You have a theory about seduction? That’s fantastic… Obviously you’ve been doing some thinking and trying some experimentation, to try to disprove your theory. You’ve gathered evidence under various different conditions, with different types of people and in different environments. Then you’ve established its predictability, and expressed it in a form which is logical and testable… You haven’t? – Then you merely have an assumption or perhaps just conjecture.

A theory isn’t just an unsubstantiated guess or hunch which you only gather evidence in support of, and then claim to be a Seduction genius: If I may use a quote from Charles Darwin, “I always make special notes about evidence that contradicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying!”.

And to continue, I’ll borrow a snippet from Stephen Hawking‘s book, A Brief History of Time; “a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations”

In summary, your theory should:

• be guided by natural law – Hearsay or supernatural explanations arn’t good enough.
• be explanatory by reference to natural law – As above.
• be testable against the empirical world – One observation that disagrees with your theory proves it wrong.
• have conclusions that are tentative – You might need to develop a new hypothesis.
• be falsifiable – Explanations such as “It’s axiomatic” or “Everyone knows” just arn’t good enough.

If your theory cannot follow the above points, then at best it’s just Magical thinking, and you may be wasting a lot of peoples time, including your own.

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• The art of seduction or seduction of art?
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• Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex – Reviewed and appraised
• Psychics predict trouble with new laws
• Why men are visual and how this is exploited

Posted by Jonathan in Philosophy, Psychology

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