Magick of Thought

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After posting Why There’s No Published Research on Magick, lots of you wrote in about researchers who had published results but were ridiculed out of their jobs, or with warnings about threatened industries (like big pharma) drowning researchers in legal fees.

It got me thinking about how to publish your magick, and how to avoid the problems those researchers had. And I think I have an answer.

First, what they did wrong: They published the first result they found. The technique was unreliable, hard to test, and not immediately useful. Now, that’s how science normally works — you discover a tiny advance, publish it, and repeat until you develop something really cool. But it won’t work here.

The problem is, publishing magick is less about science than it is about marketing and publicity. You need a genuinely amazing result as the first publication. Something reliable, undeniably obvious, and so useful that people will clamor for the service, creating political pressure to not shut you down. Something you can do out of Africa or Eastern Europe if needed, with medical tourists flying in, so you can build the studies and successes to make it in the US. It needs to be a fully-realized product, not an initial result.

And, before you publish, you ought to have a bunch of fully-realized products. First, that lets you pick the best one for publication — a healing technique that works immediately, rather than one with a 1-month delay, for example. Second, that lets you follow up with more studies, building a stack of successes, rather than a one-off kooky publication. Third, it’s better for rolling the publicity into a successful business.

Comments

Thanks for sending me the pointers to those researchers. Seeing what they did wrong will help me do it right. Any other thoughts?