analyze religion. How do you experiment with someone's belief system, change it under controlled laboratory conditions? Is that possible?

Most scientists I know--or at least people *I* think of as scientists--don't spend all or even a significant part of their time making any kind of search for universal truth. Most of them are just trying to publish their next paper, to make that little baby step to expand the body of knowledge on a given subject.

You seem to have a very high-minded and narrow view of what science is, which I find slightly disturbing considering your claim of being a scientist. Personally, I'm an analytical inorganic chemist. I deal with nitty-gritty details on the analysis and classification side of things all day long, and tend to stay away from the larger all-encompasing grand unifying theories, which I leave to the crackpot physicists who wear ties and sandals when giving lectures and the even weirder philosophers who spend their non-lecturing time being one of the many crazies that mumble incoherently to themselves near Sather Gate (UC Berkeley grad here ). It makes sense to me that many hermetics are spending less of their time trying to quantify the magic population's religious beliefs regarding their magic in some attempt to find some "Religion of Maximum Magical Potency", and are focusing more on what can actually be done with magic. But then, maybe I'm not a scientist either, so maybe I don't count.

I'm just a chemist.

you're misinterpreting. ell isn't talking about some kind of quasi-mystical Universal Truth. she's talking about facts and theories which are universally true, as far as can be tested. when you write those papers, do you just throw in whatever results you got the first time you ran experiment X, or do you try experiment X in circumstances A, B, and C to test your hypotheses? if you're doing the latter, you're looking for universal truths.

as for how you study religion and belief, i have no idea. but the fact is, it's only ever been tried once (UMT), and even then, the results aren't universally applicable--a dog shaman can't switch to UMT and summon elementals. regardless, hermetics can't really be classified as scientists of magic, because none of them really seem to be trying to figure out where magic comes from or how it works--they seem satisfied figuring out how to perform their own style of magic, without much delving into the underlying theory.

Doctors get scientific training, certainly. There are practicing doctors who simultaneously do science (e.g. who are involved in clinical trials), and there are M.D.s who do research and don't practice medicine. Treating patients is, for the most part, not particularly scientific unless you consider any place where you apply science in order to achieve an effect to be a science. The more science doctors use in their treatment of patients the better, in my opinion, since they'll get better results.

The dictionary definition (Random House Unabridged) of science starts with:

I am not considering definition (7) here when deciding whether or not to grant that Hermeticism as typically defined is scientific in nature, because then you include things like golf and fly fishing and so on (and probably shamanism, in the sixth world, too).

I am using the narrower definition encompassed by (1) and (2), and there is an awful lot of medicine that doesn't quite count. I was going to give some examples, but this is getting too long, and I'm not really concerned with medicine but rather with Hermeticism. (For what it's worth, Random House defines the medicine as "the art or science of restoring or preserving health", which is perfectly okay by me--my point is that there is a lot of art to it, and as an analogy to Hermeticism, we've seen in published works a lot of the art side, and not much to do with the science side.)

Hermeticism fails to live up to this description as presented because it doesn't actually deal with facts or truths, at least as presented so far. It deals with what-works-for-me. That can be systematically arranged, but it's not about the operation of general laws because other Hermetics (let alone shamans) can operate with contradictory laws and they still get results. They also seem a little short on the observation and experimentation aspects of science, and rather more like philosphers when they try to come up with explanations (i.e. think about a problem a lot rather than do a bunch of experiments).

Likewise, astrology fails to live up to this prediction because it doesn't appear to deal with facts or truths and is pretty short on experimental verification. Hermeticism is like astrology in its structure and detail and theories--except it does work, very obviously, even though it's not working for the reasons that the practitioners think (because they believe contradictory reasons). Note that modern astrology fits the SotA:63 description you quoted pretty well, except for the "research the laws of magic" part. But again, for every half-sentence that makes it look like there's science going on here, there are four that make it look like there isn't. ("There are nearly as many versions of these theories as there are mages.")

