On Superstition

Superstition is actually a surprisingly rational construct. When someone was telling me about my being superstitious, I was rudely shocked. Me? Superstitious? Irrationality did not seem like something I would readily tolerate in myself. Indeed, it is the in-depth scientific analysis that separates rationality (as we understand it) from superstition.

Take for example the omens of bad fortune. Here's a hypothetical situation: I see a black cat. It is my superstitious belief that it portends ill fortune (no, I don't, in reality). Naturally, it will be my approach to attempt to prove this belief to be true. That very day, I fell and scraped my knee. Clearly, this is a form of ill fortune. I think back to the other times when bad things befell me because of the presence of black cats. A pattern was obviously forming: Black cats are bad luck.

The approach is surprisingly rational. Every time a black cat turned up, I seemed to have ill fortune. It is the same for people who believe they have special powers, or that storms portend a downfall. The correlation is unmistakable. However, it is their failure to establish causality that was problematic. Correlation without causality is insufficient to draw a reasonably rational conclusion.

For all I knew, I did have accidents on a regular basis. I only noticed those when black cats were around. That, or black cats did not increase my accidents in a statistically significant way. Without accurate record-keeping and analysis of the data, it can be quite impossible to get a fairly rational conclusion. Selective memory would cloud that area of judgment.