6 ms·

Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs [pdf]

54 points by Hooke 9y ago

bradfordarner 9y ago
This paper leaves me feeling uncomfortable. There are so many problems with it on so many levels and, yet, I think it is fascinating in the sense that it is applying a well known concept to a novel context. Personally, I have a hard time seeing how this "bulletproofing" technique could possibly be true. However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians". Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z. As an aside, it seems weird to start with the premise that the belief is inherently false when the village was able to protect and free itself. You could very well make a claim that the "treatment" was effective from a scientific perspective; it would require replication in order to be validated. Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the opposite of scientific enquiry. The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion. This sounds more like a piece of literature from an "enlightened" European priest visiting a wayward tribe of "barbarians" during the 19th century colonization of Africa than a modern, scientifically-rigorous scholarly article.
- mturmon 9y ago
  In the spirit of cultural relativism, here's a parallel anecdote about (incorrect?) superstition from our own treasure box: * A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
  - bradfordarner 9y ago
    Haha!! Well said, sir!
  - Fjolsvith 9y ago
    I used to be a computer technician. Sometimes I arrived at a customer's office and the perplexed person couldn't explain why his computer suddenly started working. I developed a theory I called the "Tech Threat Syndrome", which posed that computers occasionally hid their problem whenever a technician appeared, so as to embarrass their user.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      It's a widely believed theory, formulated (and verified) independently many times through history.
    - lolc 9y ago
      My theory around this is rather mundane: People behave more in the way they were taught when an authority is around. That makes a lot of computer problems go away when a techie shows up because people avoid taking shortcuts when they're being watched. In my view this is sufficient to explain the phenomenon.
      - mjevans 9y ago
        It may also simply be that they're slowing down and actually waiting to respond to problems instead of trying to get things to work as fast or easily as possible. Traffic manages to flow quite smoothly at the speed limit when a police officer is just standing around somewhere... (but there's usually a major bottleneck right upstream of that observation point as everyone panics and straightens up their focus). Similarly, it is amazing how disruptive something worthy of gawking at can be. A curve in the road, a car safely on the shoulder, flashing lights that scream "PAY ATTENTION TO ME": all of those things seem to result in gawker-block. Self driving cars really can't save us quickly enough.
        9y ago
- EthanHeilman 9y ago
  >However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians". I think you are reading into the motivations of the authors without evidence. It is much more likely that they conclude that bullet-proofing spells are a false belief because everything we know about physics and ballistics contradicts it.
  - bradfordarner 9y ago
    Certainly a possibility. I totally agree with you that is seems downright ludicrous to think that a spell will cause bullets to bounce off of someone. We have to take the author at their word that such is actually the belief of those using the spell. (My experience in Africa would tell me that may be a rather naive understanding of the villagers' expectations of the spell's effectiveness. From what I've seen in Africa, it seems more likely that the villagers believed that the bullets would miss them or go around them; it just strikes me as a little too stupid to be believable.) All of that seems irrelevant for the conclusions that the author is trying to reach. The belief is labelled as "false" without any evidence given for such being the case until the conclusion where it is written as "(false) belief". In other words, the word "false" is an unnecessary modifier. Hence, it seems like it is being used as a rhetorical device rather than a meaningful addition to the article.
    - hordeallergy 9y ago
