Magic of Destruction by Bob the fool
If you are talking to a communist, or another religious believer in science or theory, they will want you to prove that you are correct if you say that they are practicing magical thinking. Since magical thinking was evolutionarily favored for reason of making reactions fast, without stopping to reason, evaluate proofs or logic, a magical thinker might be closed to the most obvious proofs that they are indulging in such.
‘Mathematical’ Preliminaries
Magical thinking exists in every human because it is a time saver. If you rigorously avoid magical thinking to question ‘is it bad to be eaten by the Tiger’, you get killed by the Tiger before you really get started. Exactly how time consuming it is to avoid magical thinking may not be apparent to everyone. This is partly because most people aren’t aware of performing magical thinking. Stopping such, can be very specialized training or experience, and the skill may not be very general. Another part, you may not actually have a very strong need to avoid magical thinking. There are circumstances where it is incorrect enough to matter, but that is not every time.
Nobody has enough time to avoid magical thinking for every single thing that they do. Sometimes you come out of the rain by habit, and it does not matter if you precisely evaluated how much you really needed to.
Generally, people who say that they never practice magical thinking are not introspecting properly, and have overlooked one or more elements of their thinking. Non magical thought processes are not perfect, and are expensive, so there is little real motivation for ensuring that they make up all of one’s thinking, and many motivations to prefer action over eternal naval gazing.
I think many of the motivations for believing one is always uses reason are magical thinking. Not understanding the limited utility of logic, and magically thinking that it perfectly answers all problems, might motivate a person to identify as being purely rational. (Logic depends on your assumptions. GIGO. If you do not have a habit of testing and retesting your assumptions, you have no idea where logic is misleading you.)
It is a ‘if you do not know who the mark is at the poker table, you are the mark’ problem. If you do not know where you tolerate magical thinking in your internal practices, it is buried somewhere that you do not realize.
Choice of magical thinking matters
What we call sanity and culture are downstream of individual selections of magical thinking. Which thoughts you repeat over and over, which thoughts emotionally draw you most strongly.
This stuff matters.
It can be hard to see by direct observation, hard to learn how to see, and hard to teach others to see.
State cult of the Aztec Triple Alliance is a perhaps sufficiently alien example to be useful. Mexica nobles of the Aztec Triple Alliance practiced pain magic in their daily lives. As in, they inflicted pain on themselves personally in ritual, and perceived the magic as real and productive. This directly overlaps with why they thought everything else they did was of real effect. This is why they did human sacrifices for everything. This is why they thought the sun would /die/ if they did not cut out enough hearts.
The choice matters
Christianity and Judaism are religions, and it is not generally required that we prove or explain that. There are most definitely specific patterns of magical thinking which are reinforced by those practices. Certain other patterns of magical thinking are basically omitted or discarded.
This has some critical implications missed in a lot of modern histographies. That lasting peaces are downstream of a consensus about magic in a culture which limits capricious beliefs that those other people over there can violate the peace agreement by witching you somehow.
Full discussion of comparison and contrast in magical thinking types is omitted here for space. Contrast Christianity versus liberation theology. Judaism versus those reform Jews who conflate leftism with the Law.
Christianity is a heresy of Judaism. Judaism had some very good mind genes, memes in the original sense. See, forex, the Samaritans. Those translated to the heresy of Christianity being itself fairly functional, and spawning some heresies that while perhaps wildly dysfunctional, may not be obviously so in their initial stages.
The most widespread heresies of Christianity are Islam and communism. (Islam hates Jews and Christians, because Jews and Christians have the information to show that the ‘prophecies’ of Jesus are pretty much all claims that Jesus is divine. Islam requires that Jesus make true prophecies, while also not being divine.)
Communism, in comparison, is playing a complicated motte and bailey game with ‘children of God’.
Communisms are cults of power, that use leadership magic to accomplish goals in this world, and play cheating games with what Christianity and Judaism would consider clear cut questions of good and evil.
(The party truth stuff, and inner and outer party stuff, is a wee bit diagnostic of magical thinking. Wishcasting word/consensus magic, and also fear of not participating in the ritual. Stalin would murder folks, capriciously and also purposefully. This made people afraid to verbally deviate from his proclaimed “wisdom.” This shows up in all the left, and means that they care much more about updating verbal positions to current expedient ones, then they do about the exercise of testing positions against each other. (One bit of evidence is how rarely the folks are willing to deviate on points.) From the Party’s perspective it is not possible to innocently be out of step, it is always deliberately an act of wrong doing that must be punished. Speech is part of the leadership magic that the party provides. The oft overlooked implication is that as long as this behavior continues, communist revolutions will always be ‘usurped’ and ‘stolen’ by ‘facists’. The communists give bad actor leaders too many tools for seizing and abusing power. This attracts a ton of bad actors to communist leadership positions.)
Destruction Magics
Communist theory/theology implicitly outlines the magical ideas practiced by repeating it, and by feeling it is important.
The split into victims and oppressors is pretty key. This is the cheating game with ‘children of God’, and with clear cut matters of good acts, and evil acts.
It is also a center of the magical thinking around destruction.
They do not say oppressors, victims, plus some people who are neither, and some people who are both. Oppressors and victims are defined necessarily as sets that are mutually exclusive, and exhaustive.
Consider high nobles of a German empire. Communist theory is that they are necessarily oppressors. One implication, peace consensus is not valid because the nobles are witching everyone else. Two, nobles must only be in a situation that is good for them by causing harm to others. There is no room in communist thought for circumstances in which ‘actually, it was mutually beneficial, and both parties profited from the arrangement’.
This is an aspect of zero sum ism.
(Christianity and maybe Judaism are opposite. Locally you can have from individual action good or bad results that are not balanced to, coupled with, or conservated over an aggregate. )
I am a white dude. Critical theory teaches that any good thing I have was obtained by false premises in ancient times on my behalf by magic workers.
Rituals of destruction
Because of this, Communism predicts that if you destroy a good thing associated with an oppressor, it automagically helps out one or more victims somewhere.