Eyeless, by "universal truth" I simply mean something that is not relative to belief. As a chemist, do you find that stuff works for you but not for anyone else who believes different things about chemistry? Maybe TMF is a good solvent for you, because you have a certain set of beliefs about solubility, but ethanol is better for your coworker because she has different beliefs.

I don't think so!

Hm, mfb seems to have done a better job explaining my point than I have. Oops.

It is hard to study religion scientifically because religion isn't supposed to do anything. You don't disqualify something as a religion because its adherants can't fly, or somesuch. However, in SR, magic does do something, and that makes it eminently more testable.

For example: you can't heal an injury more than once. Why not? What counts as healing? Are there any exceptions? What counts as an injury? Does what counts as an injury and healing vary between practitioners? To what state is one returned when one "heals"? In the aftermath of cosmetic surgery, is the surgery undone, or does the healing take place like normal? Etc. etc. etc..

These are all things that can be addressed experimentally in a way that is essentially independent of magical tradition. I'm sure there are Hermetics (and for that matter, shamen!) in the Sixth World who are doing just such experiments and publishing papers on the results.

But I haven't actually seen much about these experiments. Can you derive magical power from them? Who knows--the topic isn't really addressed. Can you wield magical power in an analytical tradition without having to believe a bunch of untested theories that contradict other people's theories? That topic isn't addressed either.

So Hermetics seem to me as though they get their power from philosophy (in the sense that their ideas are internally consistent but not necessarily strongly grounded in reality), not from science. Maybe there is a branch of Hermeticism that actually uses science, but then again, maybe not. I've not found any source material that says one way or another.

So, as I said, I'd like to see these topics addressed--Street Magic or SR4 would be fine places to do it--but only if the authors have enough familiarity with the nature and practice of science, because I think the authors have tried before, but have not deeply understood the distinction between scientific knowledge and other sources of knowledge and types of thinking.

That happens to be true in chemistry, but only because chemicals have an existence independent of my perception. Magic is different. Magic is in fact impossible to divorce from the thoughts and perceptions of those who practise it; magic literally does not exist in a vacum. This is actually why magic is difficult to analyze experimentally; you can't yet decouple magic from the humans who practise it. Thus any truly important studies into the nature of magic must necessarily deal with studying (meta)humans as individuals or groups. You end up with the same fundamental problem with experimentation that the behavioral psychologists do, whom I note you also don't believe are scientists probably for this very reason.

Again, I still think you're being too strict as to what constitutes a "pure" scientist. To ask a rhetorical question. what religion to you most identify with? If you actually have an answer to that question, including "atheist", "agnostic", or "I don't know," then you're not a scientist, at least not by the strict definition you seem to be giving. The ability to even contemplate religion as it currently stands is impossible, because the factual, purely experimental evidence in favor of any religion does not and cannot exist. Every time you go beyond pure, experimentally-proven facts you are no longer dealing with science, but rather philosophy, and at that point the "truth" becomes far less about what can be proven, but becomes what works for you personally.

Hermetics are (meta)human, just like everyone else. They will have personal philosophies that go beyond what can be scientifically proven, simpley because the body of knowledge does not--and I believe cannot, though I'm not sure if Godel's Incompleteness Theorm applies to science--describe the whole universe.

Besides, who wants to read a sciencific journal about magic? How many articles have you read from the academic journal Science, for instance? Do you want them to reprint stuff like that into your game books?

Barring of course, free spirits and critters with the sorcery power. The catch being, the scientific community's wavering stance on whether or not spirits are just the result of magically active beings subconiously imprinting their psyche on the manascape. The other catch being, would you really trust what a dragon has to tell you about the nature of magic?

