Call Your Local Wizard | Hacker News Reader

Call Your Local Wizard

slate.com

73 pointsdrdee40 comments

>Rather coyly, Stanmore refuses to weigh in on the efficacy of such spells. “It is not my place to say whether the magic practiced by cunning folk was real,” she writes: “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” She does propose that all of their fellow citizens believed in the cunning folk’s powers. Many magicians had excellent reputations in the art of finding buried treasure or directing the outcome of lawsuits, and she maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

That last line of this quote and the first line of this quote sound to me like they contradict each other.

You can have a consistent reputation for success without having real magical powers.

Being lucky is an option. ("I shall cause it to rain" and it just so happens to rain.)

Outsmarting your client is another option. ("I shall cause it to rain... tomorrow" - meanwhile, you have used meteorology to predict that it will rain tomorrow.

Lies and rumors are a third option. ("That magician can make it rain! I saw it with my own eyes!" meanwhile it's actually just a baseless rumor which has circulated around town for a while.)

Confirmation bias is a thing. If you believe that magical powers are real you will find a way to explain away when it does not work while celebrating loudly when it does. For example if your wizard cannot cause rain it's because the curse is too powerful etc. Additionally growing up with something, such as when everyone around you believes something, makes it somewhat unlikely that you will question it. Finally, if everyone around you believes something there is strong pressure to do the same thing to fit in.

I have a theory that a lot of mental biases could be explained by energy minimization - changing beliefs requires brain reconfiguration which is expensive, so we tend not to do it... unless it's imperative to survival.

> I have a theory that a lot of mental biases could be explained by energy minimization - changing beliefs requires brain reconfiguration which is expensive, so we tend not to do it... unless it's imperative to survival.

I am pretty sure this is a very variable trait among humans, some change their mind easily others almost never change their mind. Its expensive as you say, probably communities survive best when some change their mind easily and most keep their mind steady and only change when presented overwhelming evidence (usually from the minority that easily change).

People who do that kind of thing for a living are very good at setting low expectations for success and blaming outside forces for failures and taking credit for every lucky hit. Dowsers, cold readers, etc.. it hasn't changed for centuries and con artists and magicians use all the same techniques today.

> very good at setting low expectations for success and blaming outside forces for failures and taking credit for every lucky hit

Sounds like a lot of management and executives I've ever worked with honestly

This reminds me of the story of Fermi and the "great generals"[1]:

  During the Second World War, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked General
  Leslie Groves how many generals might be called ‘great’, and
  why. Groves replied that any general who won five major battles in a
  row might be called ‘great’, and that about 3 in every 100 would
  qualify. Fermi countered that if opposing forces are roughly equal,
  the odds are 1 in 2 that a general will win one battle, 1 in 4 that he
  will win two battles in a row, 1 in 8 for three battles, 1 in 16 for
  four battles, and 1 in 32 for five battles in a row. ‘So you are
  right, General, about three in a hundred. Mathematical probability,
  not genius’.

[1] quoted from (PDF): https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

Reminds me of this old con idea. Get a mailing list of 1024 people, send half an email that the market will go up, and half that it will go down.

The next day, half of them will see you got the prediction correct. Of those, send a further half a prediction that it will go up, and the other half that it will go down.

After 7 total rounds you’ll have 16 people that have seen you consistently predict the market for 7 days.

Sell them your next prediction.

Derren Brown has TV shows where he implements this idea. Entertaining.

Later the article discusses how some of those results were achieved via the application of psychology, which does explain why some might have excellent records of success.

The same could be said of any technology.

What does this mean? The excellent results of antibiotics could be the result of psychology? CPUs? Lasers? Satellite imagery?

I suspect that the person you're responding to is critical of psychology, so they read my comment to imply something contrary to their very strange worldview and responded accordingly.

I could, of course, be very wrong. That's just my best guess as to what they meant.

Well that isn't self-serving at all.

You gave us only eight words.

I did my best to parse them into something meaningful and relevant, expending much more thought and effort than a few random words from an internet stranger are usually worth.

If I failed and you meant something else with those eight words, my biggest failure won't have been misinterpreting you, it will have been in responding at all to someone who writes like they're on Twitter when they're not.

This isn't the place for that.

That's not my interpretation. You seem to be claiming magic was only successful when it was underpinned by psychology, right? swayvil seems to think magic works because it is a form of technology. That's not to disparage psychology, it's to commend magic, which existed before psychology as a concept. Magic is not Psychology. Psychology is Magic (with a more respectable and hopefully evidence based rebrand).

My view is that if you don't know why or whether some strategy works then the scientific method should be used to test whether the phenomena in question is real or not and gain a better understanding of it if it is. To do otherwise is ignorant. But how to come up with scientific hypotheses in the first place?

That and applied psychology is a pretty handy tool to know. But dressing it up in superstition is superfluous, dishonest and counter-productive.

> You seem to be claiming magic was only successful when it was underpinned by psychology, right?

I was not. The article stated that psychology was sometimes used to great success, and I was pointing out to those who hadn't finished the article (as it seemed to me, many had not) that it was already mentioned as one possible explanation.

Antibiotics are compounds that if imbibed can cure the sick (under some circumstances). They would be considered magical in the middle ages when bacteria were not known of. Now we have better descriptions of nature. Paracetamol/Tylenol was discovered as a derivative of Willow bark, which was chewed as a cunning prescription for toothache.

Can you claim you know why the pills you take work or don't work? Many popular antidepressants in use today wouldn't get a licence now from a lack of provable efficacy and the placebo effect. How is that different?

(can't help but think of the fixer in pulp fiction)

VINCENT: I said a "please" would be nice.

the Wolf takes a step towards him

THE WOLF: Set it straight, Buster. I'm not here to say "please". I'm here to tell you what to do. And if self-preservation is an instinct you possess, you better fuckin' do it and do it quick. I'm here to help. If my help's not appreciated, lotsa luck gentlemen.