Communism also predicts that if oppressed hard enough, oppressed rise up and over throw the oppressors.
Communists also understand that desperate people are more easily motivated to turn to communists for leadership magic with which to fix problems.
All of these are reasons rooted in magical thinking for communists to willy nilly proceed with destruction magic everywhere. Furthermore, communist prediction of evil leadership, primes them to accept evil from their leaders in an effort to have their own leadership magic to offset the leadership magic that ‘oppressors’ ‘have’. This means that opportunistic assholes seek out leadership positions among communists, because they will have greater license to get their own jollies by hurting people.
There is a systemic hazard wherever communists are employed. If you employ them to take care of your cows, they dislike you for having the money to pay them, and your having cows is a crime against them. Which thereby makes you an oppressor. They think that killing your cattle is productive, and a righting of wrongs. You have to make it worth their while not to kill your cows.
Communist green and environmental politics? The analysis is not quick to reiterate, but the destruction is to the most fundamental elements of agricultural and economic efficiency, and thereby causes greater poverty and want. Public education? If it were not deliberate sabotage, they would accidently miss opportunities to cause harm and suffering at least sometimes. Welfare? Law enforcement? Employment law and corporate law? Everywhere communists get the upper hand destruction follows. Therefore destruction must be the desired result, or it would not be so consistent.
There are several positions among those who have not made themselves communist by practicing those specific magical ideas:
One is to be willing to murder communists, but also sees the murder as in itself a good. This magical thinking about destruction results in them turning everything they touch into shit.
Valuing the innate dignity of humans turns out to be fundamental to preserving value, and aggregating much wealth. If you do not capriciously destroy what a human accomplishes, because you respect that human, there may be a lot of accumulated surplus, and great wealth. Murderous idiocy is almost always bad, or could be outright always bad. Whether practiced by communists or not.
A second flavor of non-communist does not buy into mass murder, and opposes mass murder, but ignores the destructive trend in communist thinking, and hence compromises with communists in destructive rituals.
There are also non-communists who actively recognize communists as crazy and evil, and refuse to participate in ritual. But, they do not confront the communists, and do not make a show about their resistance.
Now, communists cannot really be negotiated with. And they aren’t aware of their own magical thinking, and therefore can’t reason themselves out of it. They are not really willing to deliver on anything unless forced.
Trump’s success in enraging the communists may be downstream of his efforts to negotiate. He is not strictly avoiding left ideas. However, he does see them as another party. So, as a basis for negotiation, he does not concede that any of their ideas are a good thing he would do anyway for free. To participate in any one ritual, he wants a price paid to his faction. And that price must be paid out of the communist ‘budget’ for rituals of destruction. This had the consequence of limiting the effect of rituals passing through the US government. Which in theory made it possible that the American population could get ahead of the destruction done by the communists, or for the communists to fall far behind.
Was Trump a perfect instrument of this? No. He was human, he thought he was negotiating and getting the communists to deliver, and also doing this on purpose might be hard.
However, so far it is the best we’ve seen.
Perhaps curing communists of this magical thinking is impossible. It may be possible for communism to mutate into a more sustainable religion, not my call. Evangelizing individual communists should also be possible.
It should not be impossible to stop them indoctrinating new generations. As a starting measure, if we do not grant their positions the superiority they demand be granted, if we force them to prove their destruction magic can do anything more than destruction, it might slow them enough for us to rebuild civilization and stop the infection of new generations and new structures.
Until someone comes up with a better method.
According To Hoyt 
Who had Bob makes perfect sense on their 2024 bingo card? The Reader sure as heck didn’t. The Reader thanks you for a thought provoking read.
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You know what I love most about this post? All the Usual Suspects who lurk this blog are screaming at their screens and having a conniption right now. Go Bob go!
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Agree. Their heads have got to be spinning! Love it!
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Bob’s predicting the future too….8-)
“
Krugman wrote: “How would Trump respond if things went wrong? Remember, he suggested we look into fighting Covid by injecting disinfectant. Why expect him to be any less inclined to magical thinking in dealing with, say, a new surge in inflation?” “
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/05/14/nyts-krugman-made-an-economic-claim-so-wild-that-even-lefty-outlets-mocked-him-n2639014
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Ah, Krugman, one of the few people in the world more wrong about more things than even Joe Biden.
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Say what you want about Krugman, at least he can find the bathroom on his own.
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Are you sure?
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Sure? Can’t say I’m -sure-, but to my knowledge we don’t have video of Mr. Krugman making boom-boom outside the Whitehouse. ~:D
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he was right once, back in the 90’s about Asia. He even diagnosed the proximate cause, but totally missed the ultimate cause, that’s where his ideological blinkers interfered. Since he became famous, he’s been wrong about everything. Too bad really, he coulda been something.
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More wrong even than Jim Cramer? :-)
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I think so. Cramer is just a loud clown; Krugman is utterly wrong about really big things. Stuff like the stock market direction after the 2016 election. Stuff like “overpopulation”. Stuff like communism.
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And Krugman is lying again, as usual, since Trump never actually said to inject disinfectant.
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So, Krugman lies. KNOWINGLY more than likely. Day ending in Y?
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He’s still breathing, so…..
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Bob, you’re making sense again. What have we told you about this? ~:D
Example of magical thinking from science yesterday, Sabine Hossenfelder is Simply Amazed that Roger Penrose wasn’t talking out of his nether regions in The Emperor’s New Mind.
Ms. Hossenfelder has been saying, as seems to be fashionable among scientists lately, that she thinks there’s no such thing as Free Will, capital F capital W. Penrose of course is famous for saying that there is, and PROVED it mathematically. According to Penrose, as outlined in his two books, ‘The Emperor’s New Mind’ and ‘Shadows of the Mind’ there are some things that Humans do which are fundamentally incomputable. Meaning that the doing of the thing cannot, in principle, be accomplished by an algorithm. Humans do things that reach outside logic and mathematics, and therefore cannot be accomplished by an algorithmic machine like a Turing machine.