Again, I have to say that you don't understand Modern Medicine. Think of each patient as a different hypothesis, a different experiment. Doctors are taught to analyze the information that they are given, and then seek the best scientific evidence for the best course of action. This may involve lab tests, which prove or disprove the hypothesis (all diagnoses are temporary hypotheses). This may involve reading in the literature, to determine effective treatments (and each treatment is a hypothesis followed by an experiment). While the actual "healing" part is due to a variety of factors, the diagnosis and treatment of patients in Modern Medicine is intensely scientific. About two-thirds of the doctors you meet in hospitals are involved in one or more clinical trials, along with about one-third of general practitioners. Not to mention that Medicine is peer-reviewed (doctors discuss and argue ALL the time, and seek consultation with more knowledgable sources on a fairly regular basis), more so than any other scientific field. Medicine is quite reproducible, and falls under your definition here:

In Modern Medicine, you gain knowledge by observing (history and physical), then experimenting (one or more lab tests, radiology tests, etc.), then through your conclusions you go about the best course of action.

However:

This is not always true. Patients generally don't care about science. They care about healing. The expectations that a patient has is just as important when it comes to healing as the science behind the method of healing (or no science at all, depending on what the patient wants). I can explain to a patient why he/she needs to quit smoking, get a flu shot, etc. That doesn't mean they will do it. I can give them antibiotics to cure their strep throat... but that won't help them if their "real" problem is something else.

this is exactly what the point of contention is. you--and, apparently, the hermetic community in SR--say this and accept it as fact without ever studying it or testing it. how would you go about testing it? no idea. the point is, it apparently hasn't even ever been tried.

the point isn't that "real" scientists don't have pet theories. the point is that no one ever tests those pet theories to see if they might actually be true or not--it's simply accepted that, because they work, they must be true. and that isn't true. i can believe that Ctrl+Alt+Del forms a holy trinity which must be brought closer to the ground in order to perform their magic Reset Computer spell, and i can even "prove" that theory over and over again by pressing those three buttons. that doesn't make me right, and it certainly doesn't make me a scientist. in SR, though, it apparently does, because that's exactly what hermetics do.

But those subjective truths are based upon communities and standing bodies of knowledge. You cannot learn spells or increase your magic skills as a hermetic without a current standing body of knowledge (hermetic libraries) or extensive experimentation. A hermetic can still use a derivative body of work (at a penalty, according to MitS)... it's not "what works best for them" but it can still work for them if it works for someone else.

Really, it sounds like people are making hermetics out to be the example of scientific individualism (i.e. Diane Fossey out in the woods with the chimpanzee, a lone investigator observing and recording). The reality supported by the text is that they read, they argue, and work together (or against each other) as a collective, just like scientists today, with standardized standing bodies of knowledge which becomes augmented through research and experimentation. While each person may be reinforcing personal beliefs in the process, they still take a scholarly point of view in developing their own magic.

From MitS p17

The problem with this statement is that it's not the whole truth, applied to magical activity from start to finish. Certainly, at the casting/summoning level, magic cannot be divorced from the perceptions of the mage in question. After that has occurred, however, and the spell is active, or the spirit is running about causing mayhem, the effects generated are certainly no longer contingent solely on the perceptions of the magician who generated them.

You can't choose to "disbelieve" a fireball that a mage just tossed at you, even though the mage believes he was granted the power to shoot fire by the terrible metal hand in the sky, while you know that no such hand exists, as we are all nodes in a universal distributed consciousness named Bob. Likewise, you don't believe in spirits. Try and tell that to the earth elemental that just flipped over your car and is now intent on crushing your squishy hu-man body in its rocky folds.

If it generates a specific physical effect, be it sudden increases in heat(fireball), ionization and electric discharge(lightning bolt), sudden bursts of kinetic energy(clout), sustained kinetic energy(levitate), or an area with the capability to negate energy(physical barrier), then it should be able to be researched.

If, in Shadowrun, magic is taught in schools, then it's generally apparent that there is such a thing, in Shadowrun, as reproducible magical results, measurable degrees of success (Johnny's levitate spell is A+ work, but Carmen needs to get hers up past C- if she doesn't want to repeat this course!), and other scientific findings that are the basis for reliable instructional material on the subject. Ever tried to write a paper from a point of view that differs from the professor's? If magic was solely the realm of one's own world-view, and immutable to things like facts and formulae, no one would be able to pass a course where a professor expected certain spells or rituals to be identical to, in practice and in result, ones that they themselves had developed or learned.

