It will never not amaze me how many humans believe dumb shit in this new age of information…

We now have access to more info than any human before us, yet it seems like the main consequence is more and more misinformation.

If you go deep, then you’ll find plenty of intelligent folk keeping the truth safe for later generations. But we still have countless well-meaning dimwits (bless ’em) who are circulating what can only be described as dumb shit…

… and I’m not talking about your average “whoops I got it wrong” errors — hell no — I’m talking about batshit crazy claims that can’t be backed up by a damn thing, yet believed by millions.

Sometimes billions.

As a truth-seeking keyboard warrior, I find superstition the most unusual offender. There ain’t many red flags as dumb as when a new person wanders into your life after the year 2000 with a handful of tarot cards, trying to sell you crystals, while asking about your stupid star sign.

Wanna know how dumb ideas are born?

Here are the 4 chapters of this post:

1. How dumb shit is born
2. Why dumb shit survives
3. How dumb shit spreads
4. Why dumb shit is here to stay

1. How Dumb Shit Is Born…

I’d reckon we start with superstitious pigeons:

All you need to know is that a guy named Skinner put a bunch of pigeons into a bunch of boxes. He then dropped food into each box when a pigeon performed a specific task he had chosen for them.

So maybe one pigeon would get food when he pecked the side of the box.

Another would be fed every time she flapped her wings…

Shit like that.

You can guess what happened next:

Each pigeon did more of whatever led them to be fed.

Obviously, the bird who was rewarded for pecking the box was now pecking more often. The bird who was rewarded for flapping her wings was now flapping her wings every few minutes. Exactly as expected.

Right?

Well, now it gets weird…

Skinner ran the experiment again, but this time he dropped food into boxes at any old random time — no matter what the pigeon was doing. Amazing or boring.

Skinner didn’t care.

He didn’t time it.

He didn’t even look.

The pigeons were fed at random times no matter what they were doing.

Still, over 75% of the birds exhibited an odd behavior.

For example, one bird walked in circles all the time while another was pecking the box. One pigeon was standing on one leg, while another was flapping his wings. Some chicks were dancing while others were bobbing their breasts around.

The poor pigeons wrongly believed that whatever they were doing when the food dropped, was the actual reason for the food being dropped.

The birds had become superstitious.

They were wrong but they kept their belief anyway, as some kind of weird ceremony or religion or tradition or whatever.

We intelligent humans know this is dumb shit…

Right?

Lol, hell no.

To give you some idea the behavior of the bird is almost exactly that of a traditional rain dancer, found all over the world back when nobody knew what rain was or why it happened.

A rain dancer will move around in weird ways to make it rain, and if it doesn’t rain they keep trying new things. If it does rain they keep doing whatever they were doing when it rained.

And, if you think rain dancers are extinct, then I have news for you:

Recently here in Bali we had pawang hujan (or rain shaman) whose job it was to delay or divert the rain so that the MotoGP Grand Prix could precede without a hitch.

Many of my Indonesian friend’s were embarrassed, while I thought is was somewhere between insane and cool in its own weird and wonderful way.

That’s how stupid beliefs start.

That’s how superstitions start.

That’s how traditions start.

It is how dumb shit is born.

2. Why Dumb Shit Survives

To witness a famous superstition is to witness human brains acting in a massive collective consciousness, concluding on connections that are not there, yet still remarkable.

Remarkable just means worthy of telling people about, but this unique feature is so powerful that many of these memes will outlive your genes. Almost all of them no matter how stupid will easily outlive “you” with your fragile brain and bag of bones body which will all be gone within 100 years, almost without a doubt.

Here’s the problem:

Dumb ideas have an ability to survive almost as well as good ideas.

When enough people talk shit about something, that particular shit gains significance in the ears of the person hearing it so often, especially when it originates from more than one source.

But something cannot be significant for no reason.

So, humans naturally need to justify anything they find significant.

And (here’s the kicker) what humans find significant is what is shared significantly. As we have already covered, this can be good or bad shit.

True or false… it doesn’t really matter.

