Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs [pdf]
raulsanchezdelasierra.files.wordpress.com
raulsanchezdelasierra.files.wordpress.com
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.
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.
The random gods bit just being a small part of the larger act.
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.
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.
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/
> 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.
http://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/study-shows-combat-eff...
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.
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.
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.
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.
*
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.
In my view this is sufficient to explain the phenomenon.
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.
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...
I think it is outside the scope of this paper. But that is part of the thing that struck me as being so bizarre. This isn't a paper about the efficacy of the spell on an individual level. It seems to be a paper that is discussing how a belief in X may have high potential risk to the holder of belief X and, yet, be beneficial to a group of believers in X. That is an interesting but counterintuitive idea. I could see the same model being applied to experimental cancer treatments on a purely conceptual level.
> "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians"
This is admittedly 100% rhetoric on my part and may be "too much". However, there is really the way that authors' view of these villagers came across to me. I'm sure that is partly due to spending time in Africa and the very positive impression of the people that I came away with.
As you said the authors start by mentioning: "unfalsifiable religious claims". So, they seem to start the paper by classifying this a one of those "unfalsifiable religious claims". But, they then immediately classify it as a "false belief" without any evidence for such being the case AND the "false" modifier being irrelevant within the context of the paper.
> The authors come to exactly the same conclusion
Once again, that is what I find so bizarre about the article. I guess it is just me. But, it doesn't sound like a scientist conducting a study; it sounds like one part cultural commentary and one part science. The conclusion doesn't seem to require the cultural inferences about belief systems and their falsifiability or lack thereof. Hence, it struck the wrong chord with me.
I guess I would like to believe that we (i.e. all science lovers) are really looking for a better understanding of the world and that we can do so without pre-conceived judgements of something that is foreign to us.
The closest explanation I'd allow of how this bullet-proofing is supposed to work is that the smell is so bad the attackers get confused. Really, that would be my first hypothesis if it could be shown that the ingredients matter.
I noticed that, too. The first sentence says that many people hold unfalsifiable beliefs. The second says that many of these unfalsifiable beliefs are false. Which is it?
Seriously, the biggest expense is going to be shipping the researchers.
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.