Now, I think that magic can be the result of hand-waving and crystals and belief. I just think that it can, just as validly, be approached, researched, and applied from a scientific perspective as much as a spiritual one. I don't like the way I saw shamans (and magicians with decidedly shaman-like views) being basically affirmed as "correct", and hermetics (and others who employed scientific reasoning) being portrayed as "wrong", in prior materials. The moment there is an absolute right way of doing things, it'll be the rare character who does it any way different.

Plus, if we're gonna just outright guess who's doing it right, assuming there is a provable right way of doing it, look at the Righ Path-Follower. It seems that, just based on their capabilities, they're probably a notch or two closer to the enigmatic true nature of magic than any hermetic, shaman, or vodoun.

Be careful with words like "never" "no-one" and other broad generalizations. I'm sure there are whole teams of eggheads trying to crack the "universal magic theory". Hell, the whole of Renewed Hermeticism was an attempt by two prestigious Hermetics to quantify why magic works, and the majority of mages in North America base their work on those original assumptions. And one of those Hermetics moved on to form the foundation of Unified Magic Theory.

Well, there's also the reality that medicine, in the field, is as much art as science. See psychiatry and pediatrics for two examples in point.

Also, I'm not sure the 'scientific' point here is science as such...But rather that Hermetics use the scientific method.

Pediatrics is veterinary medicine for the kids and psychiatry for the adults. *grin*

Actually, pediatrics, like all other medical fields, has its share of academic scientists, empirical scientists, and general practitioners. Children are far more predictable than adults when it comes to pediatric psychiatry and developmental pediatrics, for example. Pediatric Oncology is one specialty which engages both in cutting-edge experimental research and in standardized care (treatment for leukemia falls into pretty rigid protocols and doesn't deviate, with excellent results).

I'm going to go back to the example of Einstein and Bohr, because it's a close parallel to what we are talking about. Reference, though you are certainly more than capable of coming up with your own by just Googling. Basically, Bohr (and later Heisenberg) backed the Copenhagen Interpretation, which states that at a fundamental level atoms only exist purely in a statistical sense until they are decoupled (observed). Einstein and Schrödinger had a different view, that particles had an existence independent of the observer, and that the uncertainty principle and the like arose from the fundamental incompleteness of the ability to observe things at a precise level. Neither side relented during their lifetimes, and the debate raged for decades over whose view was more "right."

So, we have four scientists believing in two different theories about something fundamental to the understanding of our universe. All of them made significant contributions to the body of scientific knowledge during their lifetimes, but according to your views either some or all of them are not scientists because they hold contradictory views that they champoined at the exclusion of the opposite view.

Yeah, but for all that...I'll grab psychology/psychiatry.

There may be standards of care, medications that fill a role in the "toolbox", the DSM-IV (when's DSM-V due, anybody know?), etc.

But it's still very, very unique. There's still a lot of creativity required. (Mostly because the patients can be so messed up.)

Oncology, maybe not. Tumors react in fairly standard ways.

But oncology is not a normal discipline, IMHO.

Re pediatric psych: I'd seriously doubt that it's that predictable. A week on a pediatric psych unit should cure anybody of the notion.

As a scientist, my answer to that question is that I have insufficient evidence to form a solid hypothesis about most religions, although I note that there exist claims in many religions that are demonstrably untrue if taken at face value. However, religions apparently do not intend for all their claims to be taken at face value, and thus I can't say much more.

My personal views are less tentative than that, of course, but if I have been sloppy about conflating a scientist with science, let me retract that. Scientists are people who apply the scientific method and the findings of science as a primary tool in their job. However, they apply a lot of other things as well, especially outside of their area of research.

My claim was intended to be that Hermeticism is not portrayed as a typical science in SR materials, and that I am sure many of them act like scientists with respect to their magic, but the details are left out, and there's a large amount of apparently conflicting material put in.

