Comment by williamtrask | Hacker News Reader

Comment by williamtrask | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> For the sake of the survival of the planet/species, I also don't think any institution based around magical thinking should fill the gap.

I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not. At any time literally any tribe could have chosen to believe in nothing. It’s almost impossible to think that no tribe tried it. Heck. It’s the default state until you make up a deity!

And yet… the overwhelming majority of societies were based on “magical” thinking.

Inversely, it’s possible there could be a hard scientific truth that we discover and kills us all (“information hazard” by Nick Bostrom is a good survey… think nuclear bombs etc)

It’s a really interesting mental experiment. Is truth best defined by repeatable experimentation (Manhattan project) or by human thriving (including magical thinking).

Aside: Reinforcement Learning theory hardcore leans (implicitly) on the latter.

>I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not.

I disagree. "more effectively than not" is an implicit comparison between "magical believing" societies and "non magical believing" (in other words, scientific) societies. Given the latter allows modern medicine, surgery, sanitation, mass food production and countless other advances, it seems obvious that science affords a much greater degree of survival than does belief in magic. One only needs to look at the increase in the average human lifespan and reduction in infant mortality rates over time to see that.

Science has given many things, and as a professional research scientist, I help it continue to do so. I by no means think science should go away.

However, it also created the ability for humanity to destroy itself: the nuclear bomb, climate change, and plenty of other existential threats.

Also there are plenty of non-tech tribes which display tremendous lifespans. To my knowledge, the common threads among centenarians is not usually tech or globalisation driven. Often they’re religious and they’re very often closely knit with their local communities.

The jury is still out on whether science is net positive. We’re only a few hundreds if years in (12,000 if you want to start with the dawn of technology…being the plow).

It’s made lives better and worse while simultaneously significantly decreasing the amount and depth to which humans believe they have a purpose, a pursuit I feel science has made little to no progress on.

But my stronger point is that magical thinking was naturally selected (as in natural selection) to be almost universally advantageous for the first 99% of human existence. I’m not sure our 1% experiment with a scientific society is as of yet conclusively better. We’ve almost made humans extinct. We might still. I don’t know of a magical belief (karma, etc.) that has put humanity in such a grave threat as the Cold War or climate change, for example.

>However, it also created the ability for humanity to destroy itself: the nuclear bomb, climate change, and plenty of other existential threats

Would it be better to not have any knowledge at all and be at the mercy of nature?

Acquiring power always comes together with the possibility of misuse. Maybe those who never got as far as we got would prefer to eventually get wiped out by nature (and it's gonna happen either way, what with the heat death and all that). I'd still prefer to have lived to know the electron than the alternative

> I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not.

Not true. Majority of progress human civilisation made happened in last 100-200 yrs. in the industrial revolution and Information Age. None of them were based upon “magical” concepts but only science, hard work and facts. Infact it has been the most pragmatic time in human history.

We would soon land on Mars within this century, exponentially increasing the chances of survival of human specie in the very long run. Plans already underway for moon as well. All of this would be made possible by people who believe in pure facts and science and not in magical things. I think the “magical believing” phase occurred due to 1) extreme fear of adverse events(floods/volcanoes) or the things unknown to humans (how does it rain? We don’t know. Let’s create a rain god and keep them happy so it doesn’t run erratically. Try that now with Climate change on our head, rain or cold wave patterns won’t change even if 7bn people worship a rain god today). But now that humans know a lot of these answers, the era of scientific truths begun and will continue forever. Would be interesting to see where religion goes in next 50 yrs.

You are assuming that magical thinking is the optimal survival strategy as opposed to a lesser-evil byproduct of advanced cognition in a particular environment. This is like assuming that because all humans have appendices, having an appendix is necessarily a better survival strategy. It's not. It may have once served a purpose, but now the best it can do is kill you.

Nukes could wipe out the human race, but so could an asteroid. Coincidentally I'd be much less worried about having nukes if there was a lot less magical thinking in the world.

I don’t think magical thinking is optimal. But I do think strictly non-magical thinking is suboptimal. Despite being a scientist as a profession, I can’t ignore the empirical data across a million years that virtually all civilisations independently have magical thinking.

Your analogy of the appendix is a good one. Some things which were useful no longer are.

I feel religion in particular doesn’t fall into this category as it has known uses. Collective action in particular is something the exclusively scientific worldview seems to repel in practice.

I also think that we don’t yet fully see this because todays secular humanists have a tremendous amount of moral momentum inherited from 10 thousand years of non scientific society. But things are changing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com