What is magic?

I did a cross-cultural developmental psychology experiment on the way children think about magic. In brief, children in the USA showed an inverse correlation between their ability to understand something and their attribution of magic (i.e. if they didn't know how something worked, it was magic, and vice versa). In Mexico, I found that the correlation was not so mutually exclusive, children were willing to attribute things to magic, even if they knew how it worked.

Understanding magic not as something distinct from science, but as something that is the realm of things which you can explore to understand better is, in my opinion, a better way to frame the debate. Telling someone to stop believing in magic because no such thing exists is unlikely to change their belief system. Encouraging them to explore magic, and seek to understand it and find the magic in everything around them, has a greater chance of spurring them into a more inquisitive frame of mind.

The theory of Wonder I developed for my masters thesis posits that wonder is an emotional trigger that positively rewards us for finding things that we can't explain. The evolutionary basis for this is that the more things you find that break your world view, the more likely you will learn something to new that will positively effect your ability to survive. This could explain people's fascination with magic: we have an innate drive to find the things that baffle us, an internal reward system for experiencing wonder.

I could go on about this for days, so I'll just stop now.

This is really key. SO many people struggle with this brand of magical thinking, i.e. "There's someone out there who will solve all these problems for me." It took me 27 years to stop doing it myself. I see it with a lot of my friends starting companies and trying to get traction for them. They take every meeting with a VC who "wants to chat," they consider uber sketchy proposals from marketing guys looking to "combine my people skills with your product" etc etc etc. And it leads to death.

I spent a solid year of working on Windy Citizen where my hopes and dreams were all centered around getting one of the big newspapers to write about the site and the community coming together there. It was a huge waste of time and energy that could have been so much better spent actually building the community and making the service better.

This idea that special people do special things is proposterous. Anyone can do something special, you just have to put yourself in a position to accomplish whatever it is. Waiting around for some outside force to change your life it the fast-train to loserville. Glad Jenny shared that message with the kids.

It turns out, if you're intently focused on your own mission, if things start coming together for you, people will go out of their way to make things happen for you.

> Now in real life, what is magic in our world? It’s kinda the oppo­site. It’s about imag­in­ing some­thing which is not yet exist, and believ­ing in it so much that you will it into exis­tence with a lot, lot, lot of hard work. So much work that peo­ple often think you are crazy.

I get the "you're crazy" vibe on HN occasionally, and this is close to what I've been doing for going on 4 years now: gathering so much energy around myself -- in the form of work and effort and resources -- that the things that I began imagining even longer ago start becoming real.

I have a list of 22 different projects, spanning 50 years of time, ranging from pretty straightforward to preposterous. So far I've pulled off the first two of them, and my now-business-partner has just pulled off another on his own. We're picking up speed!

Thanks for getting out there and motivating kids. That's a great thing to do. :-)

  Magic is about what happens where you aren't looking.

() For "sleight of hand", watch closely the notch that magically appears and disappears when you open/close a "folder" icon on iOS. Watch the home icons fly in closely and see if it matches what you thought they were doing before you looked closely. Movies and computer games have lots of such "tricks of the trade" as any movie buff who bothers to find continuity or physicality errors in movies will tell you. Such sensory "sleight of hand" even works because your brain has loads of such tricks as, for example, visual and aural paradoxes have shown us.

I am an engineer by profession. I'm paid to figure things out, and to make those things cheaper or more efficient.

I originally came across what the common person knows as witchcraft from originally studying Yoga and Tantra from the East. I was witness to television and in person the abilities of those practitioners. I watched, and am working on Tumo (the art of creating massive amounts of heat in the body). I have been able to leave the body, like a dream state but retaining full consciousness.

The more I worked on these earlier techniques, other things made sense. I slowly am now able to perceive energy around others, as well as can tell when people are being deceiving (it changes their color).

Maybe I'm crazy. I can accept that. I'll answer questions if people have them.