(And just for the record, I do think some behavioral psychiatrists have experiments that are well enough controlled and free enough from presumptive bias for the work to be called science without being misleading. It's hard to do, though. There are some pretty neat findings, too, about what leads to stable marriages, the best way to compensate for auditory comprehension problems, and so on. The grand unifying models of maturation of mental state, e.g. by Kegan, are possibly inspired by a little science, but massively overreach to the point of being nonscientific and almost useless for a basis for scientific inquiry.)

I'm not sure why this is relevant, but well over a hundred from Science, but probably not more than a thousand (plus a similar number from Nature, PNAS, various IEEE proceedings, etc.). And no, I don't want the actual articles in the game text, but something akin to part of a Scientific American article on a scientifically interesting part of thaumaturgy would be nice as flavor, and I'd like to have a better idea of what it is that Hermetics actually do that is supposedly scientific. From flavor text, the legal profession is probably a better model for what most Hermetics do.

And I don't consider their disagreement to be a scientific one, actually. My understanding is that they adopted their positions more out of personal taste, coolness factor, and philosophical discomfort with the alternative than on the basis of any evidence. After all, if there was evidence that was relevant (i.e. if the answer actually matters to us on a practical level), the dispute would have been resolved a long time ago.

I guess you have different doctors than I have, and know different doctors than I do. The doctors I respect most do what you described when then can--but given our very limited knowledge of biology, it's hard to get far except with the most common conditions. Then practitioners are to fall back on experience, empathy, common sense, and so on--and this, too, is part of medicine. Take case studies, for example--there'd be no need for those if medicine could adequately be only a science.

Anyway, I'm happy to grant that the academic, scientific part of medicine is a science, and I think this has gone far enough off track to be irrelevant to the discussion of magic, unless you contend that medicine is a science and yet multiple different treatments work for contradictory reasons based upon the beliefs of the doctors.

Really? Then why haven't Hermetics outpaced shamen (or why aren't they gaining on them)? Or, conversely, why aren't shamen massively ahead, since they don't need to bother with this growing body of knowledge to get the same results?

Maybe you're saying that hermetic libraries' ratings are continually growing while shamanic lodges are fixed in rating?

Our (as in all scientists) knowledge of biology is hardly rudimentary, and human physiology is well-known at many levels. While we are only just beginning to unlock the secrets of the human brain and DNA, the knowledge is progressing by leaps and bounds, and much of that research is done by doctors, both academics and clinicians. Most of it is not practical for everyday practice, much like quantum physics is often not helpful for engineering, but it's leading in that direction. Most of the barriers to health care are not due to knowledge, but instead due to social and cultural factors.

Case studies are useful as examples for teaching (this is what a typical heart attack patient looks like), and for spreading the word on interesting findings (treating, say, a multiple nailgun wound to the head or separating conjoined twins). But this isn't limited to just the medical field... all fields of science have examples of "case studies".

It sounds to me like your experience of doctors is based on your perspective as a patient rather than as an academic within the field, whereas my experience is working and learning within the field. Obviously we both have different experiences, but I believe mine to be more valid due to my training and study. I'm not trying to discount what you are saying, but at the same time, it sounds too narrow-minded and too generalized to be an accurate portrayal of modern medicine. You have your own personal observation, but there's a lot of evidence that:
1) Medicine is studied and applied as a science
2) The "art of healing" is more than just the study of medicine (the science)

To extend my analogy, "the art of healing" is much like the "art of Magic". Hermeticism is like Modern Medicine (and with it, all the pseudoscientific quacks, fringe schools, and niche schools). Shamanism is like Alternative/Western Medicine or mysticism-based medicine. Both provide the service of Magic (or in the analogy "the service of healing"), but through very different mindsets. Each thinks the other school is baloney, but there is evidence that both work.

In a way, the mindset of the patient is exactly how typical Shadowrunners would see Magic and Hermeticism. They "know" that magical research is being done. But they are so far removed from it that all they see from their personal experiences are fireballs and fireworks. Shadowrun, the RPG, focuses on the glitzy and practical applications of magic (as a tool and weapon), and rightly so.