But the brain, so far anyway, appears to operate very much like a Turing machine. Nerve firings are digital, mostly. Either it fired or it didn’t. So Penrose went looking for someplace in the human body where things could be affected by quantum mechanics, that being the only physical thing we know of that does things that can’t be calculated by a Turing machine.
In ‘Shadows of the Mind’, Penrose suggests that microtubules in cells might be a candidate for quantum effects modifying cell responses.
Here’s where the magical thinking comes in, physicists like Hossenfelder immediately said “Ridiculous!!!” and went off on Penrose. Impossible, couldn’t work, no way, you’re a crazy old mystic, et cetera. Pretty much what was said about Galileo and Copernicus, Twentieth Century version.
So lately there’s been a paper released indicating that, shock surprise, microtubules REALLY DO exhibit quantum effects at room temperature. Link to paper can be found at video link. This of course does not prove Penrose is correct about how the brain/mind works to house human consciousness, but it does show that what he’s suggested is not utterly ridiculous. There could be something there. Worth looking at, anyway.
What I’ve always had a problem with, where physicists particularly are concerned, is this determined atheism that is so fashionable. Otherwise intelligent individuals utterly ignore their very own experience of daily life and twist themselves into pretzels of illogic trying to deny things like consciousness, free will, Truth capital T, etc. This despite the fact that even Ludwig Wittgenstein, who laid out every single logical proposition there is, declared that there existed some things Logic could not speak to.
Magical thinking all over the place. ~:D
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All binary digital logic can be reduced to NAND gates. I suspect that neurons are far more complex than NAND gates. I see them as being part digital, part analog, part quantum.
Binary digital logic is indeed deterministic. For any given set of inputs, a digital logic gate must produce exactly the same outputs EVERY TIME. All of our digital computers, and the procedural programs we run on them, are completely dependent on the hardware always behaving as specified.
Brains do not always behave as specified.
There’s a famous thought experiment. Imagine a man facing an avalanche, and predict what he will do. He has a very limited set of options — run away, run left or right, run towards the thundering wall of snow, or stand there frozen like a deer in headlights. No matter how much you know about the man, his upbringing, his life experiences, his beliefs — none of that will allow you to predict what he will do. Even if he has faced and survived an avalanche in the past, he could very well do something different this time.
Besides, if those scientists were right, they deny free will because they have no choice about it. Punishing children for misbehaving, or criminals for their crimes, is pointless. They had no choice, you see. Nobody is responsible for anything they do. People really are widgets. The perfect communist bureaucratic existence.
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Given determinism, punishing misbehaving children or criminal adults is pointless. And so is refraining from punishing them. If it’s all pre-determined, there is no point in complaining about it one way or the other. Yet I always hear the adherents of determinism arguing against the punishment, rather than in favor or being indifferent. And if they follow their own arguments, they have no choice in whether or not to argue against it, but they still seem to preen themselves for having made the argument.
Arguing for free will is almost a modification of Pascal’s Wager. You gain great philosophical credit, not to mention adaptiveness toward real life, if you are right. If you’re wrong, well, it was foreordained that you’d be wrong, so who can blame you? Okay, lots of people can, but they were pre-determined to blame you, so …
Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.
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Thinking about Determinism, I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Bulverism.
Bulverism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
Bulverism is a term for a rhetorical fallacy that combines circular reasoning with presumption or condescension. The method of Bulverism is to “assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error.” The Bulverist assumes a speaker’s argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake (even if the opponents’s claim is actually right) by attacking the speaker or the speaker’s motive. The term Bulverism was coined by C. S. Lewis[1] to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleged, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.
Similar to Antony Flew’s “subject/motive shift”, Bulverism is a fallacy of irrelevance. One accuses an argument of being wrong on the basis of the arguer’s identity or motive, but these are strictly speaking irrelevant to the argument’s validity or truth.
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Uh, no, bullshit. This is getting as tiring as “you like guns? must have a small penis!”.
If it is an algorithm then punishment or rewards are data going into the algorithm. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, no matter which side of the cake you are on.
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Yes. When I started seeing progressives denying free will that’s what I figured.
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I’ve made the point elsewhere that arguing whether free will exists is inherently pointless. If it doesn’t exist the arguments are predetermined and thus meaningless; if it does it’s strictly subjective. Based on personal experience and self-observation I firmly believe it exists, but there’s absolutely no way I can think of to test it objectively. Much like religious belief, but at least with religious belief observable claims made by various religions can be tested, even if none of the really important questions can.
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https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2023/10/free-will-itself-now-under-assault.html
Dr. Robert Saplosky wrote a book, recently, the source of all this “meat robot” bullshlitz we’re being subjected to lately. Old (and stupid) idea, new wrapping.
The whole idea is hilariously self-refuting. Without consciousness there cannot be perception, or experience. Or memory, probably. If there is consciousness it -cannot- be mechanistic.
But hey, the guy got a book deal so bully for him.
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Does it never occur to these people that they have to be self-aware and have free will in order to deny self-awareness and free will?
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Nope. [Sarcastic Grin]
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they tend to sneer at you and say “what a rube.” The point of most academic discourse is to show that common sense is wrong because it’s common. Only the elect are able to see the world as it is.
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Even Polonius got some things right:
Though this be madness, yet there is
method in ‘t.
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I don’t think I understand what you mean by the expression “magical thinking.” Can you specify what conditions would lead you to identify something as falling into that category, or not?
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First – you didn’t define your terms. “Magical thinking” needs a definition for the essay to really make sense.
2 – we had perfectly functional religious communism. They were called “monasteries”. They functioned best at small scales, and joining them was voluntary.
Like solar power, communism does not scale up past a hamlet’s-worth of people.
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I would prefer to call what the monasteries do “communalism”. Unlike what the disciples of Marx push, the monasteries don’t have a doctrine putting oppressed against oppressors.
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Definition is below, intended as a response to Stoddard, but I seem to have bungled the reply.
Pretty much everyone who calls themselves a communist today is not a sincerely Christian religious monastic.
