Move over, McDonalds! There’s a new worst slogan in the world.
Budweiser (a “beer” company) has a new ad campaign about sports superstitions. In a nutshell: sports superstitions (like sitting in your “lucky” chair) are funny, charming, and gosh darn it, might even be real! Budweiser’s tagline: “It’s only weird if it doesn’t work”.
I disagree. It’s weird, period.
What’s more, it’s ignorant, embarrassing, and frankly makes me a little pessimistic about humanity. Do you really think that wearing that unwashed jersey will help your team win? If yes, then please, please unfriend me on Facebook. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.
This is only weird if it doesn’t work!
Superstitions have always been a force for evil in the world. Yes, evil. Superstitions caused Aztecs to pull the beating hearts out of innocent people. Superstitions caused intelligent women to be burned at the stake as witches. Superstitions caused Okonkwo to kill his son Ikemefuna to appease the village elders. Superstitions put Galileo under house arrest, and drove Alan Turing to commit suicide, and prevent a sizeable number of otherwise educated adults from believing in the plain fact of man-made global warming.
Superstitions even keep a huge number of South Koreans from having fans in their bedrooms.
[Cue double-take]
I’m not making this up. For some strange reason, many South Koreans think that a simple oscillating fan can kill you in your sleep. This, despite the fact that fan death has never happened in human history. And despite the fact that the rest of the entire world uses fans in their bedrooms to no ill effect.
But wait! you might say, in Korean I presume. People have been found dead with fans running nearby! The fans must have killed them! Case closed!
I’ll leave it to the reader to punch holes in that kind of “logic”.
You may have heard of the famous experiment in which B. F. Skinner discovered “superstition” in pigeons:
“Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon ‘at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior.’ He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstitious_Pigeons]
A typical Budweiser drinker.
Your team wins while you’re wearing that lucky shirt? The shirt must have done it! Of course, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’re not any smarter than a pigeon.
Carl Sagan wrote a book called “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”. The idea is that science, and only science, illuminates; there is no other way to learn anything about the world. The next time you’re around a “person” who exhibits superstitious nonsense around you, cough into your hand and say “Pigeon!” Don’t worry; they won’t know what you’re talking about. Like Giordano Bruno’s torturers, or the chicken-eater Wade Boggs, or the people who stoned Tessie Hutchinson, they have no idea what science is, or logic, or common sense. They won’t have heard of B. F. Skinner or Carl Sagan or Alan Turing or Giordano Bruno.
They will, however, be familiar with Budweiser “beer”.
And they’ll be enjoying it, pathetically, in the dark.
Many Worlds Theory 
My favourites: Getting your hair cut in Mongolia on certain days is literally courting death, and in Indonesia finding a slither of cayenne pepper in a pan for no apparent reason is a sure sign something truly horrendous is about to happen.
Great post.
In elementary school there was a substitute teacher who thought that finding a dime ($0.10 US) meant death. Needless to say, students sprinkled dimes around all year. I wonder how often Indonesians just leave cayenne pepper in a pan?
You’d imagine quite often, which might explain an awful lot about Indonesia! 🙂
Well, getting your head shaved in the middle of the Mongolian winter is probably a bad idea. And finding a cayenne pepper in a meal you’re cooking might mean your dish is a bit spicier then you were intending.
‘Mentalist’ Derren Brown did an experiment with humans similar to the pigeon experiment: People were put in a large room with lots of colored toys like hoops and balls. On a screen a number was incremented – based on a fish in an aquarium crossing a certain line – which the subjects did not know.
They did what the pigeons did: Every time the number flipped they considered it due to some magic they had just done accidentally, such as placing a red ball on a yellow hoop or whatever… and then they tried to repeat this.
At the end you saw a group of adults frantically running, hopping, throwing toys – as if there were a bizarre theatrical performance.
I have now searched for a video of this Derren Brown show and found one showing a summary. Actually it had been inspired by Skinner’s experiments 🙂
I don’t know whether to be amused or appalled.
“The idea is that science, and only science, illuminates; there is no other way to learn anything about the world.”
I love that sentence. It is something that I have been becoming more and more convinced of as I mature. You can sit on a couch for as long as you want and wonder about the secrets of the universe. But, at the end, if what you come up with cannot be falsified, it is as good as poetry: pretty, maybe, but not a revealing truth about the world. The only way to advance is to make sure your theories don’t come “for free”: that there is a real risk of being wrong and an actual way to find out whether you are.