If you use "SOTA" rules (Shadowrun Companion, p86), then your libraries could very well go out of date as the body of knowledge grows (akin to using out of date textbooks and old journal articles). While everyone else is outpacing you, your hermetic library ratings fall behind. Shamanic ratings stay the same presumably because totems "update to SOTA" automatically (the same "reason" why otaku don't have to "pay" SOTA costs), but they still have to pay for their Magic Background knowledge skill costs (probably because it covers all kinds of Magic, Shamanic or Hermetic).

I spent a month on a pediatric psych unit, with two very good pediatric psychiatrists and one medical psychologist. Does that count? It was a lifechanging experience, to be sure, and I learned a lot.

Very few hospitals have active "pediatric psych units" anymore. The whole "psych unit" paradigm fell into disfavor in the 80s during the Reagan administration.

Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death following heart disease. I'd say it's a normal discipline of medicine. Oncology is a subject that every doctor needs to learn, at least at a rudimentary level.

you're still way, way missing the point. the point is that everybody has a different theory about how magic works, and all of them are equally viable. and nobody's studying anything but their own theories. i bet Einstein was more than passingly familiar with what Bohr had to say on the subject. find me a hermetic that knows the first thing about what a shaman of dog believes.

I think the average hermetic could quote two or three different sources, go to the Matrix and find 20 more, and look up several more sources on his libraries. Then he'd be able to give you a full 10 page report on the various different theories and conclusions made by anthropologists, thaumaturgists, various different schools of hermetic thought, and interviews with Dog Shamans. He'd know the esoterica about the subject, but he probably won't know the exact specific "feeling" a shaman gets with his subjective personal relationship with his totem.

From the previously quoted section on Hermetic Tradition:

and

What is research, if not experimenting and looking up known sources? That's what a hermetic does. That's what defines the hermetic tradition... you sit in a room and read books all day to learn what you need to know. If someone presents a hermetic with a magical question, he doesn't say "Dog says this..." or "Let me consult the spirits" or "My gut reaction is this..." The first thing he will do is "Let me look it up. I think it's this, but I'll have to check with my sources."

I will also note that although a hermetic cannot cast magic in the shamanic tradition, obviously, they can cast magic using OTHER hermetic paradigms. Subscribing to a particular particular, under the rules, does not mean that you are forever barred from using the magical research of other paradigms... it just means that you get smaller benefits from using other paradigms. A Renewed Hermetic can use a Pythagorean spell formulae, at a penalty to his Sorcery test to learn the spell.

Heh. 10 days as a patient...Although you're right, it was a crisis unit.

I think what I was trying to say is that psychiatry defies standardization...

This is completely off topic, but I think you'll find on reflection that this statement is inaccurate.

If it is accurate, maybe you can tell me (or point me to resources that tell me) how to reverse genetic changes that lead to metastasis and loss of cell cycle checkpoint control in lymphomas. Maybe you can at least tell me what the relevant genetic changes are. Maybe you can tell me the key chemical reactions behind the formation of artherosclerotic plaques and suggest a way to alter the rate constants of said reactions. Maybe you can tell me why I don't have an autoimmune reaction to myself, and figure out how to fix diabetics who do. Maybe you can tell me the process of formation of beta amyloid plaques and the mechanism by which these plaques cause damage (or is it the soluble multimers that cause damage?). Maybe you can explain the signaling cascade and growth factors responsible for promoting cartilage growth in young joints and tell me how to reverse the loss of such growth in the joints of older people.

Or maybe not. Maybe we know far less than we need to to really improve health care.

One of the most important aspects of practicing science is to know what you don't know.

I don't remember hearing about any, and I've asked biologist and physicist friends of mine and they can't recall having a case study either. (An ecologist friend affirms the presence of case studies in his field of research.)

What are the controls for a case study?

