"Hippy" is an aesthetic, not a specific idea, and an aesthetic can apply to both true ideas and false ideas. This post names the aesthetic and stops there; it doesn't name any specific hippy idea. This creates distance between evaluating the aesthetic, and any specific idea that could be true or false. And if there's nothing to judge as false, then everything is okay, right? The post then provides a supposed reason for objecting to (unspecified things within) the aesthetic: blind demand for a specific sort of rigor, applied inappropriately.

It feels unfair to negatively judge an aesthetic, since aesthetics can be false. So it's tempting to null out the judgement and its associated heuristics.

The problem is, the "hippy" aesthetic includes elements that are genuine red flags for stupid ideas, a historical demographic correlation with groups that invented stupid ideas prolifically, and a collection of jargon corresponding to malformed concepts that will damage your ability to think if you internalize them.

any therapeutic intervention that is now standardized and deployed on mass-scale has once not been backed by scientific evidence.

Yes, which is why, in the ideal case, such as with the polio vaccine, we take great effort to gather that evidence before declaring our therapeutic interventions safe and efficacious.

Some questions we should distinguish here:

1. How confident are you that the thing you're looking into here is going to pay off? (Whatever that means - give you something that lets you reliably improve people's lives more than existing methods?) I get the sense that you're reasonably confident, but I don't think you explicitly say. Gordon's comment talks about "high EV and low probability", so I guess Gordon got a different sense from your writing than I did.

2. How confident should you be that it's going to pay off? (It is well known that people are sometimes poorly calibrated.)

3. How confident should other people be that it's going to pay off? You might have illegible evidence that it's a fruitful field of study, in which case it seems correct for you to be more confident than others. (Analogy: if you're selling a used car that you know is not a lemon, it seems correct for you to be more confident of this than your buyer, because distinguishing sellers of lemons from non-lemons is difficult.) But also, I think a lot of people think they have illegible evidence for something when what they actually have is wishful thinking or something. I feel like that's especially the case in this field of study.

   In any case, I think most people should have low confidence that what you're looking into should pay off; and I think you should probably agree with me on this, even if you think you personally should have high confidence.

4. Should you be looking into this thing? My instinctive reaction is "why not, seems harmless, worst case scenario is you waste your time and your time is yours to waste". But actually I agree with what I think Said is saying, that a common result of people looking into this sort of thing is to go crazy, and this is not actually harmless in the same way that doing drugs is not harmless. So I dunno. Not endorsed, but maybe my thinking here is: "if you are not worried about going crazy and taking precautions to avoid, you should not be looking into this; but I'm not a cop, this is not community consensus, so I might judge you for doing things I think are dangerous but I'm not going to additionally judge you for doing things that are widely known to be dangerous."

5. Should you be teaching this thing? Under what conditions? I think my feeling is that the conditions should probably not rule out teaching it entirely, but same caveat as with (4), you should be cautious about yourself and your students going crazy. Also I think you should expect skepticism from your students per (2), and I think you should explicitly endorse it. Like, your reaction to "is this backed by scientific studies?" gives me a vibe of "I don't care and I don't think you should care", and I think that's a bad vibe. I want vibe closer to "your skepticism is great here, totally warranted; but I'm explicitly asking you to set it aside for a bit".

This is an excellent point that I think is under-appreciated, especially by would-be and new rationalists.

It's really tempting to dismiss stuff that looks like it shouldn't work. And to some extent that's fair, but only because most stuff doesn't work, including the stuff that looks like it should work. Things have to be tried, and even then the result of our best attempts at controlled experiments sometimes return inconclusive results. Determining causal relationships is hard, and when you find something that seems to work sometimes you just have to go with it whether it makes sense or not since reality is going to be how it is whether or not it fits within your model.

