Meeting on superstition

We had our Ideas Cafe meeting on superstition a couple of days ago and it was an interesting discussion.

There was an initial question as to whether a deity or supernatural being needs to be involved before we can consider a belief a superstition or is it just mistaken belief by connecting the wrong evidence to explain an outcome?

When a deity is involved as superstition the belief cannot be falsified.  It is evasive and open to the believer coming up with new explanations to defend his belief when challenged.  The involvement of a deity makes the belief beyond falsification as there is no way to prove the nonexistence of that deity.

There was also the thought that we should not be too dismissive in ruling out other people's beliefs as mere superstition.  After all, they may well be true and perhaps we should keep it in the grey area between true and false....just in case.

However, every belief carries with it predictions based on that belief and restrictions in behavior also based on that belief.  Beliefs that turn out to be wrong give us erroneous predictions as well as put us through unnecessary restrictions in our actions.

Power and influence accumulates on the proponents of these beliefs as these beliefs takes hold on our consciousness.

The price for these errors in prediction and action restrictions may not be significant in the beginning but gradually build into our lives until they become pervasive in our culture and difficult to remove.

Before we know it,  we are watching for other people's sensitivities to superstitions that we find hard to belief but unwilling to abandon.  The superstition then takes on a life of its own and become an invisible burden on our society, achieving a credibility that they do not deserve.

As to how superstition started,  it is likely due to the attributing a wrong cause to an event.

Causation is very difficult to establish.  At most we can only establish correlation through statistical summary of our experience. 

A favorite example I heard some years ago is that we can all agree that the rooster crows and the sun rises in the morning. That statistic on its own can back the claim that the rooster causes the sun to rise as well as the sun rise causes the rooster to crow.

We need double blind comparisons with individual causes removed over time before we can establish cause.  Even then, we are not completely sure if it is some buried variable that we have not yet isolated that is the real cause for our event.

We are not naturally statistical in our thinking so correlation is already difficult, never mind establishing causation.

But we are motivated to find the cause.

With confirmation bias, we tend to guess at a theory of the cause and look for evidence to back up that theory.  Evidence that do not fit our theory are easily ignored while those that conform to our theory become valued anecdotal accounts of why things are the way we think they are.

After the meeting, I happen to be reading Dan Kahneman again and reminded of his claim that one of common errors we make in decision making is that we think "what we see is all there is".

We look at an event and assume that we have all the information in front of us to determine the cause and decide what to do.

In the old days we automatically think that thunder and lightning is the super-natural's way of expressing displeasure with our behavior. It never occurred to the people then that they do not know enough about weather systems to understand thunder and lightning.

It is impossible to know whether at any one time we know all that we need to know before making a decision.

Humans are curious by nature and we want to be able to predict the future base on current and past observations.  Our knowledge have increased tremendously over the years and our lives have improved immensely because of it.  We just have to be aware that the process, while largely successful, has not been perfect.  Humility in accepting our current belief may be in error will help.

Being aware of our biases and weakness in thinking is our protection against drifting into superstition that will sap energy and resources from our lives.