What is magic?

http://www.jennifer8lee.com/2011/06/23/what-is-magic-graduation-speech-for-sixth-graders/

by kn0thing • 15 years ago

105 24 15 years ago

rglover• 15 years ago

That was a pretty great speech for a group of 12 year olds to hear. You rarely see people encouraging kids anymore. What's great about this, though, is that the author brought it down to the level of the students to help them understand how passion and perseverance can feel like magic. Very uplifting and I can only hope that this is taking place elsewhere.

CallMeV• 15 years ago

Not just for twelve year olds. It works just as well for this 48 y.o., too.

Jach• 15 years ago

This speech reminded me why I shouldn't give speeches to 12 year olds. :) "Magic? Magic is what you don't understand, and while it's okay to not understand everything, there is in general too little understanding going on so wipe out magic frequently!"

At the kid level I was happy he didn't praise intelligence but rather hard work since that seems to work out for the kids better as they grow up. Though I wonder where "Wizard" lies on the spectrum between praising for "Hard worker, lots of effort" and "Naturally intelligent"?

kd0amg• 15 years ago

Though I wonder where "Wizard" lies on the spectrum between praising for "Hard worker, lots of effort" and "Naturally intelligent"?

I was under the impression that it draws heavily from both.

kragen• 15 years ago

He? He who?

Alex39173• 15 years ago

"That was a pretty great speech for a group of 12 year olds to hear. You rarely see people encouraging kids anymore."

Probably because we live in a society where encouraging kids is fairly subversive. I think part of what makes this speech so good is that it actually manages to sneak a bunch of different things in there that would probably be frowned on otherwise.

brandnewlow2• 15 years ago

"But I am telling you that owl invitation or not, you already have this ability within you. That you have the ability to create magic within yourself. That you just have to imagine — and believe in your imagination so much that iyou work hard enough to make it real."

This is really key. SO many people struggle with this brand of magical thinking, i.e. "There's someone out there who will solve all these problems for me." It took me 27 years to stop doing it myself. I see it with a lot of my friends starting companies and trying to get traction for them. They take every meeting with a VC who "wants to chat," they consider uber sketchy proposals from marketing guys looking to "combine my people skills with your product" etc etc etc. And it leads to death.

I spent a solid year of working on Windy Citizen where my hopes and dreams were all centered around getting one of the big newspapers to write about the site and the community coming together there. It was a huge waste of time and energy that could have been so much better spent actually building the community and making the service better.

This idea that special people do special things is proposterous. Anyone can do something special, you just have to put yourself in a position to accomplish whatever it is. Waiting around for some outside force to change your life it the fast-train to loserville. Glad Jenny shared that message with the kids.

It turns out, if you're intently focused on your own mission, if things start coming together for you, people will go out of their way to make things happen for you.

jenny8lee2• 15 years ago

Hi Brad. I'm glad that you found a message in it for you. Makes me think that the message works on kid and adult levels.

brandnewlow2• 15 years ago

Absolutely. People like to help people a lot more than they like to be asked for help. Think of how many people asked you to write stories about them when you were at the Times, and that little part of you that died inside every time and made you actively NOT want to cover them simply because they asked. Meanwhile, if you heard about someone doing something awesome cough Reddit cough you'd want to go write about what they're up to and spread the word.

It's the same for these kids. Waiting around for someone to make their dreams happen for them won't work. They need to go try to be awesome and then people will help them get better.

magicseth4• 15 years ago

Recently, in the tech and geek community, I've noticed a backlash towards magic. I understand it in the contexts of the rejection of blind faith and superstition, but I think it fails to recognize the larger scope of the word magic.

I did a cross-cultural developmental psychology experiment on the way children think about magic. In brief, children in the USA showed an inverse correlation between their ability to understand something and their attribution of magic (i.e. if they didn't know how something worked, it was magic, and vice versa). In Mexico, I found that the correlation was not so mutually exclusive, children were willing to attribute things to magic, even if they knew how it worked.

Understanding magic not as something distinct from science, but as something that is the realm of things which you can explore to understand better is, in my opinion, a better way to frame the debate. Telling someone to stop believing in magic because no such thing exists is unlikely to change their belief system. Encouraging them to explore magic, and seek to understand it and find the magic in everything around them, has a greater chance of spurring them into a more inquisitive frame of mind.

The theory of Wonder I developed for my masters thesis posits that wonder is an emotional trigger that positively rewards us for finding things that we can't explain. The evolutionary basis for this is that the more things you find that break your world view, the more likely you will learn something to new that will positively effect your ability to survive. This could explain people's fascination with magic: we have an innate drive to find the things that baffle us, an internal reward system for experiencing wonder.

I could go on about this for days, so I'll just stop now.

jenny8lee2• 15 years ago

Would love to read your masters thesis on the theory of Wonder, if it's done! Research for my universe.

magicseth4• 15 years ago

http://bettermagician.com/papers/

The masters thesis is the first one, but the intercultural study was in my undergraduate thesis which is only available in person. Let me know if you would like to see it, and we can meet up in the real world.

Alex39173• 15 years ago

That's really cool. I've published some of my own theories on basically the same thing:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writing...