Meanwhile we've got to get on with the project of living our best lives whether the things we do seem like they should lead to winning. If you want to win, you've got to sometimes be willing to take the status hit, get out there, and do something weird that people will think is nuts to try because it sometimes works. It doesn't mean throwing out everything you know, but it does mean bothering to go live in the real world where things are messy and you can't always figure out what's up.

Time will tell. If you keep doing crazy stuff after it becomes clear it doesn't work, sure, that's a mistake. But it's also a mistake not to check. If you never verified that you don't have psychic powers, can't teleport, that healing crystals don't work, etc. then you're also going to miss out on things like weird therapy modalities that do work for some people for unclear reasons and idiosyncratic dietary changes that dramatically improve your life but would make someone else's life worse.

As you point out, the leading edge is not respectable. Being on the leading edge has costs, but also rewards. It's a test of one's strength of a rationalist to be able to go all in on something that has high EV and low probability to see if it might work. The only real failure is the failure to update once the evidence comes in.

In other words: The leading edge of cultural innovation never happens in health insurance-paid sessions with licensed therapists.

ART actually grew out of EMDR, which was by then licensed.

Be wary of survivorship bias! Of course, everything that is licensed and proven to work was not at some point. But so is everything that was tried out and ineffective / harmful, and (hopefully) still not licensed.

But things that work, accumulate evidence that they do, and good chances get licensed. That's the way science works.

I don't blame anyone for trying things out, in fact we need people who do to figure out what actually works. But it's also perfectly reasonable not to want to do that.

… any therapeutic intervention that is now standardized and deployed on mass-scale has once not been backed by scientific evidence.

And, often, is still not backed by scientific evidence, even after it’s been deployed on a mass scale.

Freud was considered a crackpot when he first suggested that actually, how peoples’ childhoods play out might have an influence on how they behave and misbehave as adults.

As far as we know, therapy based on Freudian ideas is nothing more than pseudoscience, and most of the claims about the effectiveness of such things are baseless. This stuff was considered nonsense; then—in the manner of fashion trends and passing fads—were believed to be effective; and now, once again and increasingly, is understood to be nonsense after all.

Given the replication crisis, and recent developments in various social-science fields, it seems likely (and other evidence points this way) that the same is true of most or all of the other forms of therapy that you mention. (See also the dodo bird verdict.)

Similarly, the current mindfulness-based third wave of psychotherapy would be unthinkable if some bums in India several millennia ago hadn’t decided to see what happens when you just sit very, very still for a while. Without any double blind experiments to reassure them while their minds disintegrated and went down all kinds of scary avenues.

It seems like what happens if you just sit very, very still for a while is that your mind disintegrates and goes down all kinds of scary avenues. This is a bad thing! Going crazy is bad, and not good.

It really seems like the rationalists who mistrusted you were right to mistrust you, but that you, on the other hand, are wrong to “trust that the past decade of studying human minds theoretically, on the meditation cushion, and in relationships, prepared me for the real world”.

In other words: The leading edge of cultural innovation never happens in health insurance-paid sessions with licensed therapists.

Of course it doesn’t—who would have thought otherwise? But just because something happens in some other place does not, in fact, mean that said thing is anything but nonsense.

You're making valid points: Not everything that is not backed up by scientific studies is useless or harmful. Also, for innovation to happen, we need to try things, because new approaches are just not necessarily backed by scientific evidence. 

Yet, it is important to also not trust what is *not* backed by evidence. Lobotomy was a thing. And believing that people with mental instability were possessed by ghosts, and so on. 

Some useful handles are: has it worked for the past centuries and stood the test of time? Is it an area where intuition can easily be deployed? Can the underlying mechanisms be explained by some well established science? What are the risks when it goes wrong? 
 

Finally: Sometimes it does make sense to ask a specialist. A friend tried to self cure with MDMA and went into a big depression (yep this is anecdotal). Some major mental illnesses benefit most from medication. Hippie culture doesn't focus on curing specific symptom clusters, but focusses on general human/communal well-being, and thus generates generalists by default.

Peer review and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.