Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Kinda sad that the ritual was a way to curse somebody. 12,000 years of hurting each other.

Side Node: computer programing is kinda cool. It is a set of incantations which actually does work.

EDIT: Hello, all you down-voters and people who say I should read the article before commenting :-) I to, don't like it when people just start commenting without reading the article.

I also don't like it when people take what a pop-sci writer too seriously. In this case, I was interested enough to read the original article in Nature, where it says this practice was for cursing (see quote at the end)

Don't forget Gell-Man's Amnesia :-)

"Howitt described how magic was employed to harm a victim using a ritual fire and a wooden object smeared or attached with a piece of human or animal fat (major sources of lipids): “In all these tribes a general, I may say almost an universal, prac- tice has been to procure some article belonging to the intended victim. A piece of his hair, some of his faeces, a bone picked by him and dropped, a shred of his opossum rug, or at the present time of his clothes, will suffice, or if nothing else can be got he may be watched until he is seen to spit, when his saliva is carefully picked up with a piece of wood and made use of for his destruction..."

Well, I read an article once discussing the social good of cursing each other. The essence was this:

Yes, it's an attempt to do harm. You're mad at someone, perhaps they wronged you, and you want something bad to happen to them. So ask a demon to spoil their grain, or to tear their clothes. (In other words, pray that entropy will happen - you can't go wrong!) If you didn't have demons you could ask for help and you were motivated to do them harm, you'd have to take matters into your own hands. By slandering them or harassing them or attacking them. Much better for society that we genuinely believe we can get our revenge by not doing anything at all.

Struggling to find the article now though...

This is a very profound point. We have to actually live with each other, and even for small groups, frictions arise. As the groups get larger and larger, friction intensifies. There has to be some way to blow off steam.

Kind of like how instead of cities fighting each other, we have their sports teams fight each other in a ritualized, ersatz combat.

Where are you getting that from? The article states it was a healing ritual -- the ritual was something done to someone who was already sick. Presumably...to make them better. I have no idea where you got the idea that it was intended as a curse.

sigh yet another victim of pop-sci.....I've edited the OP with an explanation.

That's not how I understood it. From the article:

> "The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete,"

Which to me seems like a healing ritual.

Alas, the writer of this pop-sci article got it wrong---see my edited OP which contains a quote from the original nature article.

>One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a small fire was lit underneath.

>"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," a Monash University statement said.

Curses are what you do instead of beating someone with a stick. It's an outsourcing of justice to nature or spirits rather than taking it into your own hands.

This is a very profound point. I suppose it's kind of like what the olympics are supposed to do: how about we all fight each other in a ritualized game, instead of with sticks and stones, strikes and drones.

It's not a surprise to me that computer programs are so widely compared to magic spells, from SICP to SMT, but it remains a cool observation.

Computer programs do nothing. It’s computers, i.e. actual hardware, which work. We forget this at our peril.

If computer programs do nothing, why do we need them?

A computer can run them, and thereby accomplish things.

So programs can affect the internal state of the computer, thus resulting in useful work being done which would otherwise not be done in the absence of said program. Which means programs do something, rather than nothing.

This is like claiming books change the world. In one sense they do, but in a a bit more real sense it’s people reading books who change the world. A crucial distinction.

To elaborate on the analogy:

Books cannot change the world if they lie unread on a shelf or are confiscated or impounded and kept out of people’s hands.

In the same way, software cannot be useful to you if your hardware will not run it.

Therefore we cannot think that by being programmers making software, we are directly helping people; we can only help those people who can, and will, run our software.

chuckle computer programs are the incantations we do to make computers do what we want. Quite a bit like shamans did incantations to get the world to do what they want. Only ours actually works. Or, it does if we can debug them.

Only if you take computers for granted as a natural part of the world. Which you do at your peril.

Where did it say it's a curse? The first line says it's a healing ritual

You have to go look up the Nature article which this po-sci article was written from.

It says nothing about cursing. Please read article first before commenting.

I read the original Nature article, not the one written by an underpaid and overworked english major who wrote the popular article.

Then maybe you cite it? And what a shitty assumption to make of the writer, btw. And also, what the fuck kind of a condescending attitude to have for the English major? Maybe if you were an English major we wouldn't be posting all this nonsense right now.

Mr./Ms. greenheart, whoever you are, life is too short to have hostile conversations.

As far as a condescending attitude---I did say they were underpaid and overworked, didn't I? When you are overworked don't you start to make mistakes as well? I sure do.

Hey buddy, I have a few English majors in my life and they are some of the best people and I would pick any of them over someone like you in a split second. I suggest taking some classes in the English major to keep yourself from becoming a complete POS, which what looks like is happening.

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