The form of evaluation called "does it make sense"

The form of evaluation called "does it make sense" seems to sometimes be substituted for using the scientific method.

And those who do so, seem to believe that "making sense" is equivalent to doing an unbiased truly adequate scientific experiment and observing the result.

Sure, each person needs to make quick decisions in the course of daily life, based on a wide variety of past experiences and knowledge. This seems to condition us to believe that such evaluations are indeed equivalent to the verifiable facts, when something off-the-edge of expectable events is presented to oneself.

Also, sometimes the esteem, the apparent credibility of the source, factors in on the "does it make sense" evaluation.

One way that has some success in getting past these barriers is to arrange to have people actually experiment on themselves in a group setting, and then ask "did it work or not" or "what were the effects that you found."

This approach has had interesting success for gaining some acceptance of a process that "does not make sense" to the average American, a process called "Emotional Freedom Technique" or "EFT" as its easy acronym. It makes no sense that mere tapping on specific points on the face and upper body, while focusing on the memory of some disruptive event, can quickly and permanently convert the disruptive memory into just a plain memory that no longer disrupts the person's life. Makes no sense that such a simple thing could provide such a lasting benefit - might even be called a blessing - for so little effort. It is like the memory of the event clearly remains, but the memory of the disruption is just gone, following the rather rote tapping process. Actually doing the experiment is the only way to enable people to get past the "it does not make sense" barrier for evaluating the technique.

In such an experiment there is the element of "subjectivity" one would expect to influence results. Being open-minded as to what results might happen is not always easy to do.

For example, if someone is presented with a technique that easily and quickly eliminates the stress of an event on a person, if the person has a deep belief in the stored pain of punishment for wrongdoing is required to force people to be a good citizen, such a stress-removal process might be seen as opening a Pandora's Box allowing all those bad people to be bad again; thus would be seen as quite a risk, and could influence any opportunity to make an unbiased evaluation of the experiment even on oneself. Also, if one has a history of punishing others to correct their bad behavior that had been displayed due to acting out the disruptive stress stored in them, it would put a burden of wrongdoing upon the person who has been judge-jury-punisher for so long; and be seen as the actual wrongdoer instead of the esteemed authority: possibly an intolerable situation, and thus would seek to keep things just like they were, forget this EFT stuff.

Is the stored stress of pain really necessary to prevent people from being assaultive to others? And, how much of assaultive behavior is triggered by stored stress of past pain in similar circumstances - it is said that people who are abusive, were themselves abused; monkey-see-monkey-do kind of phenomena. What would happen if all those little traumas of being abused were erased as if never were, with only the plain memories left intact? Or are bullies and the greedy powerful simply incorrigible and have to be controlled by fear of more painful trauma being imparted to them to get them to fit into society? - Really?

Another interesting phenomena regarding doing "EFT" is that it works so well that the person being tapped on in the experiment tends to not remember the stress that had long been there before, but only remembers the experience as just a cause-&-effect learning experience, so what; it works so thoroughly. The "Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle" - that is, in the process of observing something, you change that which was observed - is quite strong in these experiments; that which was there before is no longer there to measure, as if the nature of reality itself has changed for the person. Third party onlookers can observe the before and after results, however.

Sometimes the effort to set aside the form of evaluation called "does it make sense," and then doing the scientific method thing, doing an unbiased truly adequate scientific experiment and observing the actual result, can be outstandingly rewarding to one's life.