I think this is pretty close to the real mechanism that lets "The Secret" and its ilk appear to work.
I suspect the world is full of "traditional" or otherwise "unscientific" beliefs where the supposed mechanism ("manifesting", "chi", etc) is objectively hot garbage but there's nevertheless a grain of truth in the inputs and outputs. The ones that persist today are the ones that are really hard to study. The relevant field here would be psychology; heard of this thing called "the replication crisis"? So I don't expect to get conclusive answers about what degree of truth or nonsense is in most of these ideas any time soon. As usual there are no easy answers, not even "science" or "common sense".
They tend to be emotionally polarizing to boot, so probably not even unlimited money would solve them.
I suspect the world is full of "traditional" or otherwise "unscientific" beliefs where the supposed mechanism ("manifesting", "chi", etc) is objectively hot garbage but there's nevertheless a grain of truth in the inputs and outputs. The ones that persist today are the ones that are really hard to study. The relevant field here would be psychology; heard of this thing called "the replication crisis"? So I don't expect to get conclusive answers about what degree of truth or nonsense is in most of these ideas any time soon. As usual there are no easy answers, not even "science" or "common sense".
They tend to be emotionally polarizing to boot, so probably not even unlimited money would solve them.