      My experience in Africa is that anything will be believed. Look up Dr beetroot. Or zuma, the prostitute, and the shower.
    - aidenn0 9y ago
      If the gri-gri actually work as advertised (i.e. the beliefs are true), then there is no paradox for why it is adaptive. If tribe A is immune to gunfire and tribe B is not, then tribe A will win and in a region with sufficient inter-tribal warfare, we will observe only tribes that are immune to gunfire.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief In this context, the belief is that a spell and magical powder/paste, combined with ritual, can protect from gunfire. Science isn't free. Also, how on earth does one go about such an experiment humanely and in a financially prudent manner? I'd love to see the reviews on the grant proposal and IRB request to shoot 10 goats in order to test the effectiveness of gri gri... > "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians" The authors specifically discuss monotheistic religions and miracles in the introduction. It's possible the authors believe all religious people are "superstitious barbarians", but that seems like an awfully uncharitable assumption to make about the authors. Even if all the authors are atheists, there's still a huge gap between "person who believes in unfalsifiable religious claims" and "superstitious barbarians". > Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z. The authors come to exactly the same conclusion -- at base, gri gri is effective; its efficacy is explained by its effect on communal behavior rather than magical powers. > Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the opposite of scientific enquiry. Tea pots in space and all that. > The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion. You and the author seem to have come to approximately the same conclusion...
  - Fjolsvith 9y ago
    One of the great things about the practice of magic is that disbelievers never know when magic has been worked upon them.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      None-the-less, I don't want my tax money funding studies on the efficacy of gri gri...
      - RangerScience 9y ago
        Fuck that, I do, and it'd be pretty goddamn cheap. Likely benefits are training / practice, unlikely benefits are deeper anthropological and jungle-life (why those plants?) understanding, and the Pascal's Mugger benefit is "huh magic...?". And then there's the weird side-benefit of encouraging scientific investigation of all things. Seriously, the biggest expense is going to be shipping the researchers.
- cicero 9y ago
  I don't know if the author thinks they are barbarians, but he does say their beliefs "are almost certainly incorrect." I will give him a few objectivity points for including the word "almost," but he follows the typical modern assumptions by using the word "certainly." The beliefs are also described as "non-falsifiable", which means they do not fit Popper's basic scientific principle, which only means that the beliefs cannot be verified using the scientific method (according to Popper), but that does not mean they are incorrect.
- GuB-42 9y ago
  I think they used "superstitious barbarians" because that bulletproof magic is obviously false belief (people still get shot and die) and the results are very quantifiable (life and death situations). Using our own false beliefs would distract from the main research. First, researchers would have to prove this is actually false belief, then sort out the more subtle effects.
nabla9 9y ago
Similar phenomenon was found with native tribes hunting caribou in some islands (Newfoundland I think). Caribou herds are divided between different valleys with little movement between them. Before hunting starts, nomadic hunters asked spirits to select the valley where they travel to hunt as a group. They did it using method that is essentially throwing a dice. If the hunters had choosen the nearest and easiest valley every time, they would have hunted caribous into extinction valley by valley. By randomly alternating the hunting pattern and moving longer distances they allowed caribou populations to recover.
- netcan 9y ago