Entirely separate set of beliefs, in my view, Marxist socialism mostly inherited through Stalin’s victims.
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Feather blade said
Perhaps for some short period some monasteries worked like this. But very quickly the Abbots and Abbesses had more and did less than their brothers and sisters, some of the brothers had better than the initiates. Some brothers had more than their fellows some worked far less being favored in some way.
Similarly, the early Christian Church is described as holding things in common. And yet people cheated on it (See Ananias and Sephira) and Paul had to tell folks at the church at Thessalonica that if someone wouldn’t work then he shouldn’t eat.
If you look at various other similar groups (e,g, the Shakers) they ultimately fail and not entirely because they fail to recruit new members.
The magical belief here (if I may borrow from Bob) is that all work is equal and that the value of something is based on said work imparted. This is part and parcel of why the Economic theory of Marx and Engels is so screwed up. Apart from their obsession with inequality this in itself is seen to fail either in minor ways or spectacularly across history.
Even families to some degree founded on this principle of sharing often end up with violent divisions over sometimes the stupidest of differences.
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Marx never really “worked” a job and Engels came from a wealthy family.
Sounds very much like the Left today.
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True. The same clearly applies to Barack Obama as well as Joe Biden.
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Want to see a truly ugly fight? The funeral’s over and it’s time to divide up Great-Grandma’s kitchen items — and both Aunt Mae and Aunt Sandy are determined to have that relish tray Great-Grandma always used for the cranberry sauce at Christmas dinner. The monetary value is negligible, but the sentimental value is immense.
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Yep. Mother’s family nursed various grudges for years after Grandmother passed because she was senile and had promised the gramophone and records to all of them at one time or another.
OTOH, my mother-in-law wrote a detailed list (separate from the will) expressing her opinions on who got what, but adding, “you boys work it out.” The result was an almost frictionless sorting with no ill-will.
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Sounds familiar. MIL physically gave us the antique phone, hall antique mirror, and painted misery whip saw, before she died. Before she went into her spiral into dementia. Then one of the SIL’s wanted it back after MIL (FIL) died because the two girls got the contents of the house and the two boys got the contents of the garage, but the will stated “equal shares”. Contents of the house? Meant nothing to hubby other than the above 3 items. Contents of the garage? Like we needed any of it (didn’t). SIL did not get the items back.
Mom has done the same for us 3 girls. Most items will go to the grandchildren. Gotten to the point where we don’t want more things. A few things that if no one takes them we will avoid them going to charity (grandpa’s paintings, grandma’s desk grandpa made for her, antique table found in grandma’s attic when she moved into the house, etc).
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Communism as practiced is effectively a complete perversion of Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Judaism). It denies the existence of the divine. It attempts to force through rules and punishments the result of loving your neighbor as yourself without actually encouraging the practicioner to feel affection for his or her neighbor.
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It includes thinking that does not have every step laid out.
If I have forgotten about mathematical induction, I could only practically verify addition for small numbers. Assuming that I have verified addition, and could trust it to that degree, if I had tested it, and was missing the key detail when I tested it, would be magical thinking.
I mostly use sets to define magical thinking. Take the set of thinking, subtract the set of thoughts non-magical, and what is left, everything else, is magical. Which of course just shifts the definition problem.
I often approximate ‘non-magical thinking’ as being some thoughts about mathematics, where all assumptions are included, and also all assumptions are verified. If I have to trust anyone else to have gotten any element right, than my thinking on that math is trusting, and not entirely non-magical.
Logic is very dependent upon assumptions.
The conclusions and decisions that one makes, and considers important, without being able to see and verify every single step, are a subset of magical thinking.
You can turn some but not all magical thoughts into approximately non-magical thoughts by examining, searching for the assumptions, laying everything out, and testing very carefully. Quite a lot of ideas fail at this conversion.
Action generally requires some conclusions about good or bad, and immediacy. Immediacy tends to be very specific to a set of circumstances. So, by the time ideas about immediacy start to be tested, they are generally out of date, because circumstances change even if one is not active oneself.
What if being eaten by a Tiger was the only way to go to heaven? If you anticipate that question, you can check against theolgoy, and go no. But, then, you might find that you only have to deal with wolves, or a train, or whatever.
The general short hand that avoids all of those specific questions is ‘preferring to remain alive’. But, this does not consider the situations where that default is not every person’s desire. Some people would not elect to attempt to use cannibalism magic to extend their lives. Cannibalism magics of acquiring traits by eating a person with those traits is a very common magical thought, so healthy or vital persons by implication could be longevity food.
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That seems like an excessively broad definition, as it includes, for example, the great majority of scientific research. See for example Michael Polanyi’s writing about tacit knowledge. Certainly it includes many quite practical activities such as cooking a meal or fixing a car. I’m not sure that the term as you define it has any utility.
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Well, if you consider the motivation for developing it, you would expect a broader than ‘necessary’ or entirely sound definition. The two motivations were a) ‘hey, the existing consensus is clearly much too narrow’ b) ‘I need an idea that I feel comfortable defending, and I would be unwilling to get a humanities degree’.
On the narrow side, it has been pretty clear for a while that ‘inevitable historical forces’ are functionally spirits. In terms of mechanics, we have no reason to think that they exist. Except as an emergent phenomena of individuals, for which the ‘historical forces’ model can only be a reduced order approximation.
Group mental phenomena that exist in themselves migth pretty much have to have a mechanism that is woo, or psionic, or something.
If I use a broad definition of magical thinking, I can port that into a definition of religion, and a definition of personal (2) magic, that are also very broad. That broad definition (1) of religion fit my need, then.
Consider the critical theorists. They basically postulate an ancient super conspiracy, that set up ‘the bad stuff’ back in prehistory. Some include sex physical disparities in that conspiracy, and assign it a recent date. Despite that what we know about big headed babies, the pelvis, and ACL tears indicates a much earlier date at he most recent. Their theory of how is basically word magic, and explicitly contrary to some other more reliable theories or claims of fact.
