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Comment by topherclay | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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(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.

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?

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

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