Has "Feng Shui" Ever Been Tested?

Factual Questions
21

[QUOTE=Chronos]
OK, so all the business about flow of chi is nonsense. But that does not imply that there’s nothing to Feng Shui. Suppose someone were to tell you that they think a room looks prettier when the stairwell doesn’t face directly towards the door. Would you say that that was an idiotic view to hold? Of course not. Now suppose that some enterprising architect asked a lot of people their preferences, and found that many people don’t like the aesthetic effect of a stairway facing directly towards the door. Such an architect would be very well advised to design houses with stairways at an angle to the door, not because of any mystical significance, but because that’s the way people like it. A person might even compile a list, or a whole book, of tips like this, which enhance the aesthetics of a living space, and it would be not at all unreasonable to consult such a book when designing a space. And if such a book happened to give mystical explanations for why those arrangements were better, it wouldn’t change the truth (or lack thereof) of the suggestions.

I’m not saying that feng shui is such a situation, and I’m not saying that it’s not. I don’t know enough about the subject to say one way or another. But it should be judged on its merits, not on its mystical justifications.
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Aren’t you making a rather large leap here in assuming that, mystical mumbo-jumbo aside, Feng Shui happens to embody some good interior decorating ideas?

Your claim is that the mysticism is just a wrapper around what are some good design ideas, and that if you follow them you will wind up with a better result than if you didn’t. But you haven’t made that case either here or in your SDSAB report. The bit about noticing that houses in valleys get flooded more is completely irrelevant. That’s like saying that atrologers have some valuable things to teach us, because after all, back before we had astronomy astrologers used their own understanding of humans to derive meaning from the positions of the planets. If you just throw away the mystical part, you can learn what they knew about humans and gain benefit from it.

The assumption is that there’s any value whatsoever underlying the mysticism. I question that. At least, I’d like some proof of it. Can you point to some specific concepts of Feng Shui and show how they make good sense if you don’t consider the mystical part? Maybe you can, but I haven’t seen it.

One of the points that Penn and Teller made was that if there was anything to it at all, whether mystical or not, different Feng Shui consultants should have reasonably similar advice. But they didn’t. They were all over the map. They contradicted each other. They pored over their charts and formulas for hours, then came up with essentially random suggestions.

22

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Aren’t you making a rather large leap here in assuming that, mystical mumbo-jumbo aside, Feng Shui happens to embody some good interior decorating ideas?

Your claim is that the mysticism is just a wrapper around what are some good design ideas, and that if you follow them you will wind up with a better result than if you didn’t. But you haven’t made that case either here or in your SDSAB report. The bit about noticing that houses in valleys get flooded more is completely irrelevant. That’s like saying that atrologers have some valuable things to teach us, because after all, back before we had astronomy astrologers used their own understanding of humans to derive meaning from the positions of the planets. If you just throw away the mystical part, you can learn what they knew about humans and gain benefit from it.

The assumption is that there’s any value whatsoever underlying the mysticism. I question that. At least, I’d like some proof of it. Can you point to some specific concepts of Feng Shui and show how they make good sense if you don’t consider the mystical part? Maybe you can, but I haven’t seen it.
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PEOPLE. REREAD THE TITLE OF THIS THREAD.

Now please, has anyone ever done market research or anything like that (forget even scientific studies) to do any sort of investigation?

If no one knows, then maybe no point saying anything?

23

[QUOTE=Alex_Dubinsky]

Now please, has anyone ever done market research or anything like that (forget even scientific studies) to do any sort of investigation?

[/QUOTE]

For market research, check out my first post. There’s probably more if you dig into Chinese-language papers.

Ah, but there is a big difference between homeopathy and feng shui, in this particular instance. Homeopathy claims that it will cure ailments. Feng shui promises (among other things) prosperity. I’m not sure, but I think the financial prosperity angle is a bit left aside when feng shui is discussed in the west, but in Chinese culture and superstition attracting money is a big aspect of the good fortune feng shui is promised to bring. And hence the self-fulfiling promise: if you buy a house with a “prosperous” address you will be able to resell it for more money, because no-one wants to buy a house with an “un-prosperous” address. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are, just that people agree on them.

24

[QUOTE=BrainFireBob]
I am, and you’re wrong on both counts.
[/QUOTE]

I’d be interested to see a cite to peer-reviewed literature that demonstrates humans definitely detect and respond to the Earth’s ambient magnetic field.

25

[QUOTE=Alex_Dubinsky]
PEOPLE. REREAD THE TITLE OF THIS THREAD.