They spend a career trying to do critical theory word magic to fight the ‘bad stuff’. Seemingly as result, it twists them up inside and makes them vicious.
Then we have them thinking that the current Jew hating is a productive PR exercise for them.
If you model all of that as a religion, downstream of their group magical rituals, then it is easy to understand why they might have driven themselves insane from the perspective of mainstream culture.
As for ‘the great majority of scientific research’? Yeah, that would not be a test result that I would take as indicating a problem with my theory. I’m significantly irritated by what I see as unfounded magical thinking across a wide range of academic disciplines. Engineering is not an academic field I often loudly condemn, but I have problems with, for example, some of the ‘grand societal challenge’ thinking within that discipline.
I’m frequently of the sentiment that they only results from a university that you should be trusting are results that you personally obtained.
I have problems with quite a lot of borrowings of ideas between academic fields. The literature, generally, seems like it probably has a lot of suspect work buried in it.
Anyway, this line of thought was informed by a rather massive axe to grind when it comes to a large number of academic theorists, and I was more concerned about not giving people an easy out for an idea they cared a lot about, than I was about avoiding including a bunch of ideas that no one cares about.
The people very worried that they may be tricking themselves? They maybe aren’t really committing themselves to anything long enough to have much of a permanent impact.
The folks who learn something by rote in a freshman class, never revisit testing it, and never stop talking about it? Well, I may form grudges too easily.
(1) magical thinking, with group rituals
(2) magical thinking, with ritual, by a person in private
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No, I’m sorry, but that doesn’t seem compelling, or even acceptable. As St. Paul wrote, abusus non tollit usum (“abuse does not take away use”). When I took college courses, I studied Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetic theory, thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, molecular and classical genetics, and various other parts of biology; those were real results, even if “science” courses now offer nonsense under the same name. I had to learn economics by my own reading, but results such as Say’s Law and Ricardo’s Law are real also—either can be demonstrated mathematically. Your pointing at all of the content of academic instruction as magical thinking again strikes me as overbroad.
More generally, your category of “magical thinking” seems to be defined negatively, by the absence of a certain desired trait. I don’t find this sort of classification satisfactory. For example, zoology textbooks and courses used to be divided into vertebrate and invertebrate. “Vertebrate” is a proper category: It includes animals with spinal cords and backbones, a well defined group with specific traits in common. But “invertebrate” includes two or three dozen other animal groups, each with its own roster of traits; it even includes sea squirts and lancelets, two groups of animals that belong, along with vertebrates, to the larger phylum Chordata and have many specific things in common with vertebrates (though not all, or else they would BE vertebrates). There are no actual features you can identify as shared by all “invertebrates” that are not shared by all animals, including vertebrates. And I don’t think there are any positive features shared by all examples of what you call “magical thinking” that are not shared also by what you regard as nonmagical thinking.
I might accept a category of “magical thinking” that included specific positive traits: “in magical thinking you get from A to B by this route.” But it just doesn’t seem to me that you’ve specified such a route.
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The detection hypothesis inherently trades off between false negatives, and false positives.
You have whatever distribution you assume for your absent case, you have whatever distribution you assume for your present case, you have the metric you have access to directly. Some range of metric values is in both distributions, realistically, and that means that you are trading false negative probability against false positive probability.
Okay, if you studied Newtonian mechanics, there is a chance you studied deformation. If you study the conventional theory of elastic deformation, that makes a lot of predictions that you can pretty directly test for your whatever material in question. So, with enough study, enough time, and enough budget for experimentation, you can verify geometric continuity (from continuum mechanics) for your material of choice, etc. Okay, obviously that set of solutions will be invalid for your tests that do plastic deformation, and for your tests that cause material failure by crack growth, etc.
But, that level of understanding continuum mechanics is not magical thinking. It may include some magical thinking, but it is not all magical thinking.
At the same time, it is quite possible to study that same material, and have a grasp of it that is by rote, that trusts the instructors blindly, or is outright magical. ‘The beam deflection table says this, so it must always happen’, even for the case where the table was applied to a beam that has a critically placed void defect.
Magical thinking is in the mind of the thinker. There is no superficial quality that gives you a free pass for never doing it, even in your own speciality when you are a legitimate scientific expert.
The features that are common between some of these cases of academic theory problems include a) borrowing ideas outside the field carelessly, or without properly following up on later developments in the source field (for example, the biology theory of ecosystem. Ecologists have not kept up with the engineering developments in control theory, or in systems identification.) b) not understanding inherent limitations of behavioral theories c) not understanding enough foundational theory of measurement to properly evaluate their experimental work (Education) d) presuming that mathematical theory ever is a driver of real world e) taking basic courses, effectively by rote, and trusting every single thing that the instructors says. f) never considering the obvious intuitions about the limiting assumptions of the theory’s origin.
You’ve just said yourself that something is ‘real’ because it can be ‘mathematically proven’. That is precisely a thought that I have issues with. Math tells us about mathematical models. Some mathematical models match to reality, some I would trust a very great deal, but they are always to be /tested/ against /reality/.
There are plenty of models that are self consistent mathematically, but which also quite clearly fail obvious tests against reality.
High quality models, that every real expert agrees are true enough, can still be misapplied by someone that those experts have trained.
Theory should never be applied blindly, and should always be tested against the application, as part of applying it to whatever specific thing.
Math is not an inherent proof of anything real, it is only as good as the tests applied to mathematical theory, but it is very functional for physicists and mathematicians to treat math as something directly real.
Behaviorists are in error if they have that mindset. Reducing behavior to a number is too much of an abstraction away from reality, and contains too much inherent error from that process.
Math is a very useful language for discussing reality, and real situations.
Theory is very useful, as a time saver, to not attempt to test every single thing, on its own, each and every time.
However, the problem I have includes, exactly how other people think about mathematical theory, and reality, how I find myself thinking about mathematical theory and reality, again and again.
I screw up my measurements, again and again, in my own occupation.
I screw up my own predictions, again and again, in my own occupation.