When enough people tell you that the number 13 is unlucky, you are likely to believe it. I’ll come back to the number 13 in a second, but for now let’s focus on how many humans go along without question, the same way modern day morons say…

“Touch Wood!”

This wood we must touch to disarm something we have said makes no sense, but even I’m guilty of doing it. Nobody knows or cares why we do it, so let’s check.

Recently, I received a reply from my last “superstitious” email about this wood touching phenomenon:

Hi Tristan,

“Touch wood” has become a silly thing but originally, it made a lot of sense. In the days of wooden sailing boats, only fools would not “touch wood”. Why do you refer to “superstition” using the female personal pronoun “she” btw??!!

HEIDI

As for the “she” thing…

…it is my Aussie slang acting up again, mate. We refer to trucks and massive machinery as “she” too, or even our “everything” when we say “she’ll be right mate”.

It ain’t sexist so you can relax.

But back to the letter at hand…

Heidi is right.

There have been times in history when today’s’ superstitions made sense. You’ll find some funky justifications for believing in superstition, but this isn’t a good one.

Just because something made sense in the past, does not automatically mean it makes sense in the future. That’s an argument from tradition, which is a formal logical fallacy.

And, Heidi’s origin story isn’t the only one.

It is also believed this dumb “knock on wood” shit originally came from the folklore of the ancient Indo-Europeans, who believed trees were home to various spirits. Touching a tree would invoke some blessing of some spirit within (or whatever) so it started as a spiritual religious thing and evolved to also be used when people were lost at sea or just afraid in general.

Fine, back then, I kind of suppose maybe.

But these days it is still used by people all over the world in many different religions, cultures and countries. I’d bet my best friend’s lunch money that many of you still touch wood when you want to un-jinx something you’ve said — even though you have zero belief it will work, no idea why it could work, no clue how it started, why you should believe it — or even how it came to be believed by others in the first place!

And, you don’t care.

So why do we do this?

And, what do we learn from it?

Let’s get back to numbers.

I enjoy defusing the spookiness of the number 13.

At Jesus Christ’s last supper, there were 13 people around the table — that’s counting Christ and the 12 apostles. Some believe this is unlucky because one of those 13, Judas Iscariot, was the betrayer of Jesus Christ. Apparently Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th to sit at the table.

Like that matters…

But suddenly, the superstition surrounding the number 13 became so widely known yet heritage forgotten — much like “knocking on wood” — that the number 13 itself became unlucky in many Western countries.

After an extremely long and disappointing game of Chinese Whispers, today we call this dumb and irrational fear of the number 13, Triskaidekaphobia.

Well done intelligent humans!

It is so common that in most buildings in most Western countries, the 13th floor is missing. The elevator goes from 12 to 14, due to a real fear that real people from real societies have, because Jesus had dinner with 12 people… or something.

My point?

Most people who fear the number 13 don’t even know why...

Turns out, if you spread your lack of logic over enough time, then ridiculous conclusions can be believed by billions.

And, religion isn’t the only way superstitions begin, by the way.

Did you know about these superstitious numbers:

Number 4
In cantonese (and other languages who borrowed words from Chinese like Japanese and Korean) the number “4” is unlucky because it sounds like the word for “death”.

Number 14
In some of those same languages, the word for “1” sounds like the word for “Must” which randomly results in the number “14” sounding like “must die”.

Number 17
Many Italians fear the number “17” because in Roman Numerals it looks like this XVII, which can be rearranged to form the word VIXI, which in Italian means “My life had ended”.

That’s a log of mental gymnastics to be scared of death — which seems to be a running theme and the main fuel for many superstitions.

But I think we can all agree none of these are good reasons to be scared of a number. We know from the examples I’ve mentioned that these superstitions can stay alive for an extremely long time, so let’s talk about how humans spread them.

3. How Dumb Shit Spreads

It seems humans who spread dumb shit seemed to have a unique survival advantage.

Imagine two idiots walking back to camp 10,000 years ago.

Both equally stupid.

Both have heard the legend of the flying ghost baby who lives in bushes and eats humans every full moon (which is something someone else made up).