  Fascinating. One of the interesting open questions in human history is the prevalence of extirpation due to human hunting pressure. I think the theories range from a "blitzkrieg" of human impact as sapiens hit the cultural milestones of the paleolithic revolution to gradually mounting impact starting in pre-sapien times or even having started relatively recently (with prehistorical extirpations attributed to other factors). I bet type of dynamics you're talking about go back a long time. Humans are very culturally driven. What & how people hunt or eat is all very culturally driven. Hunting cultures still exist today. There are still living traditions of hunter gatherer cultures. There are people who fish. There are brits on horses. All of them have cultural norms that seem counterintuitively random. For example, fish considered edible by fisherman are almost always a much smaller subset than blind palatability test would estimate. When I visited the states (florida) I caught some "mudfish" which I looked up online, then ate (tastes good). The locals told me "we don't eat them, but some black people do." This is not unusual. The English eat different fish than the French. It's true of gamebirds and it's true in traditional cultures too. ...Anyway, hunting practices can have big effects on local ecology. It seems likely that cultures with beneficial rites, spread or spread those rites.
- aaron695 9y ago
  What would be interesting to know, and I suspect true, is if they knew by letting part of the forest recover and going to another place that has had time to recover it increased hunting yield. The random gods bit just being a small part of the larger act.
panarky 9y ago
This is deeply fascinating. We provide theory and case-study evidence showing how incorrect beliefs persist. Although harmful at the individual-level, we show that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes that have group-level benefits. Pretty much my view on religious practices in the West. Many beliefs are almost certainly untrue, yet there are big benefits for group members. Those of us on the outside with our evidence and falsifiable hypotheses are left with envy.
- mrec 9y ago
  If you enjoy this sort of thing, you might try Marvin Harris' book Cannibals and Kings. It's pretty old now - I read it in 1990 - but it's full of thought-provoking illustrations of how apparently bizarre superstitions and practices can actually be adaptive.
- nyolfen 9y ago
  i strongly recommend this link, which explores these ideas philosophically: https://samzdat.com/2017/06/19/the-use-and-abuse-of-witchdoctors-for-life/ https://samzdat.com/2017/06/19/the-use-and-abuse-of-witchdoc... and if you have a little spare time, a previous book review that provides extra framing for what the author is getting at, as well as expanding on the notion you mentioned: https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ > In the [cool kids scene] of the 2000’s, opposition to Christianity was a given. No subject was more likely to unite than a good old bashing of fundamentalists. Marxists, Anarchists, Libertarians, Liberals, Randians – it crossed political borders. (I’m from California, if that helps.) > It was hard not to – it’s not like the fundies had any coherent reasons they could articulate. Every other day some [class indicator] pastor would announce opposition to “the gay agenda” or seek to return to “a Christian nation” as though that were a desirable thing that had ever existed (like, deism duh, etc.). If that wasn’t bad enough, when pressed for an explanation, they’d just read some passage from John or Corinthians. “And? Was that all?” Readers take note: if someone is busy mocking you for your holy book, justifying your actions based on your holy book is a terrible rhetorical strategy. > Standard interpretation: “The olds are lamenting the loss of an oppressive institution that has no objective value, right?” Right? > So this is what churches do in our language: they’re probably the single most important economic institution in rural America. Period.
suyash 9y ago
Magic is for real - if you don't believe it, we need to meet :)
webnrrd2k 9y ago
I wonder how much of this is related to the whole ”beards make better soldiers" thing. Something like combat effectiveness strikes me as extremely difficult to understand and incredibly dependent on people's particular psychology, as well as group Dynamics, so much so that ”magic” (a.k.a. placebo effect) is as good an explanation as we are going to get for a while. http://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/study-shows-combat-effectiveness-and-beards-are-related/ http://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/study-shows-combat-eff...