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/03/how-to-blog...

Have you checked out the book Why Don't Students Like School? I've heard it also explores this, but I haven't had time to read it yet. The book Made To Stick actually has a chapter on this as well. This is a problem that I've been somewhat obsessed with for several years now.

magicseth4• 15 years ago

Here are some slides from one of my workshops on using magic to create better technology:

They are very controversial, especially out of context, so please understand that the slide that says the value of learning goes down over time has obvious qualifications, and is not generally true. It does however make a lot of sense in the context of my presentation.

http://magicseth.com/presentations/Imagineering%20InsightOut...

mmahemoff• 15 years ago

"The evolutionary basis for this is that the more things you find that break your world view, the more likely you will learn something to new that will positively effect your ability to survive."

This makes sense, but the "fitness" of such a trait (positive response to Wonder) will vary a lot depending on your circumstances. A positive response to Wonder might confer an evolutionary advantage if you're born into a middle class family in California in 1980. OTOH if you're born into a peasant society in 1580, being prone to long periods of daydreaming is probably undesirable!

dmoney2• 15 years ago

The author seems to say the formula for magic is imagination + determination. Turning on a light would be one kind (or level) of magic: the Harry Potter kind. Inventing light switches, when everybody thinks you have to rub two sticks together, or wire up electrical circuits by hand to get light, would be another. The kind I've seen arguments about recently are analogous to a new kind of light switch, with a built in light sensor, so when you turn on the light it automatically turns it to the "right" brightness for the level of natural light already present. Those against it would maybe rather have a dimmer so they can control the brightness, or maybe rather install the light sensor themselves.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Science very much needs to embrace the wonder and majesty of its discoveries. It sometimes comes off as too dry, which is very offputting for many people. However, it's important not to tread into the realm of superstition or teleology.

anonymous10• 15 years ago

I am a magician. Or occultist. The title means nothing to me, as it is just a name. (I am also a regular on HN, but choose to register for a temp account.)

I am an engineer by profession. I'm paid to figure things out, and to make those things cheaper or more efficient.

I originally came across what the common person knows as witchcraft from originally studying Yoga and Tantra from the East. I was witness to television and in person the abilities of those practitioners. I watched, and am working on Tumo (the art of creating massive amounts of heat in the body). I have been able to leave the body, like a dream state but retaining full consciousness.

The more I worked on these earlier techniques, other things made sense. I slowly am now able to perceive energy around others, as well as can tell when people are being deceiving (it changes their color).

Maybe I'm crazy. I can accept that. I'll answer questions if people have them.

dmoney2• 15 years ago

I don't have a question, but I do have an observation. The "science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will" could be the definition of a lot of disciplines: business, hacking, engineering, painting, politics. It's unfortunate that you felt you had to register anonymously to talk about this particular form of magic.

Okay, I do have a question: how do you feel the "occult" type of magic is connected with what the author is talking about (i.e. magic = imagination + determination)? Are they completely different beasts? Is one a subclass of the other?

thaumaturgy• 15 years ago

This was a great speech, well done. This part especially stood out for me:

> Now in real life, what is magic in our world? It’s kinda the opposite. It’s about imagining something which is not yet exist, and believing in it so much that you will it into existence with a lot, lot, lot of hard work. So much work that people often think you are crazy.

I get the "you're crazy" vibe on HN occasionally, and this is close to what I've been doing for going on 4 years now: gathering so much energy around myself -- in the form of work and effort and resources -- that the things that I began imagining even longer ago start becoming real.

I have a list of 22 different projects, spanning 50 years of time, ranging from pretty straightforward to preposterous. So far I've pulled off the first two of them, and my now-business-partner has just pulled off another on his own. We're picking up speed!

Thanks for getting out there and motivating kids. That's a great thing to do. :-)

aufreak3• 15 years ago

Having recently heard "magic" being used over and over again in several contexts, I was looking for a concise expression of what it means to me, covering aspects of design, imagination, the work it takes, etc. .. and sort of came up with this --

  Magic is about what happens where you aren't looking.

A "magician" literally directs your eye somewhere and works her "magic" elsewhere. The iPad (or the radio for that matter) is "magical" 'cos you never look at all the decisions, and even sleight of hand, that go into creating every detail of it. ()
It takes a thorough understanding of the regularities of your world to create something magical. Without these regularities, there is no predictability and no control possible. And the magic happens when you hide it all and hide it so well that nobody notices ... like a master artist masking all his sources of inspiration in an "original" work.
In particular, if your critics say "oh I could build that over a weekend" and you know for yourself how complex the thing is and all the myriad details that you might be slipping right past your critics' watchful eyes, you've probably have created something "magical".

() For "sleight of hand", watch closely the notch that magically appears and disappears when you open/close a "folder" icon on iOS. Watch the home icons fly in closely and see if it matches what you thought they were doing before you looked closely. Movies and computer games have lots of such "tricks of the trade" as any movie buff who bothers to find continuity or physicality errors in movies will tell you. Such sensory "sleight of hand" even works because your brain has loads of such tricks as, for example, visual and aural paradoxes have shown us.

What is magic?

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