Now please, has anyone ever done market research or anything like that (forget even scientific studies) to do any sort of investigation?

If no one knows, then maybe no point saying anything?
[/QUOTE]

The hotel I stay at in Richmond BC has no 4th, 13th, or 14th floor.
It has a very high occupancy rate of Asians.
Did one cause the other?
IMHO being a Feng Shui specialist is the greatest job on earth. Who has the credentials to tell you that you are wrong? :smiley:
No, trust me, the chi is much greater if you leave the sofa halfway out the window.

26

Lucky numbers are obviously bullshit. The house addresses, the hotel floors, etc, are all based on numbers and aren’t worth discussing here.

It’s annoying that the Chinese give numbers so much focus, and it even seems that feng shui didn’t used to to focus on them at all. (For trivia’s sake, the reason ‘4’ is unlucky is simply because in Mandarin it sounds almost the same as the word for ‘death’. Ditto for 14. The Chinese seem to think this is profound, but this has got to be an example of the dumbest numerology possible. Especially since in Mandarin every word, without exaggeration, sounds identical to about a dozen others.)

27

[QUOTE=Colibri]
I’d be interested to see a cite to peer-reviewed literature that demonstrates humans definitely detect and respond to the Earth’s ambient magnetic field.
[/QUOTE]

I’d like to see some solid evidence myself, sicne the articles I have seen are fairly vague on this.

You’d have to subscribe to get the full versions, but these seem to indicate there is some response.:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/pr506l1632579p12/
“Summary Single unit electrical activity was recorded extracellularly in the lateral and superior vestibular nuclei, the vestibulo-cerebellum and the nucleus of the basal optic root (nBOR) under earth-strength magnetic stimulation. Units in the vestibular system responded with either inhibition or excitation to the magnetic stimuli only if the animal was moved out of the horizontal plane. No responses to the artificial magnetic field were observed when enucleation was performed contralateral to the recording site or when magnetic stimuli were applied in total darkness.
Most of the units in the nBOR responded to slow direction changes in the magnetic field with a gradual augmentation of activity. The responses were generally weak but nevertheless statistically significant and seemed to be direction selective, i.e. different cells responded to a different distinct direction change of the magnetic field.
The results indicate, that information provided by magnetic cues in the earth’s strength range may be conveyed from the visual to the vestibular system via a projection from the nBOR and then related to active movements of the animal.”

http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.bb.13.060184.000505

But I have seen and can find nothing which confirms this except in the most general possible way, more or less along the lines of “other vertebrates can, so maybe humans can also”.

28

Which was more or less the point.

We do suffer physiological responses to changing electrical and magnetic fields- hence the concern a few years ago about cell phones, why you’re more likely to be struck again by lightning if you’re struck once, some humans can actually “sense” magnetic north, etc.- and the earth’s magnetic field is pretty considerable compared to fields we do show a response to. Whether that response is other than negligible, as it is in other animals, we don’t know. Hell, we don’t know what it does.

Problem is, there’s so much pseudo-science homeopathic crap out there, that it’s not something you can get legitimate backing to seriously research, and even then, at best you could show that there might have been a mystical etymology that developed into feng shui rooted in some sort of feel-good sensation.

29

[QUOTE=BrainFireBob]
Which was more or less the point.

We do suffer physiological responses to changing electrical and magnetic fields- hence the concern a few years ago about cell phones, why you’re more likely to be struck again by lightning if you’re struck once, some humans can actually “sense” magnetic north, etc.- and the earth’s magnetic field is pretty considerable compared to fields we do show a response to. Whether that response is other than negligible, as it is in other animals, we don’t know. Hell, we don’t know what it does.
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You keep asserting this, but no one has posted a link to a peer-reviewed article showing that this is the case. And double-blind studies that have been done on things like magnetic bracelets and other magnetic or electrical devices that are supposed to affect the body have shown zero results.

The jury is also still out on cell phones and whether living under huge power lines has any effect at all (I don’t believe that any causal relationship between powerlines and physiological effects has ever been conclusively shown). The one major peer-reviewed study I remember suggested that there might be some very tiny effect on cognitive behaviour when a person is exposed to a very strong 50hz electric field, but the results were so close to the margin of error that no positive conclusion could be reached. And that was a hell of a lot stronger field than what you get from the Earth.

There is no problem getting funding for scientiific research if A) the subject being studied is amenable to scientific analysis, and B) isn’t an obvious load of crap. All kinds of bizarre and fringe ideas have had money thrown at them when there was even a shred of scientific plausibility attached (see: cold fusion).