54 points by Hooke 9y ago

This paper leaves me feeling uncomfortable. There are so many problems with it on so many levels and, yet, I think it is fascinating in the sense that it is applying a well known concept to a novel context. Personally, I have a hard time seeing how this "bulletproofing" technique could possibly be true. However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians". Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z. As an aside, it seems weird to start with the premise that the belief is inherently false when the village was able to protect and free itself. You could very well make a claim that the "treatment" was effective from a scientific perspective; it would require replication in order to be validated. Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the opposite of scientific enquiry. The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion. This sounds more like a piece of literature from an "enlightened" European priest visiting a wayward tribe of "barbarians" during the 19th century colonization of Africa than a modern, scientifically-rigorous scholarly article.

mturmon 9y ago
In the spirit of cultural relativism, here's a parallel anecdote about (incorrect?) superstition from our own treasure box: * A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
- bradfordarner 9y ago
  Haha!! Well said, sir!
- Fjolsvith 9y ago
  I used to be a computer technician. Sometimes I arrived at a customer's office and the perplexed person couldn't explain why his computer suddenly started working. I developed a theory I called the "Tech Threat Syndrome", which posed that computers occasionally hid their problem whenever a technician appeared, so as to embarrass their user.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    It's a widely believed theory, formulated (and verified) independently many times through history.
  - lolc 9y ago
    My theory around this is rather mundane: People behave more in the way they were taught when an authority is around. That makes a lot of computer problems go away when a techie shows up because people avoid taking shortcuts when they're being watched. In my view this is sufficient to explain the phenomenon.
    - mjevans 9y ago
      It may also simply be that they're slowing down and actually waiting to respond to problems instead of trying to get things to work as fast or easily as possible. Traffic manages to flow quite smoothly at the speed limit when a police officer is just standing around somewhere... (but there's usually a major bottleneck right upstream of that observation point as everyone panics and straightens up their focus). Similarly, it is amazing how disruptive something worthy of gawking at can be. A curve in the road, a car safely on the shoulder, flashing lights that scream "PAY ATTENTION TO ME": all of those things seem to result in gawker-block. Self driving cars really can't save us quickly enough.
      - 9y ago
EthanHeilman 9y ago
>However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians". I think you are reading into the motivations of the authors without evidence. It is much more likely that they conclude that bullet-proofing spells are a false belief because everything we know about physics and ballistics contradicts it.
- bradfordarner 9y ago
  Certainly a possibility. I totally agree with you that is seems downright ludicrous to think that a spell will cause bullets to bounce off of someone. We have to take the author at their word that such is actually the belief of those using the spell. (My experience in Africa would tell me that may be a rather naive understanding of the villagers' expectations of the spell's effectiveness. From what I've seen in Africa, it seems more likely that the villagers believed that the bullets would miss them or go around them; it just strikes me as a little too stupid to be believable.) All of that seems irrelevant for the conclusions that the author is trying to reach. The belief is labelled as "false" without any evidence given for such being the case until the conclusion where it is written as "(false) belief". In other words, the word "false" is an unnecessary modifier. Hence, it seems like it is being used as a rhetorical device rather than a meaningful addition to the article.
  - hordeallergy 9y ago
    My experience in Africa is that anything will be believed. Look up Dr beetroot. Or zuma, the prostitute, and the shower.
  - aidenn0 9y ago
    If the gri-gri actually work as advertised (i.e. the beliefs are true), then there is no paradox for why it is adaptive. If tribe A is immune to gunfire and tribe B is not, then tribe A will win and in a region with sufficient inter-tribal warfare, we will observe only tribes that are immune to gunfire.
throwawayjava 9y ago
> I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief In this context, the belief is that a spell and magical powder/paste, combined with ritual, can protect from gunfire. Science isn't free. Also, how on earth does one go about such an experiment humanely and in a financially prudent manner? I'd love to see the reviews on the grant proposal and IRB request to shoot 10 goats in order to test the effectiveness of gri gri... > "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians" The authors specifically discuss monotheistic religions and miracles in the introduction. It's possible the authors believe all religious people are "superstitious barbarians", but that seems like an awfully uncharitable assumption to make about the authors. Even if all the authors are atheists, there's still a huge gap between "person who believes in unfalsifiable religious claims" and "superstitious barbarians". > Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z. The authors come to exactly the same conclusion -- at base, gri gri is effective; its efficacy is explained by its effect on communal behavior rather than magical powers. > Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the opposite of scientific enquiry. Tea pots in space and all that. > The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion. You and the author seem to have come to approximately the same conclusion...
- Fjolsvith 9y ago
  One of the great things about the practice of magic is that disbelievers never know when magic has been worked upon them.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    None-the-less, I don't want my tax money funding studies on the efficacy of gri gri...
    - RangerScience 9y ago
      Fuck that, I do, and it'd be pretty goddamn cheap. Likely benefits are training / practice, unlikely benefits are deeper anthropological and jungle-life (why those plants?) understanding, and the Pascal's Mugger benefit is "huh magic...?". And then there's the weird side-benefit of encouraging scientific investigation of all things. Seriously, the biggest expense is going to be shipping the researchers.
cicero 9y ago
I don't know if the author thinks they are barbarians, but he does say their beliefs "are almost certainly incorrect." I will give him a few objectivity points for including the word "almost," but he follows the typical modern assumptions by using the word "certainly." The beliefs are also described as "non-falsifiable", which means they do not fit Popper's basic scientific principle, which only means that the beliefs cannot be verified using the scientific method (according to Popper), but that does not mean they are incorrect.
GuB-42 9y ago
I think they used "superstitious barbarians" because that bulletproof magic is obviously false belief (people still get shot and die) and the results are very quantifiable (life and death situations). Using our own false beliefs would distract from the main research. First, researchers would have to prove this is actually false belief, then sort out the more subtle effects.