The only difference between these idiots is that one is superstitious and believes the legend is true, while the other is skeptical and doesn’t believe the legend until he has evidence.

A fair and rare stance to have back then.

Suddenly, they hear a rustling in the bushes a few meters away.

Both idiots hear it.

The superstitious idiot believes the sound to be the infamous flying ghost baby. Due to this thought, he receives an instant adrenaline rush and his body achieves fight or flight. He throws his arms in the air and runs back to camp like a startled clown… and then (this is the dumbest bit) he tells everyone about his ghost baby encounter, as if it were true and he had some sort of actual encounter or any evidence at all — and it is accepted often without question.

The skeptic ain’t so easily convinced.

He is calm and collected.

He is thinking critically.

He has no idea what the sound in the bush might be, but he sure as hell needs evidence before he takes such drastic action. So he slowly edges closer to the bush. Ever so carefully, he investigates the source of the mysterious sound…

…and it turns out to be a deadly snake.

Snake bites skeptic.

Skeptic dies.

Startled clown survives.

Life ain’t fair.

Similar scenarios of simply being superstitious actually saving people’s lives would have played out countless times over the course of our human history, and is one of the reason some humans today are superstitious rather than skeptical.

The superstitious lived on to have little superstitious babies.

While the skeptics died horrible deaths investigating mystery.

Is Superstitious Nature Or Nurture?

Superstitious is almost certainly mostly nurture.

The superstitious gene is hypothetical, but many respected scientists today believe. Whether superstition comes from genes or memes, we know it can sometimes be passed through generations more effectively than DNA or language.

I caught a good quote from scientist Michio Kaku about this:

“First of all, I think there is a gene for superstition. A gene for here-say. A gene for magic. A gene for magical thinking. And I think that when we were in the forest that gene actually helped us. Because 9 times out of 10 that gene was wrong. Superstition [generally] didn’t work.

But 1 time out of 10 it saved your butt. That’s why the gene is still here. The gene for superstition and magic.

Now, there is no gene for science. Science is based on things that are reproducible, testable, it’s a long process; the scientific method. It’s not part of our natural thinking.”

I like this quote and reckon he ain’t wrong.

But I’ll admit he is taking a massive leap of faith:

Michio cannot claim to know that superstition helped 1 out of 10 survive. It is just a guess like my ghost baby story.

And, even if he could (and did) we still cannot know if this superstitious gene helps people survive more than it kills people, which it also definitely would have.

I mean, which happens more often?

Believing something magical and wrong that ends up saving your life?

OR

Believing something magical and wrong that ends up killing you?

I don’t know.

Neither do you.

And, I don’t think Michio Kaku does either.

How would you measure such a weird thing?

Whether you believe superstition is more likely to be spread by people with a “superstitious gene” or not, those genes are not the main reason superstitions are still around today, and spread by millions.

4. Why Superstition Is Here To Stay

1. It Is Way Too Easy To Believe

Our brain enjoys shortcuts.

The easier something is to believe, the less likely we are to verify. The best example I can think of for this would be the “5 Monkey Experiment” which you have probably heard of but yet to know an important part of the story.

If you haven’t heard it before (I bet you have on social media) it goes something like this:

An experimenter puts 5 monkeys in a large cage:

High up at the top of the cage is a bunch of bananas.

Underneath the bananas is a ladder.

The monkeys immediately spot the bananas and one monkey begins to climb the ladder. As he does, however, the experimenter sprays him with a stream of cold water. Then, he proceeds to spray each of the other monkeys.

The monkey on the ladder scrambles off.

And all 5 sit for a time on the floor, wet, cold, and bewildered.

Soon, though, the temptation of the bananas is too great, and another monkey begins to climb the ladder. Again, the experimenter sprays the ambitious monkey with cold water and all the other monkeys as well. When a third monkey tries to climb the ladder, the other monkeys, wanting to avoid the cold spray, pull him off the ladder and beat him.

Now one monkey is removed and a new monkey is introduced to the cage. Spotting the bananas, he naively begins to climb the ladder. The other monkeys pull him off and beat him.

