Superstition is an accident of our evolutionary heritage. While decreasing in prevalence, it remains an obstacle to rational thought and a cancer of our society. Discuss.

In unrelated news, wooooooh, 666 posts. Spooky

Thank the Lord we've got past that now

You don't get past it. It's an artifact of how you think. People tend to notice patterns. Some of them have an underlying cause. Some are just coincidences. People aren't very good at probability, so they won't be able to tell the difference very well. We have been getting better at finding out if the patterns are just coincidences, and when correlation is causation, but superstition will never go away completely. Also, they spread like urban legends. Until people check everything they're told, they'll never go away. Do you believe that the great wall of china is the only man-made object visible from space? It isn't.

What's interesting to me is that superstition is in our evolved nature. You can cause pidgeons to behave superstitiously in order to get a randomly occurring reward. (link below). Apparently, under the right experimental conditions, they'll make decidedly un-pidgeonlike poses in order to get their food:
scroll down to "superstition and psychology"

Apparently, it's evolutionarily important to capitalise on patterns that are actually present. Even if we expend a small amount of resources on theories that are not actually predictive.

I think it's similarly superstitious thinking that causes us to invent "streaks" in sport. I've been told of a study that showed that basketball goals aren't actually clustered in "streaks" any more than predicted by random variation. That is, one goal streaks are as common as two goal straks which are as common as five goal streaks. A streak is just as likely to end when a team is "on fire" as when they're not. (I admit I do need to find a source for this. Either way, it's an interesting idea). The explanation continues: random variation can be made to feel like a series of streaks. Because what is a streak anyway? It's just something that starts when a team starts playing well and ends when they stop! So while the "streaks" theory doesn't make reliable predictions, we hang on-to it because whenever a few goals are scored in a row by one team, this validates our theory.

Some superstitions from Japan:

If you play lots of basketball and volleyball you'll grow to be very tall

If you whistle at night, snakes will come out to get you

If you cut your nails at night your parents will die while you are away

Your personality is totally dictated by your blood type. Hence there being only four personality types in the world

Babies in their mothers wombs must get cold because they are naked, so pregnant women should wear extra layers around their stomachs.

How widely are they actually held?

Well, the whistling and cutting nails at night are more traditional ones and probably aren't so believed, however the others are reasonably widespread. I heard the 'cold baby' one from an Australian woman living in Japan who was told it by her doctor. The blood type one is rampant, it's got to be one of the most common questions you'll get when meeting people in Japan socially. I've also heard the basketball/volleyball one from a number of different Japanese people, so it must be out there in the public conciousness.

The basketball one is a brilliant causal relationship. I'm sure you could prove it with statistics.

Most things like this do show relationships that aren't obvious. My normal response is to cite Napoleon on luck - he promoted generals deemed to be "lucky" by their peers, because he believed that those considered lucky were just expert at calculating in which ways they could increase their chances. But then, most people consider me a jammy bastard, so there may be some selection bias going on there...

Latest Japanese superstition I heard today:

Eating or drinking lots of cold food or drinks causes baldness

A doctor warned someone that although it is tempting to eat lots of ice-cream and drink cold beer in the hot and humid summers of Japan, don't do it for the love of your hair. Come autumn you will be malting like a cat if you overindulge in ice-cream during the summer. Don't ask me why it takes 3 months to take effect, it just does

Other Japanese superstitions include:

Don't wear new shoes for the first time at night

If you give a wallet as a present, include a 5 yen coin in there.

If a tooth come out in your top gum you must throw it down or bury it, while if it comes out of the bottom gum you must throw it up onto the roof. As that is the direction they want to go...

redcarded wrote:Other Japanese superstitions include:

I get the feeling these are more urban myths shared among a few cranks along the lines of what you might find on Snopes rather than real folklore - if for no other reason than that the icecream companies would have gone bust in Japan

If you give a wallet as a present, include a 5 yen coin in there.

Wait, that's a superstition? Doesn't it need a threat to go with it? Like 'if you're sparring with Arepo you must drop your guard and let him hit you until he's bored, and then give him $100, or you'll be infected with leprosy the next time you use a telephone'?

Well, I don't know. My better half heard the ice-cream and baldness one from her mother and was just doing searches on the internet when I asked her about superstitions, and there was a thread on an 'ask the doctor' website in which it was also being repeated. Mind you this doctor was also warning against the hair damaging effect of wind and the wearing of hats.... so maybe not the greatest doctor. As for the 5 yen, that's from a number thingy. The Japanese are big on that and 5 yen in Japanese is pronounced as 'go-en' which means 'good luck'. Likewise 4 is bad luck as it sounds like 'death' and 9 as it sounds like 'pain'. Japan is this wierd mix of the hyper futuristic, bizarrely medieval and kiddy fetishists, or possibly cute fluffy animal fetishists or both