Statistically, barring a radical change in my thinking, I will make mistakes again in the future.
The correct judge is applying tests against reality (and also letting the customer understand on their own whether I am serving their needs).
Yes, it is necessary to take preliminary results in academic theory as a starting point for later discussion. This is necessary for science. A strong degree of trust, on the other hand, is much more optional.
Original essay was never meant to be a complete exposition of that particular theory. There was a late edit that removed the disclaimer about skipping over the boring rederivations that give obvious results. Doing every single step correctly in this particular argument, presuming that I can, and that it holds together, is more time than I can afford right now. I try to lay out the interesting/newer conclusions carefully, but I still used a process that is much too quick to allow for any degree of real rigor.
It is in response to a previous estimate, and is a corrected estimate. It may err too much the other way. It is quite possible that it is practical to achieve a theoretical explanation that describes the phenomena with better accuracy and precision. That may hold up to rigorous theoretical analysis better.
This is partly a limit of the current state of my own work. I am not a behavioralist, I do not spend most of my time trying to get my behavioral theories up to an acceptable level of quality, I simply discount the quality of my behavioral theories.
Perhaps you can do better, in a way that serves my particular use case as well. This theory serves my use case well enough, for the time I had to spend developing it. Again, I have a very fundamental problem with fully trusting any mathematical theory to determine reality. What are the assumptions of the model, and how persuasively can we argue that they really do hold everywhere?
Mathematical models are at best maps, and reality is the territory. ‘Map is the territory’ magical thinking is one concern I have about academic theories, but it is far from being my only objection.
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In magical thinking, you get from A to B by not having a route at all.
If someone provided a shortcut you can use, you don’t have to know the specific route yourself, but it does exist, and it’ll reliably get you to where you need to be. So unlike Bob, I’d say that magical thinking doesn’t include *all* thinking that doesn’t have every step laid out — but I think I see why Bob framed it that way, because if you test ideas against that standard, those that rely on magical thinking will quickly hit a gap where there simply are no steps to lay out.
When the expected sequence of events starts to look like a plan devised by the Southpark underpants gnomes, there’s your magical thinking. (Does it qualify as magical thinking if nobody can lay out how, but it observably does work despite the gap? Probably not; at that point, it’s a matter of limited knowledge, not magical thinking.)
The fact that quantum mechanics involves a lot of stuff that might as well be magic even to the people who understand it best (this particle suddenly becomes detectable and Thing X happens; why and how, we don’t know, but it does) doesn’t necessarily make it magical thinking. It’s a knowledge gap; physicists understand a lot of the inputs and outputs, but can’t see inside the box yet. Magical thinking would be thinking that anybody *does* understand how it all works at this point.
Anyway, yeah… This probably doesn’t satisfy your request for a precise definition, but it’s a distillation of the argument that works for me, at least.
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No, there is a path from A to B in magical thinking.
It is simply that it is not all the same type of path, so if you set yourself up to define things in terms of type of leap, or type of shortcut, you are either setting your self up for a lot of dedicated study, or to have an incomplete listing, or both.
If word magic conspiracies are infinitely powerful, it makes sense that only another word magic conspiracy could possibly hope to change reality.
Christians literally believe that Christ was sacrificed on the cross to atone for Christian sins. This is literally magical thinking, and there is definitely a path from A to B. Some Christians are introspective enough, and honest enough to describe it as magical thinking, adn own that magical thinking. Others partake too much of the societal message that magical thinking is always bad, and are not willing to defend those particular choices as a good thing. But, appeals to magical thinking of the Christian flavor are not very useful for attempting to persuade people who are not Christian, or who are not the same flavor of Christian, using the same words to mean the same things.
Avoiding magical thinking is useful when one is trying to communicate persuasively across the boundaries of magical traditions. But, even if one is working with such disparate groups of people, there are situations where mutual communication and agreement are not possible, and it makes sense to proceed along to whatever best alternative to negotiation.
It can be really hard, from the outside, to sort out who is thinking magically, and who is approximating less magical thinking by doing due diligence when it comes to the theory that matters most to their day to day life.
You need a subject willing to share their thoughts in detail, and you need to be willing to put in work examining those.
Sometimes, you can ask a weird question about certain steps, and get a really unexpected answer. Then, emotional intensity /may/ be a clue about how important that idea is in how they navigate reality and or daily living.
But there are also things like insanity, peculiar background experiences, having a bad day, getting confused because notes were misplaced, etc.
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Magical thinking: thoughts or behavior not based on logic or any train of thought, but jumping from e to k without any way of actually getting there. One example often used is
Communism: 1) revolution 2) ??? 3) Paradise
Magical thinking can be “The earth is going to die if we don’t sacrifice the virgin to the dragon,” or “If I teach these children to doubt themselves and their gender this will result in paradise in the future.” A determined logician might extend that to “If I teach these children to doubt themselves and their gender, they will have fewer and perhaps no children and we will achieve stated population goals sooner.”
That last requires at least a little thought to get from a to g to m, even if they ignore all the pain, degredation and evil in between.
As stated, magical thinking is “Tiger! Run!” It’s usually programmed behavior without any thought behind it. We do it all the time without thinking. 😀
In our modern world, magical thinking might be triggered by advertising (If I go eat at McD I’ll feel young again) politics (candidate A is a bad person because they’re not my type of person) or many other things, and if questioned often results in a call on authority.
The important thing in the definition is that there is little or no thought involved.
I had a friend who was a determined atheist, in spite of the fact that she had visits from dead family members who told her things she could not rationally know. When I pointed out the discrepancy she had to think about it and find a way to support her “magical” thought process.
Magical thinking usually takes place beyond the reach of rational thought. How many people question the idea that the light will change? But we wait, because that’s what you do.
And this is getting too long.
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Well, when I was young I was poor, and a Quarter Pounder is $7 now, so if I go eat at McD I will feel poor, like when I was young. QED.
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Not enough coffee.
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The only practical way to avoid magical thinking is to test it against reality. What do you see? What can you measure? Can you make accurate predictions? Can you make plans that work?
