What does this mean? The excellent results of antibiotics could be the result of psychology? CPUs? Lasers? Satellite imagery?

I suspect that the person you're responding to is critical of psychology, so they read my comment to imply something contrary to their very strange worldview and responded accordingly.

I could, of course, be very wrong. That's just my best guess as to what they meant.

Well that isn't self-serving at all.

You gave us only eight words.

I did my best to parse them into something meaningful and relevant, expending much more thought and effort than a few random words from an internet stranger are usually worth.

If I failed and you meant something else with those eight words, my biggest failure won't have been misinterpreting you, it will have been in responding at all to someone who writes like they're on Twitter when they're not.

This isn't the place for that.

That's not my interpretation. You seem to be claiming magic was only successful when it was underpinned by psychology, right? swayvil seems to think magic works because it is a form of technology. That's not to disparage psychology, it's to commend magic, which existed before psychology as a concept. Magic is not Psychology. Psychology is Magic (with a more respectable and hopefully evidence based rebrand).

My view is that if you don't know why or whether some strategy works then the scientific method should be used to test whether the phenomena in question is real or not and gain a better understanding of it if it is. To do otherwise is ignorant. But how to come up with scientific hypotheses in the first place?

And applied psychology is a pretty handy tool to know. But dressing it up in superstition is superfluous, dishonest and counter-productive.

> You seem to be claiming magic was only successful when it was underpinned by psychology, right?

I was not. The article stated that psychology was sometimes used to great success, and I was pointing out to those who hadn't finished the article (as it seemed to me, many had not) that it was already mentioned as one possible explanation.

Antibiotics are compounds that if imbibed can cure the sick (under some circumstances). They would be considered magical in the middle ages when bacteria were not known of. Now we have better descriptions of nature. Paracetamol/Tylenol was discovered as a derivative of Willow bark, which was chewed as a cunning prescription for toothache.

Can you claim you know why the pills you take work or don't work? Many popular antidepressants in use today wouldn't get a licence now from a lack of provable efficacy and the placebo effect. How is that different?