
Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs [pdf] - Hooke
https://raulsanchezdelasierra.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/nunn_sanchez-de-la-sierra_aerpp_2017.pdf
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nabla9
Similar phenomenon was found with native tribes hunting caribou in some
islands (Newfoundland I think).

Caribou herds are divided between different valleys with little movement
between them. Before hunting starts, nomadic hunters asked spirits to select
the valley where they travel to hunt as a group. They did it using method that
is essentially throwing a dice.

If the hunters had choosen the nearest and easiest valley every time, they
would have hunted caribous into extinction valley by valley. By randomly
alternating the hunting pattern and moving longer distances they allowed
caribou populations to recover.

~~~
netcan
Fascinating.

One of the interesting open questions in human history is the prevalence of
extirpation due to human hunting pressure. I think the theories range from a
"blitzkrieg" of human impact as sapiens hit the cultural milestones of the
paleolithic revolution to gradually mounting impact starting in pre-sapien
times or even having started relatively recently (with prehistorical
extirpations attributed to other factors).

I bet type of dynamics you're talking about go back a long time. Humans are
very culturally driven. What & how people hunt or eat is all very culturally
driven. Hunting cultures still exist today. There are still living traditions
of hunter gatherer cultures. There are people who fish. There are brits on
horses. All of them have cultural norms that seem counterintuitively random.
For example, fish considered edible by fisherman are almost always a much
smaller subset than blind palatability test would estimate. When I visited the
states (florida) I caught some "mudfish" which I looked up online, then ate
(tastes good). The locals told me "we don't eat them, but some black people
do." This is not unusual. The English eat different fish than the French. It's
true of gamebirds and it's true in traditional cultures too.

...Anyway, hunting practices can have big effects on local ecology. It seems
likely that cultures with beneficial rites, spread or spread those rites.

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panarky
This is deeply fascinating.

    
    
      We provide theory and case-study evidence showing how incorrect
      beliefs persist.
    
      Although harmful at the individual-level, we show that they
      generate Pareto efficient outcomes that have group-level benefits.
    

Pretty much my view on religious practices in the West.

Many beliefs are almost certainly untrue, yet there are big benefits for group
members.

Those of us on the outside with our evidence and falsifiable hypotheses are
left with envy.

~~~
mrec
If you enjoy this sort of thing, you might try Marvin Harris' book _Cannibals
and Kings_. It's pretty old now - I read it in 1990 - but it's full of
thought-provoking illustrations of how apparently bizarre superstitions and
practices can actually be adaptive.

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webnrrd2k
I wonder how much of this is related to the whole ”beards make better
soldiers" thing. Something like combat effectiveness strikes me as extremely
difficult to understand and incredibly dependent on people's particular
psychology, as well as group Dynamics, so much so that ”magic” (a.k.a. placebo
effect) is as good an explanation as we are going to get for a while.

[http://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/study-shows-combat-
eff...](http://www.tactical-life.com/firearms/study-shows-combat-
effectiveness-and-beards-are-related/)

------
suyash
Magic is for real - if you don't believe it, we need to meet :)

------
bradfordarner
This paper leaves me feeling uncomfortable. There are so many problems with it
on so many levels and, yet, I think it is fascinating in the sense that it is
applying a well known concept to a novel context.

Personally, I have a hard time seeing how this "bulletproofing" technique
could possibly be true. However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and
lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption
that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a
false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians".
Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to
show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the
village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the
effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z.

As an aside, it seems weird to start with the premise that the belief is
inherently false when the village was able to protect and free itself. You
could very well make a claim that the "treatment" was effective from a
scientific perspective; it would require replication in order to be validated.
Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the
opposite of scientific enquiry.

The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion. This
sounds more like a piece of literature from an "enlightened" European priest
visiting a wayward tribe of "barbarians" during the 19th century colonization
of Africa than a modern, scientifically-rigorous scholarly article.

~~~
mturmon
In the spirit of cultural relativism, here's a parallel anecdote about
(incorrect?) superstition from our own treasure box:

 __*

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and
on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a
machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going
wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

~~~
Fjolsvith
I used to be a computer technician. Sometimes I arrived at a customer's office
and the perplexed person couldn't explain why his computer suddenly started
working. I developed a theory I called the "Tech Threat Syndrome", which posed
that computers occasionally hid their problem whenever a technician appeared,
so as to embarrass their user.

~~~
lolc
My theory around this is rather mundane: People behave more in the way they
were taught when an authority is around. That makes a lot of computer problems
go away when a techie shows up because people avoid taking shortcuts when
they're being watched.

In my view this is sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

~~~
mjevans
It may also simply be that they're slowing down and actually waiting to
respond to problems instead of trying to get things to work as fast or easily
as possible.

Traffic manages to flow quite smoothly at the speed limit when a police
officer is just standing around somewhere... (but there's usually a major
bottleneck right upstream of that observation point as everyone panics and
straightens up their focus).

Similarly, it is amazing how disruptive something worthy of gawking at can be.
A curve in the road, a car safely on the shoulder, flashing lights that scream
"PAY ATTENTION TO ME": all of those things seem to result in gawker-block.

Self driving cars really can't save us quickly enough.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Your police car example is pretty ignorant of the negative upstream affects of
the police car. You may as well say traffic is no longer in a traffic jamb
once you're past the point of the jamb.