nabla9 9y ago

Similar phenomenon was found with native tribes hunting caribou in some islands (Newfoundland I think). Caribou herds are divided between different valleys with little movement between them. Before hunting starts, nomadic hunters asked spirits to select the valley where they travel to hunt as a group. They did it using method that is essentially throwing a dice. If the hunters had choosen the nearest and easiest valley every time, they would have hunted caribous into extinction valley by valley. By randomly alternating the hunting pattern and moving longer distances they allowed caribou populations to recover.

netcan 9y ago
Fascinating. One of the interesting open questions in human history is the prevalence of extirpation due to human hunting pressure. I think the theories range from a "blitzkrieg" of human impact as sapiens hit the cultural milestones of the paleolithic revolution to gradually mounting impact starting in pre-sapien times or even having started relatively recently (with prehistorical extirpations attributed to other factors). I bet type of dynamics you're talking about go back a long time. Humans are very culturally driven. What & how people hunt or eat is all very culturally driven. Hunting cultures still exist today. There are still living traditions of hunter gatherer cultures. There are people who fish. There are brits on horses. All of them have cultural norms that seem counterintuitively random. For example, fish considered edible by fisherman are almost always a much smaller subset than blind palatability test would estimate. When I visited the states (florida) I caught some "mudfish" which I looked up online, then ate (tastes good). The locals told me "we don't eat them, but some black people do." This is not unusual. The English eat different fish than the French. It's true of gamebirds and it's true in traditional cultures too. ...Anyway, hunting practices can have big effects on local ecology. It seems likely that cultures with beneficial rites, spread or spread those rites.
aaron695 9y ago
What would be interesting to know, and I suspect true, is if they knew by letting part of the forest recover and going to another place that has had time to recover it increased hunting yield. The random gods bit just being a small part of the larger act.

panarky 9y ago

This is deeply fascinating. We provide theory and case-study evidence showing how incorrect beliefs persist. Although harmful at the individual-level, we show that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes that have group-level benefits. Pretty much my view on religious practices in the West. Many beliefs are almost certainly untrue, yet there are big benefits for group members. Those of us on the outside with our evidence and falsifiable hypotheses are left with envy.

mrec 9y ago
If you enjoy this sort of thing, you might try Marvin Harris' book Cannibals and Kings. It's pretty old now - I read it in 1990 - but it's full of thought-provoking illustrations of how apparently bizarre superstitions and practices can actually be adaptive.
nyolfen 9y ago
i strongly recommend this link, which explores these ideas philosophically: https://samzdat.com/2017/06/19/the-use-and-abuse-of-witchdoctors-for-life/ https://samzdat.com/2017/06/19/the-use-and-abuse-of-witchdoc... and if you have a little spare time, a previous book review that provides extra framing for what the author is getting at, as well as expanding on the notion you mentioned: https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ > In the [cool kids scene] of the 2000’s, opposition to Christianity was a given. No subject was more likely to unite than a good old bashing of fundamentalists. Marxists, Anarchists, Libertarians, Liberals, Randians – it crossed political borders. (I’m from California, if that helps.) > It was hard not to – it’s not like the fundies had any coherent reasons they could articulate. Every other day some [class indicator] pastor would announce opposition to “the gay agenda” or seek to return to “a Christian nation” as though that were a desirable thing that had ever existed (like, deism duh, etc.). If that wasn’t bad enough, when pressed for an explanation, they’d just read some passage from John or Corinthians. “And? Was that all?” Readers take note: if someone is busy mocking you for your holy book, justifying your actions based on your holy book is a terrible rhetorical strategy. > Standard interpretation: “The olds are lamenting the loss of an oppressive institution that has no objective value, right?” Right? > So this is what churches do in our language: they’re probably the single most important economic institution in rural America. Period.

suyash 9y ago

Magic is for real - if you don't believe it, we need to meet :)

webnrrd2k 9y ago

I wonder how much of this is related to the whole ”beards make better soldiers" thing. Something like combat effectiveness strikes me as extremely difficult to understand and incredibly dependent on people's particular psychology, as well as group Dynamics, so much so that ”magic” (a.k.a. placebo effect) is as good an explanation as we are going to get for a while. http://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/study-shows-combat-effectiveness-and-beards-are-related/ http://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/study-shows-combat-eff...