Comment by magicseth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicseth | Hacker News Reader

Recently, in the tech and geek community, I've noticed a backlash towards magic. I understand it in the contexts of the rejection of blind faith and superstition, but I think it fails to recognize the larger scope of the word 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.

That's really cool. I've published some of my own theories on basically the same thing:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writing...

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/03/how-to-blog...

Have you checked out the book Why Don't Students Like School? I've heard it also explores this, but I haven't had time to read it yet. The book Made To Stick actually has a chapter on this as well. This is a problem that I've been somewhat obsessed with for several years now.

Here are some slides from one of my workshops on using magic to create better technology:

They are very controversial, especially out of context, so please understand that the slide that says the value of learning goes down over time has obvious qualifications, and is not generally true. It does however make a lot of sense in the context of my presentation.

http://magicseth.com/presentations/Imagineering%20InsightOut...

After reading the first half of your thesis I really like that model. However, I would take 'effort' and split it into two parts: the effort needed to create a new model, and then the effort needed for integration. It seems like a lot of the time people figure out what the new model could be, but they never go through the work of actually integrating. This can lead to all sorts of cognitive disfunction and psychospiritual crises later on, perhaps even full-blows psychosis if their anxiety is extreme enough. You kind of do this in the text, but not in the picture. The picture is pretty muddled in general, but I think the overall idea seems correct.

I would also choose more concrete definitions for each of the terms you're using, and specifically I would define each of them in such a way that they form a logically consistent system. Fuck the dictionary. (E.g. I would probably say that wonder is intrinsically coupled with the desire to know more, whereas awe isn't. Doing something like this would make the flowchart vastly more actionable.)

Anyway I like this model, I think it probably needs to be cleaned up a bit, but conceptually it seems like you've pretty much nailed it.

Thanks!

The slides weren't made to stand on their own, and are not entirely self-explanatory.

I'd love to chat about this in person if you're in the valley.

"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 makes sense, but the "fitness" of such a trait (positive response to Wonder) will vary a lot depending on your circumstances. A positive response to Wonder might confer an evolutionary advantage if you're born into a middle class family in California in 1980. OTOH if you're born into a peasant society in 1580, being prone to long periods of daydreaming is probably undesirable!

Would love to read your masters thesis on the theory of Wonder, if it's done! Research for my universe.

http://bettermagician.com/papers/

The masters thesis is the first one, but the intercultural study was in my undergraduate thesis which is only available in person. Let me know if you would like to see it, and we can meet up in the real world.

The author seems to say the formula for magic is imagination + determination. Turning on a light would be one kind (or level) of magic: the Harry Potter kind. Inventing light switches, when everybody thinks you have to rub two sticks together, or wire up electrical circuits by hand to get light, would be another. The kind I've seen arguments about recently are analogous to a new kind of light switch, with a built in light sensor, so when you turn on the light it automatically turns it to the "right" brightness for the level of natural light already present. Those against it would maybe rather have a dimmer so they can control the brightness, or maybe rather install the light sensor themselves.

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