Anyway, brilliant article.
Thank you!
I am now unfriending you on Facebook. You, good sir, are no longer allowed in my pigeon coop.
The idea that only science illuminates is flawed by the fact that it is finite. Space by its very definition is finite. Time by its very definition is finite. Man and his intelligence is certainly finite. The study of finite things only produces finite results and such results are the by product of flawed human beings with flawed thought processes that are subject to all manner of internal and external influences often leading to flawed results. The problem with bowing to the alter of science is that science and the study of everything was developed by … finite imperfect human beings. Do we stumble from time to time upon certain truths? Who can say because none of us have been around long enough to physically observe the universe in its physical finite entirety from its physical beginning. The idea that we can be illuminated by science is nothing more humanism at its core. Do we stop studying the universe? certainly not. Do we abandon science? no. But let’s not fool ourselves into believing that everything that we’ve learned or believe we’ve learned is indeed fact because it only takes one small false premise influenced by our own flawed ego to provide valueless results that are bolstered only in the here and now but may not prove true after the course of time.
“But let’s not fool ourselves into believing that everything that we’ve learned or believe we’ve learned is indeed fact” I never said this. You’re arguing with someone else, and it isn’t me.
And if you don’t believe that “only science illuminates” than please propose a different mechanism for understanding.
Is science flawed? Of course. Do we have more work to do? Of course. Do we have any OTHER way to learn about the cosmos? Nope.
It’s often repeated but still plain wrong that superstition put Galilei under house arrest. The pope, Urban VIII, even encouraged Galilei to publish about the Copernican system, but keeping it as a hypothesis equivalent to the Ptolemaic system.This was the current status of the scientific debate at that time. The Ptolemaic system agreed much better with observations than the Copernic system with concentric orbits that Galilei was supporting. Also, a main supportive claim for Galilei was his theory for the origin of the tides, yet only being able to predict one tide per day. Anyway, Galilei came under house arrest because for ridiculing the pope through the figure of the Simplicio in his dialogue.
And with respect to Giordano Bruno, as far as I know his teachings are full of superstition. So was there any scientific contribution by him at all which I’m not aware of?
I think you misunderstand. Those guys were certainly victims of religious persecution. And I tend to equate religion with superstition.
What do I misunderstand? You write a blog article about how bad superstition is, and that only science is bringing us knowledge about the world. I am not debating that – I’m just saying 2 of the positive examples you are mentioning are by themselves examples of superstition.
I guess for Bruno, the case is clear. For Galilei, he officially was persecuted for heresy, but the reason for his persecution had a different cause, as explained above. Don’t understand me wrong: Galilei was a great scientiest, we have to be thankful for many things like bringing math to physics, his astronomical observations. But in the dispute about heliocentrism, his role has been much glorified afterward. He kept the idea of concentric orbits because he found that much more beautiful, despite observation proved him wrong. Isn’t that a kind of superstition, too?
So in that sense you were right: It was superstition what brought Galilei under house arrest. But not the superstition of the church but rather his own.
I just don’t like people seeing everything in black-and-white. So for me, ignorance is superstition.
Sigh. I’ll explain it one more time. Both were victims of persecution by religious leaders. Insofar as their persecutors DERIVED their power from religion (i.e. superstition) then both were victims of the superstition of others, whether or not they were “superstitious” themselves in whatever other way you’d like to think. Case closed.
“Insofar as their persecutors DERIVED their power from religion ….”
This makes me wonder, how does one derive (be granted by others) power ‘scientifically’? Aren’t all powers granted with very limited knowledge of the receiver? As a member of society one has to trust to a large degree, where power is from control of resources (e.g. money) or influence (political, religious, cultural, or otherwise…)
Is there a better way? What would that look like?
This thread is so far from the original post that I am losing interest exponentially. What’s more, I am not a sociologist. Still…the pope has “derived” his power from religion and superstition, in that he (and the church) have taken advantage of the superstitions of the masses to benefit themselves. In other words, without superstitious commoners the church could have no power.
Whether anyone could ever get power WITHOUT such superstition is an open question. I’d like to think that in democracies, people are making their voting decisions based on rational arguments, logic, evidence, and science. I know that in many cases, they are not. Because they are not, we all lose. That’s why superstition has to be eradicated from the face of the earth.
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