JULES: It ain't that way, Mr. Wolf. Your help is definitely appreciated.

VINCENT: I don't mean any disrespect. I just don't like people barkin' orders at me.

THE WOLF: If I'm curt with you, it's because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast, and I need you guys to act fast if you want to get out of this. So pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fuckin' car.

Those statements are not mutually exclusive. Whether or not the magic was real, people at the time believed it was real. Some practitioners clearly were successful in some manner, be it with magical or practical means

> Many magicians had excellent reputations [...] She maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

For a modern version of this phenomenon, check out any discussion about chatGPT here on HN. Things haven't changed all that much.

I had the same thought. People know that ChatGPT is completely fallible—prone to hallucination, etc—yet people continue to abuse it to do things it's incapable of doing—write a legal brief, create an A paper, etc. This is the same magical thinking that would lead someone to consult a wizard.

No, that's just you dissing a tool by playing up its imperfections. Some people do what you say. Others, and I imagine most ChatGPT users that also hang out on HN are like that, recognize the tool is fallible, but also that for many tasks, it's orders of magnitude easier to check a solution than to come up with one from scratch. Even >50% rate of failure is fine - you can retry your query four times, mash the responses into something serviceable, and sand off the rough edges yourself; it's still easier and faster than doing it yourself from scratch.

Or put another way: you bet I'd go to my local wizard if magic was real and they were half-competent at wielding it. Now, magic isn't real, but GPT-4 being better at almost everything than any single human, is a trivially verifiable fact.

Or put yet another way: most software devs are fallible and half-competent at what they do; this doesn't stop the world from making software.

> GPT-4 being better at almost everything than any single human, is a trivially verifiable fact.

You are either very wilfully ignorant or deluded beyond redemption. Name one thing GPT-4 does better than a competent human — beyond sheer volume of output.

Translating any language.

That is indeed probably the strongest application (indeed, the original motivation for the development of) LLMs. But it's not one thing. It may be able to 'translate any language', but it fails to be as good as the best translator of any given language. GPT-4 does indeed have a range exceeding that of any human ever, but if you fix a domain then it won't come out on top.

So try again.

I'm no wizard of AI or anything, but Claude 3 has been exceptionally good for me at malicious compliance and bureaucratic red tape wars allowing me to bring an additional (and welcome) perspective into complex circumstances. I've also used Claude for some math and physics problems and while it can get off the rails if unconstrained or if the problem is poorly defined, it's surprisingly good and its logic matches other humans at the undergrad level. But, I'll also be the very first person to call this technology a stochastic parrot. I'm not opposed to using a screwdriver for a hammer, if it works.

Look, that's my point: for any given specific task, there are some humans better at it than GPT-4. But there are no humans that are this good at more than a handful things simultaneously. GPT-4 is. It's not word-class in anything, but it's above average in almost everything. That's a very useful quality to have.

Is it, though? The world needs quality work, not vast amounts of mediocrity.

The world runs on mediocrity. To demand otherwise is a mistake of perfectionism.

Think of the grocery store you frequent, or the barber you visit, or the accountant that does your taxes or keeps company books. They may be the best available to you, but by world standard, they're all mediocre. Hopefully, you don't hold it against them.

> GPT-4 being better at almost everything than any single human

Why do people insist on comparing GPT's output against the output of "any single human"?

Of course if you pick any human on the planet, GPT is better than them at generating something. It's better at generating poetry than I am for instance.

But it's generally not better at humans when doing the things that those humans are good at. It's generally not better than software devs at writing code, it's generally not better than artists at creating artwork, it's generally not better than doctors at making diagnosis, or better than lawyers at producing legal arguments

Comparing GPT to a single human is absurd. Compare it to the people who you're actually trying to replace with it and it comes up short constantly

At least for now

Because none of us have enough friends, colleagues, or professional contacts to have access to someone good in any random thing you may need for one-off custom job. Most of the time you have, you'd have to pay through the roof for it. GPT-4 is approximately free, so even if it's not particularly good at most things, it's still more help than any of us could have otherwise.

The subheading and parts of the article itself emphasise the medieval, while the period covered is mostly early modern, just overlapping with the very end of the medieval.

I wonder if it is avoiding the disquieting thought that belief in magic is more of a modern than medieval characteristic? No only was it openly believed in during early modern times, but it is still believed in although most people do not call it magic - it is usually disguised with some kind of talk of things like "energy" or a pseudo scientific wrapper.

> Stanmore refuses to weigh in on the efficacy of such spells. “It is not my place to say whether the magic practiced by cunning folk was real,” she writes: “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.”

Ok...

> Many magicians had excellent reputations in the art of finding buried treasure or directing the outcome of lawsuits, and she maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

So you do believe but it's too shameful to admit.

It doesn’t have to be “real” for people to believe it is real. And really, it doesn’t matter if it was “real” if people believed it was real.

Because if people believe something is real, it can have a real world impact, regardless of whether or not the “magic” was “real”.

People are strange like that and medieval people would have been no different from us in this regard.

Universal eclipse coming up

And the 13 year and 17 year cicada swarms are at their 300 year coincidence.

It's a sure sign of something

No, the thing in the news right now is that a certain number of plants will form a rough line as seen from the earth, which just means they're all in the same general direction.

It is not a syzygy, nobody's eclipsing anybody.

https://www.theplanetstoday.com/

>a certain number of plants will form a rough line as seen from the earth

Ah, a fellow galactic hitchhicker. I too am a fan of dead-reaconeering in favor of astrolabian navigation.

In this case voice-to-text gone wrong and not corrected within the edit-window, but at least the error is a dictionary-word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com