I’m an electronics engineer. Lemme tellya, magical thinking won’t make the widget work. You have to design the circuits correctly, taking into account both how the components are supposed to work (the data sheets) and how they actually work (little details that aren’t specified). If there’s a microcontroller involved, you have to consider the programming. When laying out a circuit board, you have to watch for interactions between unrelated signals through capacitance and/or inductance.
The hallmarks of magical thinking are plans that don’t work, and inability to learn from their failures. Such as communists being unable to learn any lessons from a hundred years of unrelieved failures, famine, and mass murder. Every communist Believes with unquestioning fervor that they are smarter than all those failed communists in the past.
“C’mon, Bullwinkle, that trick never works.”
“This time for sure!”
Or Charlie Brown taking Yet Another kick at the football.
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Weirdly even in writing, magical thinking doesn’t work. I have to put in the steps, or the reader won’t enjoy it. Note Marxists just stomping readers/viewers SHOULD enjoy their ficiton. Magical thinkers all.
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One of my Rules Of Better Writing: As the author, you have the god-like power to make anything happen, make your characters do or say whatever you want. If you abuse that power, if you make crazy, stupid, arbitrary senseless shit happen for no evident reason, your stories will suck. The readers will tell you they suck, because you have NO power over them.
In the real world, you first have to stipulate that there IS an objective reality which can’t be overcome by magical thinking. Marxists fail that test every time.
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And the really interesting thing about that is that, even when the story is about magic, it still must follow the logic of the “rules of magic” as described or implied in the story or it will still suck. “Suddenly, the hero, in violation of his known ability and all the rules, leaped out of the pit” doesn’t cut it.
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“Nothing up my sleeve” rips off sleeve.
“Presto” pulls out carp.
“No doubt about it, I need another hat” B Moose.
Perfect example of magical thinking.
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Magical thinking is not plotting out a fantasy novel about wizards, but it probably should be.
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Magical Thinking examples.
“Magic Dirt” – bringing people from third world shit holes to the US makes them absorb the culture and become good citizens.
“Experts” – listen to the experts and believe “SCIENCE” that reduces population to help Gaia and save the population from the flu.
“Racism” – only whites are racists, except liberal white women. Jews are Schrodinger’s whites, depending on what faction of the Left you belong to.
“Gender” – the same children that aren’t responsible for their college debt can now make the decision to chop off their sex organs at a even earlier age.
“Climate” – the same planet that has been f’cked up by spaces rocks, solar activity and volcanoes is effected to the extreme by only by the humans in the Western part of the world, so they need to be penalized.
“DEI” – Ability doesn’t matter, equity builds the best pedestrian bridges and airplanes.
“Education” – The government that can’t balance it’s books and dumps money into the most corrupt country in the world knows how train your child.
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“Mirror Magic Dirt: The idea that being born here automatically makes you a good American citizen and nothing else matters.”
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Some ideas are fractally wrong.
(This was an essay, for folks who are new and do not recall.)
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Precisely. even for three generations, if you are in an aggressively anti-American community — red diaper babies — it doesn’t do anything to make you a good American citizen.
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Touche’
Although I think discussions of “good citizen” would go down the same path as “True Scotsman”.
“Welcome audience to your daily call-in show, “Under the Kilt”, where we decide what makes up the characteristics of the “Ideal American Citizen”.
Today’s sponsor is one for the libertarians: “SNACKOS”. “Your crave is our crunch!”
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See also “blood”, “school(s)”, “Military Service”, “we -like- those”, “we -haaaaate- those”….
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Sure but there’s also “being born here for three generations makes you American” — another version of magic dirt.
The truth is we’ve not been inducting our children into AMERICA.
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see also: “Devout Catholic” as in our president is such a devout Catholic he crosses himself at the mere mention that women should not be allowed to murder their own children seconds before said child draws its first breath. Because he’s one of those magically thinking Catholics.
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What you think depends entirely on what postulates you choose as your base – this applies even to mathematics.
Practical example – navigation.
If you are driving from Los Angeles to New York City, it is not “magical thinking” to postulate a flat Earth and draw a straight line on a flat map as your first approximation to the route. The deviation from a least distance course from accepting that postulate is far, far less than the deviation that will be caused by the reality of the road network, and the mathematics is relatively easy to deal with.
If you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City, though, you must accept the postulate that the Earth is a sphere. Otherwise, your “least distance” course from a flat Earth postulate will probably end you up somewhere on the coast of Virginia. Treating the Earth as a sphere is not “magical thinking” in this case, although treating it as flat would be. Spherical trigonometry, somewhat more complex, is required.
Even that postulate is not good enough when you are trying to provide GPS coordinates to a couple of meters. Your spherical trigonometry calculation has to take into account that the Earth is not a perfect sphere – or even an oblate spheroid. Not to mention that the gravitational field is not that either, and does not match the geometric shape; and that relativity from velocity differences has to be accounted for. Any set of postulates that doesn’t take all of those factors into account is “magical thinking” – and your drone is going to blow up some poor farmer’s sheep instead of the evil mastermind’s lair. Very complex mathematics involved for this purpose.
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too loose use of “magic” in thinking.
there is slow vs fast thinking:
fast thinking is fast “cheap” autopilot. it worked right most of the time in our evolutionary past.
slow thinking takes a lot of time, costly! and still can be wrong, if you assume wrong.
when fast thinking is right it isn’t magical, just a reflexive short cut.
slow thinking can be “magical” if based on wrong assumptions.
instead of using “magical thinking” better use “autopilot thinking”.
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No, not too loose.
Magic thinking is employed by all of us, and is sometimes advantageous. its evolutionary roots are the BENEFICIAL cases. “If bush moves and I see yellow tail, it’s tiger.” When in fact it could be something pretending to be tiger. but if you stand around thinking, you’ll get eaten.
HOWEVER it is arriving at conclusions without proof.
Which allows cult like thinking, such as communism.
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“Autopilot thinking” doesn’t explain the growth of mass illusion that says “Destroy all wealth — ????? — paradise.”