Here’s where you thought it got interesting:

The experimenter removes a second of the original monkeys from the cage and replaces him with a new monkey. Again, the new monkey begins to climb the ladder and, again, the other monkeys pull him off and beat him – including the monkey who had never been sprayed.

As each monkey is slowly replaced, the rule remains.

Until eventually, there are 5 monkeys in a room that do not allow each other to climb the ladder, yet none of them know why.

Cool story, huh?

Sounds like my ramblings about superstition, huh?

The popular version of this social media post would finish with a caption:

Don’t follow other’s behavior, think before you follow.

But here is the more interesting bit:

This experiment never fucking happened.

You just believed some bullshit.

Ironically, so many folks sharing this unverified pseudoscientific story, reveals our tendency to unthinkingly follow the herd. Not by the fake story. But by the fact so many share it without thinking if it is true, checking if it is true, or caring if it is true.

To most humans, it just doesn’t matter if it is true.

That’s the problem behind superstition.

That’s why people believe dumb shit.

Humans share a post that is about thinking before following other’s behavior – without verifying if it is true – which is itself an act of following other’s behavior without thinking for themselves.

You can’t make this shit up!

Pretty meta, huh?

2. It Takes No Energy To Keep It Going

I’ve done the “touch wood” thing since I was a kid, and never once bothered to look up why people do it. I know it doesn’t do anything and it certainly has no scientific backing.

Yet, I continue to do it as full grown man.

It is just easy to do.

It is fun to do.

3. It Serves A Purpose

When someone says “touch wood” they are usually not being superstitious. We know damn well touching wood does nothing. We are simply using the English language to communicate to someone that we don’t want whatever we just said to happen.

It is simply showing our intentions.

Communicating.

Which serves a pretty useful purpose.

And, there are other ways superstitions can serve you.

For example, it can be a good sports strategy to believe your lucky shoes help you win basketball games. I am guilty of this dumb shit too, when I played basketball in Australia. I honestly believed I played better if I had my lucky shoes on. Of course that dumb shit wasn’t true…

..or, was it?

Try convincing 16 year old me that my shoes didn’t give me luck!

You couldn’t.

And, if you have this self-delusional belief in magical shoes, the real magic starts:

4. The Placebo Effect

If, at the end of the day, you truly believe luck is on your side, it is likely to make you play better basketball due to your own insane psychology.

Dumb shit sometimes works.

Just like Dumbo the elephant had a feather to help him fly, or Bugs Bunny gave everyone “magical water” to win the basketball game in Michael Jordan’s Space Jam.

It was all a placebo.

But, placebos work reliably.

Dumbo couldn’t fly because of the feather.

He could fly because he had massive ears.

The feather just made him believe he could fly.

The Looney Toons in Space Jam didn’t win the game because of the magical water. They won because they believed the water was magic — and they had Michael Jordan on their team I reckon helped.

Belief is powerful.

If a superstition can give you a belief, and that belief helps you thrive in some way, then it instantly means both your genes and the superstitious memes are more likely to survive.

Superstitions Lead To Weirdness And That’s Fine

You’re weird.

I’m weird.

Everybody is their own flavor of weird.

Some flavors of weirdness are more acceptable to society than others. Elon Musk is weird and he is the richest man in the world. But I bet the poorest man in the world is pretty weird too. Some weird people are paid well. Some are starving artists. Some are forever trying to figure out how to monetize what they love to do. Some never work it out at all. Some die forever broken.

That’s just how shit is.

You’ve come into this world with our own unique flavor of weirdness.

Good luck with that.

And, I really mean it.

If you believe in magic or not, it could help you.

If you believe in superstitions or you don’t, it could help you.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to your subjective well-being.

Only choices and consequences.

The only thing you can do in the end is play the cards you were dealt.

And, if that means believing something that isn’t true to give you the edge, so be it. Who am I to judge? One thing for sure though, being your legitimate-damn-self no matter how weird is important.

You don’t really have another choice.

Keep Reality Real,

Tristan Weatherburn
https://tristanweatherburn.com

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