I think we're arguing semantics here, where I'm simply defining medicine more broadly than you are and pointing out that only part of it is scientific, while you are saying that anything that is not scientific is also not part of the study of medicine. However, I'll probe the issue by asking two questions. Would you say that residency is or is not part of the study of medicine? What does it mean when you say that someone needs medical treatment?

Um, no, that is research in the humanities and social sciences. Research in the natural sciences mostly involves doing experiments (since that process takes so much longer than looking things up).

Also, can you distinguish this mode of research from the practice of law? (Keep in mind that lawyers get to try arguments out on judges.)

that doesn't mean much, when all sources--even conflicting sources--are valid.

Speaking from close experience, I will say that I agree with Ellery 100% that your hypothetical is exactly the same ideas as the research methodology for the study and practice of law and certain social sciences (e.g., political science) and has virtually nothing in common with scientific research or the scientific method. It's a "best guess" research methodology because in those instances, people can and have said a lot of things, and nothing is ever "right" even when it's handed down from on high by a final authority because the field is in itself incredibly nebulous, prone to gross overgeneralizations, filled with an infinite number of differing theories, fact patterns, learned authorities, and so on.

All of this is more in line with what you just wrote, and is as far as I'm concerned, and has nothing whatsoever to do with scientific research and methodology. There is no scientific method for the law anymore than there is in your hypothetical. However, given the fact that there are immutable laws in magic borne out through the mechanics that you with always get X result if you cast Y spell with Z force where X is the amount of burden and stress measured as Drain for a spell with the formula of X and a power threshold of Z. Whether it always hurts someone the same is a separate variable, and is measured as a separate variable in the same way as if I hit you with a baseball bat twice at two different times under optimal (i.e., unhurt) conditions on your part, and then measure whether you absorb the impact the same way (since in both cases they are measured in Stun damage) and bruise the same way for the same duration because you might have taken the second hit better than the first.

To make an example more cogent, your Hermetic can read the same material and come to multiple conclusions, just as his Hermetic colleague can. Were the matter taken to an arbitor, they may see it one way or another based on differing philosophical arguments argued using the same fact patterns and source material based on any manner of reasons based on varying factors from one's ability to successfully read and argue the material to simple capriciousness and bias on the third person's part because he's a Pythagorean and one of the parties is, but his opponent is a Theurgist. Speaking as someone who is judging two parties' briefs which utilize the same fact patterns and 90% of the same research, it is perfectly understandable given that one party made an excellent argument, and the other's was muddled and off-point. However, both perspectives work for them and a decision could be made going two completely different ways within the same field even if you read all the research because inherent bias will sway a person one way or another.

The research is fine, but the application is completely different. And at no time, and in now way, can this process be considered in any way "scientific." No one is following a scientific method because under the example you proferred, just like the actual circumstances one in my field deals with on a daily basis, there is nothing to actually test which will yield predictable and reproduceable results, which is a hallmark of the scientific method.

Ellery's work was what led me to suggest the creation of two disparate structures in Hermeticism: Hermetic Thaumaturgy, which is founded on the principles of the application of the scientific method to achieve predictable, reproduceable results consistently utilizing the tools of science with regards to magical effects on the physical world (i.e., does an ice sheet spell actually draw water from the air or "make" it?), and at the same time use what primitive observations to determine the effects of magic on the manasphere in a way to determine what is a scientific law with regards to the manasphere (e.g., how much mana is drawn to create a Force 1 elemental) or theories, or utter bafflement until such time as magical instruments (that is, using magic to study mana as we use technology to study science) can be advanced.

The second aspect is Hermetic Mysticism, which lumps together all of these "research" theories and paradigms, be they based in theology, philosophy, (non-clinical) psychology, etc. and which include all of the paradigms in SOTA64 as they are all predicated on the study of belief structures and the manipulation of mana as a force of Will (which, btw, is tied to the fact that the two big magical skills, Sorcery and Conjuring, are linked to Willpower) as opposed to the thorough study and manipulation of mana as a force unto itself without any regard to historical antecedents which were not based upon verifiable observations under clinical conditions.