

What is magic? - kn0thing
http://www.jennifer8lee.com/2011/06/23/what-is-magic-graduation-speech-for-sixth-graders/

======
magicseth
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.

~~~
Alex3917
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/2010/06/how-writing-
creates-value-.html)

[http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/03/how-to-
blog...](http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/03/how-to-blog-
insightful-.html)

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.

~~~
magicseth
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...](http://magicseth.com/presentations/Imagineering%20InsightOut%20Presentation%202008-07-29.html)

~~~
Alex3917
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.

~~~
magicseth
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.

------
brandnewlow
"But I am telling you that owl invi­ta­tion or not, you already have this
abil­ity within you. That you have the abil­ity to cre­ate magic within
your­self. That you just have to imag­ine — and believe in your imag­i­na­tion
so much that iyou work hard enough to make it real."

This is really key. SO many people struggle with this brand of magical
thinking, i.e. "There's someone out there who will solve all these problems
for me." It took me 27 years to stop doing it myself. I see it with a lot of
my friends starting companies and trying to get traction for them. They take
every meeting with a VC who "wants to chat," they consider uber sketchy
proposals from marketing guys looking to "combine my people skills with your
product" etc etc etc. And it leads to death.

I spent a solid year of working on Windy Citizen where my hopes and dreams
were all centered around getting one of the big newspapers to write about the
site and the community coming together there. It was a huge waste of time and
energy that could have been so much better spent actually building the
community and making the service better.

This idea that special people do special things is proposterous. Anyone can do
something special, you just have to put yourself in a position to accomplish
whatever it is. Waiting around for some outside force to change your life it
the fast-train to loserville. Glad Jenny shared that message with the kids.

It turns out, if you're intently focused on your own mission, if things start
coming together for you, people will go out of their way to make things happen
for you.

~~~
jenny8lee
Hi Brad. I'm glad that you found a message in it for you. Makes me think that
the message works on kid and adult levels.

~~~
brandnewlow
Absolutely. People like to help people a lot more than they like to be asked
for help. Think of how many people asked you to write stories about them when
you were at the Times, and that little part of you that died inside every time
and made you actively NOT want to cover them simply because they asked.
Meanwhile, if you heard about someone doing something awesome _cough_ Reddit
_cough_ you'd want to go write about what they're up to and spread the word.

It's the same for these kids. Waiting around for someone to make their dreams
happen for them won't work. They need to go try to be awesome and then people
will help them get better.

~~~
wallflower
Since you live in Chicago, you may be fascinated with this profile of Lois
Weisberg.

She is single-handedly responsible for helping found many of Chicago's
cultural landmarks like Taste of Chicago.

<http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_01_11_a_weisberg.htm>

------
thaumaturgy
This was a great speech, well done. This part especially stood out for me:

> _Now in real life, what is magic in our world? It’s kinda the oppo­site.
> It’s about imag­in­ing some­thing which is not yet exist, and believ­ing in
> it so much that you will it into exis­tence with a lot, lot, lot of hard
> work. So much work that peo­ple often think you are crazy._

I get the "you're crazy" vibe on HN occasionally, and this is close to what
I've been doing for going on 4 years now: gathering so much energy around
myself -- in the form of work and effort and resources -- that the things that
I began imagining even longer ago start becoming real.

I have a list of 22 different projects, spanning 50 years of time, ranging
from pretty straightforward to preposterous. So far I've pulled off the first
two of them, and my now-business-partner has just pulled off another on his
own. We're picking up speed!

Thanks for getting out there and motivating kids. That's a great thing to do.
:-)

------
rglover
That was a pretty great speech for a group of 12 year olds to hear. You rarely
see people encouraging kids anymore. What's great about this, though, is that
the author brought it down to the level of the students to help them
understand how passion and perseverance can feel like magic. Very uplifting
and I can only hope that this is taking place elsewhere.

~~~
Jach
This speech reminded me why I shouldn't give speeches to 12 year olds. :)
"Magic? Magic is what you don't understand, and while it's okay to not
understand _everything_ , there is in general too _little_ understanding going
on so wipe out magic frequently!"

At the kid level I was happy he didn't praise intelligence but rather hard
work since that seems to work out for the kids better as they grow up. Though
I wonder where "Wizard" lies on the spectrum between praising for "Hard
worker, lots of effort" and "Naturally intelligent"?

~~~
kd0amg
_Though I wonder where "Wizard" lies on the spectrum between praising for
"Hard worker, lots of effort" and "Naturally intelligent"?_

I was under the impression that it draws heavily from both.

------
aufreak3
Having recently heard "magic" being used over and over again in several
contexts, I was looking for a concise expression of what it means to me,
covering aspects of design, imagination, the work it takes, etc. .. and sort
of came up with this --

    
    
      Magic is about what happens where you aren't looking.
    

A "magician" literally directs your eye somewhere and works her "magic"
elsewhere. The iPad (or the radio for that matter) is "magical" 'cos you never
look at all the decisions, and even sleight of hand, that go into creating
every detail of it. ( _)

It takes a thorough understanding of the regularities of your world to create
something magical. Without these regularities, there is no predictability and
no control possible. And the magic happens when you hide it all and hide it so
well that nobody notices ... like a master artist masking all his sources of
inspiration in an "original" work.

In particular, if your critics say "oh I could build that over a weekend" and
you know for yourself how complex the thing is and all the myriad details that
you might be slipping right past your critics' watchful eyes, you've probably
have created something "magical".

(_) For "sleight of hand", watch closely the notch that magically appears and
disappears when you open/close a "folder" icon on iOS. Watch the home icons
fly in closely and see if it matches what you thought they were doing before
you looked closely. Movies and computer games have lots of such "tricks of the
trade" as any movie buff who bothers to find continuity or physicality errors
in movies will tell you. Such sensory "sleight of hand" even works because
your brain has loads of such tricks as, for example, visual and aural
paradoxes have shown us.

------
anonymous10
I am a magician. Or occultist. The title means nothing to me, as it is just a
name. (I am also a regular on HN, but choose to register for a temp account.)

I am an engineer by profession. I'm paid to figure things out, and to make
those things cheaper or more efficient.

I originally came across what the common person knows as witchcraft from
originally studying Yoga and Tantra from the East. I was witness to television
and in person the abilities of those practitioners. I watched, and am working
on Tumo (the art of creating massive amounts of heat in the body). I have been
able to leave the body, like a dream state but retaining full consciousness.

The more I worked on these earlier techniques, other things made sense. I
slowly am now able to perceive energy around others, as well as can tell when
people are being deceiving (it changes their color).

Maybe I'm crazy. I can accept that. I'll answer questions if people have them.

~~~
dmoney
I don't have a question, but I do have an observation. The "science and art of
causing change to occur in conformity with the will" could be the definition
of a lot of disciplines: business, hacking, engineering, painting, politics.
It's unfortunate that you felt you had to register anonymously to talk about
this particular form of magic.

Okay, I do have a question: how do you feel the "occult" type of magic is
connected with what the author is talking about (i.e. magic = imagination +
determination)? Are they completely different beasts? Is one a subclass of the
other?

------
InclinedPlane
Science very much needs to embrace the wonder and majesty of its discoveries.
It sometimes comes off as too dry, which is very offputting for many people.
However, it's important not to tread into the realm of superstition or
teleology.