BUT magical thinking does.
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Autopilot thinking is only one aspect. All dogs are canines, but not all canines are dogs.
You can generalize to something as loose as “magic” but can’t go much farther in defining the scope.
Even non-linear and illogical cover only a portion of the possibilities. Not all “magical” thinking is illogical, nor is it all non-linear.
The word magic has a particular societal implication that makes it fit in this usage. It implies something where the thought and the conclusion don’t necessarily match up, or have pieces missing between, without going so far as to define what pieces are missing.
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there are bunches and bunches of magical ideas, or magical theories
they all made sense to some body, at some time
The consensus theory in a lot of academic fields is, when you look at literal descriptions, pretty much a theory of word magic.
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When you see something long and thin by your foot, fast is more important than correct because the wasted energy from leaping away from a stick, or harmless snake, beats out the bite of a poisonous one.
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Precisely.
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I started reading fast and slow thinking a couple months ago.
That is not the distinction I am trying to make here.
If you suppose that the law of contagion, or law of similarity makes a voodoo doll work, then that would be magical thinking whether or not you did that thought as a fast thought, or a slow thought.
It is precisely practicing stuff as slow thoughts enough to train them into fast thoughts that is the phenomena of interest there. (If you train your autopilot to crash into the ground, you crash into the ground.)
If you practice the magical thinking of your traditional religion, and put that in your autopilot, then the results of doing that are probably going to be similar to previous cohorts who did the same rituals and thought patterns.
What about automatically trusting some academic theory, and putting the same amount of mental practice into it? That is going to have some sort of result, and if the theory is truly new, you do not know what that result will be.
If the theories have previously been well tested by believers, then you may have some other known pattern.
The standard academic response is to say ‘but my academic field is good’. There has not been real academic free speech for a while, and many fields have been carefully shielded from hearing criticism. Even the scholars who think they are testing their ideas well are crippled because of the criticism that they have not heard.
It is exactly academic theorists taking ideas seriously, without enough testing, that is of interest.
Animists may think that a tree or a rock has a spirit with a special power, that can be negotiated with and appeased.
That thinking does not stop being magical simply because they are trying to negotiate with or appease the spirit of a statistic, or of an equation.
There are people with college degrees who in all seriousness suppose that they were able to make chapter Y contain X theme, or that ‘the monomyth’ must say something about the human mind.
The behavioral fields by and large do not know how to reliably measure what they think they are measuring.
Education seems to be a particularly bad example, and almost everyone in America has been trained at least partly by Education majors.
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If YOU build it, THEY will come.
Who is this THEY that YOU have to build things for?
If THEY want it, why don’t THEY build it?
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Sometimes they need you to build the half of the bridge on your side of the ravine.
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Sometimes it is better that THEY stay on the other side of the ravine.
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Sometimes it is a good idea to find out why one group moved to the other side of the ravine in the first place. There may be a very good reason why your ancestors moved to a place where the others couldn’t get to them easily. Bridge building technology has existed for a long time, so why hasn’t one been built before now?
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I think the author touches on the crux of the problem, and that is that we have tried to coexist with communists for a century, and it has proven impossible. Communism seems to be the ultimate manifestation of several sorts of demonic possession. One must extricate the demon from the human. Otherwise, it will only end in war and deaths, as the commies themselves brook no other alternative in their ideology.
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“Magic” and “Magical” are far too often shorthand for “Not Understood”.
Sometimes used with a sneer by those who do not understand.
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Which statemetn serves both as a summary of what I was trying to imply, and as a critique of what I actually said. :D
I assumed it might be the second, when I first read it.
Certain academics use ‘other ways of knowing’ as a hammer to promote savage societies against our western civilization.
but, every legitimate theory in anthropology cuts more than one way.
Ordinary everyday Americans can have ‘other ways of knowing’, that may be magical thinking, or may be strictly rigorous logic that does not make any concessions to critical theory.
If academics fail at being persuasive inside the norms of mainstream American culture, they fail to be persuasive in that way.
A savage who kills and eats people as a counter-magic against being witched has a set of motivations that make sense to them.
Academics have motivations that make sense to them.
Americans who are not academic have motivations that make sense to them.
A lot of academics have, with their selections of magical thinking, ended up driving themselves savage and barbaric. Savage and barbaric are real words, that have a theoretical purpose in describing the real world, despite what the anthropologists or archeologists may feel.
Their notion of indigenous is a bit silly, and a bit untrue.
Academic consensus, and publications, can be rituals, if there is any great amount of magical thinking in the theories involved. If scholars write a bunch of stuff privately, like a curse tablet, that would be ‘casting a spell’ based on whatever magical thinking in their theory. But, since they do it in company, academia has a bunch of mystery cults, or cults.
At this point, the self-proclaimed experts have betrayed the public grievously enough that they are getting stricter scrutiny as a result.
It is possible that I am incorrect, and that my description is purely my own insanity.
My gut is that there is going to be a great deal more discussion going forward, adn that the worst ‘scholars’ in academia will be even more obnoxious than they have been.
If the academic sub culture does not know how to coexist with the public, that is probably more of a problem for the universities than it is for the public, ultimately.
There are other ways of studying or teaching the few good academic theories, that can be done without government funding or official support.
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It looks like the Biden campaign is maneuvering to either “fix” or completely evade the Presidential debates. The campaign has announced it doesn’t want to debate under the guidelines set by the Presidential Debate Commission. It claims that debating in front of a live audience is counter-productive, as the debates should really be for the TV audience. The campaign is calling for direct negotiations between the respective campaigns to hold two debates – one in June, and the other in September.
The PDC had announced plans to hold three debates across September and October.
trump has responded by saying that he’s ready to debate Biden, and the June and September debates are acceptable. Trump wants early debates so that he can debate before early voting starts.
My guess? The Biden campaign is scrambling to figure out a way to either mitigate or avoid the issues involved in putting Biden up for a protracted length of time in front of an audience. The removal of the live audience is the first step.
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