This is an interesting and insightful article, but in my experience a person's superstition leads to the exact opposite effect: it gets in the way a person ded

This is an interesting and insightful article, but in my experience a person's superstition leads to the exact opposite effect: it gets in the way a person deducing a correct model of a how something works on a computer. The article postulates that because the forces at work in software are unseen and made up, that a person who believes in magic will be better equipped to understand it. I counter that precisely because the mechanism is unseen, it takes a sharper scientific mind to model the hidden mechanism - which is essential to predict cause and effect for new phenomena. As a software developer I've worked very hard to make things easy in a program's interface, only to find the users perpetuating myths from trainer to trainee about very complicated things they have to do to get it to work - sequences of actions which don't have any effect but which worked once and are repeated superstitiously instead of doing things easily. Another example of how a belief in "spirits" hobbles your ability to properly use the internet, would be my father: he consistently misspells URLs, and gets angry when it doesn't work. When I tell him they have to be typed exactly, he always dismisses it by saying "oh they'll know what I mean." No matter how hard I try, I cannot convince him that there is no THEY on the other end of the address box!! But his superstitious nature will not allow him to change his convictions that all these purely mechanical things the software does are not orchestrated by "spirits" (a.k.a. imaginary human operators).