magical thinking

[Guest guest]

This is what I have meant in past references to magical thinking. I

know this will not change the minds of those who think such a mode of

thinking is a valid alternate to rational thought, but just to provide

clarification for those who are unclear about the concept. the most

amazing thing about TCM is how much of it is reasonable. but it makes

more sense that some of what persists just seems true when untested.

It is not possible that ANY system of untested ancient thought can be

accurate unless postulates the religious concept of revealed knowledge.

We should run fast and far from such ideas. they will be the doom of

us.

 

.... to seem true or ... to be true ... Ideas that have evolved to seem

true (at least to uncritical minds) can in fact be quite false. An

excellent work that compares naive human judgment to judgment aided by

scientific and statistical techniques is Human Inference, a book by

Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross in the Century Psychology Series

(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980). It shows that,

just as we suffer from optical illusions and blind spots, so we suffer

from cognitive illusions and blind spots. Other experiments show that

untutored people share systematic misunderstandings of such elementary

facts as the direction a ball will move when whirled in a circle and

then released; learned medieval philosophers (who neglected to test

their ideas against reality) evolved whole systems of " science " based

on identical misunderstandings. See " Intuitive Physics, " by Michael

McClosky (Scientific American, Vol. 248, pp. 122-30, Apr. 1983).

 

 

 

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